Number of guns owned in the U.S.

The number of guns in the hands of the American citizens is often reported to be anywhere from 270 million to 300 million. I was curious and was going to start digging round a little bit, and then I saw in one of  David Codrea's articles.

November 14, 2012 Congressional Research Service report on “Gun Control Legislation”  (pdf)

From that report:

2009, the estimated total number of firearms available to civilians in the United States had increased to approximately 310 million: 114 million handguns, 110 million rifles, and 86 million shotguns.

That's a good place to start counting the number of firearms available to the American people.



According to the ATF publication Firearm Commerce in the United States (pdf), in 2010 there were an additional 5,459,240 firearms manufactured for sale or export. Information runs two years behind on manufacturing and export data, however, looking at the data from 2005 to 2010, we can see that there is an average of 8.46% increase in production each year for that six year period. With that information, we can guestimate the production for 2011 and 2012.

2009 310,000,000 firearms owned
2010    5,459,240 firearms manufactured
2011    5,921,091 guestimated firearms manufactured
2012    6,422,015 guestimated firearms manufactured

Total 327,802,346

Next, we have to remove the number of firearms that are exported. I wasn't really interested in the percent change from year to year, so for 2011 and 2012 I just used the six year average.

2010 241,977
2011 238,699
2012 238,699

Total 327,028,971

But wait! there's more. Apparently we import quite a few firearms. The number of firearms imported is reported with only a one year lag. I averaged 7 years of imports to get the amount firearms imported for 2012

2010 2,839,947
2011 3,252,404
2012 2,456,930

Which brings our grand total to 335,632,252 firearms owned by the American people. Eat that gun controllers!

Also, using our guestimated and averaged numbers, there are:

8,469,667 Number of firearms available annually
23,204 manufactured firearms per day
967 manufactured firearms per hour
16 manufactured firearms per minute

Now, if only I can make a gun owner ticker, I can start it on Jan 1, 2013 and everyone would know how many guns we own at a glance.