You know, there is a ton of speculation about how many guns actually exist in the United States. Back in the day, guns didn’t have to have a serial number… then once that changed, the records weren’t necessarily kept in a way that was simple to track nationwide… but I promise you there are A LOT of guns. I’d be willing to bet that there might even be more guns than people. If only someone took the time to gather up info about how many guns were produced and put them out publicly… oh wait, that did happen. The NSSF recently published a highlight list from some data they’ve collected and we are gonna wade through it, after this.
Welcome back to the gun collective, my name is Jon Patton and you are watching the fight for gun rights. The national shooting sports foundation or NSSF has done a lot for the gun industry over the years and things like this report are a wonderful way to allow me to share that with the world.
For context, this report compiles the most up to date info from the ATF and ITC. I’m just gonna be throwing out facts for you to soak up. The info takes time to compile so some of the stats don’t show exactly what’s going on but we can extrapolate. Ok let’s go.
In 2018, 11.4 million total firearms were produced or imported in the US. This does not include the exported guns. What’s hilarious about that is based on what we know about 2020 sales of guns, we’ve sold that number about 3 times over. We did a video on that if you want to learn more.
Also in 2018, 48 percent, nearly half, of all rifles produced or imported, were “modern sporting rifles” or as I like to call them, AR15’s. Now consider that things have ramped up even more. THAT is a shitload of AR’s.
Since the year 1990, there are an estimated 19.8, almost 20 million AR’s in circulation. For reference, that is enough to give everyone in Kansas City Missouri almost 40 rifles each.
If we are talking about 2019, well the current estimate, which is being updated is that 6 million guns were produced in the US, that doesn’t include imported guns which is a lot, and roughly 3.6 million of those were handguns while 480 thousand were shotguns and nearly 2 million were rifles.
If we look at the estimated imported guns in 2019, that comes to about 3.3 million, of which, 2.3 million were handguns. THAT IS BONKERS. About 301 thousand were rifles and 678 thousand were shotguns.
From 1991 to 2019, nearly 214 MILLION guns have been made available to the US market. For reference, there are an estimated 330 million people in the US. If my math is correct, that is enough guns to arm almost every adult in the US right now. And remember thats only between 1991 and 2019, the ATF reports indicate that there are about 434 million guns in civilian possession here in the US. WE CAN ARM THE KIDS TOO! HAHAHA. Or we could arm my immediate family over with over 72 million guns each!
Now if we break things down in a slightly different way, there are approximately 71.2 million pistol mags capable of holding more than 10 rounds and about 79.2 million capable of holding more than 30 rounds. Was that a bald eagle I just heard? How can my heart contain so much freedom without bursting? Also shoutout to all the people in ban states that can’t have standard capacity magazines.
To round us out, firearm and ammunition manufacturing account for about 12000 employees producing over 3.9 billion dollars in goods shipped and approximately 8.7 billion rounds of ammo were produced… in 2018. That was 2 years ago. You know what, lets have some fun here. What caliber or gauge do you think represents the largest chunk of that ammo and how much revenue do you think was generated so far in 2020’s epic year for the gun industry?
My heart says 9mm was a lot of it, but 22 long rifle is substantial in numbers too. And I’m betting double digit billions this year. I want to know your thoughts down in the comment section.
And guys, that is it for this video. Don’t forget to checkout the secret affiliate link down in the description because it would be super helpful if you did that and of course, hit like if you enjoyed the video and get subscribed for more gun news every single week and as always thank you all for watching, we’ll see you soon.