Report: Civilians Bought More Guns in the Last 2 Months Than the Military Has In Total

Published July 7, 2018 Updated July 10, 2018

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We all know that the citizens of the United States curb-stomp the competition when it comes to gun ownership. We just have so darn many, and more are made and bought all the time.

Even with this knowledge, however, most don’t appreciate how badly, almost comically, more-armed the American citizen body is compared to its police and military.

Before you go off into a tizzy — yes. I realize that the United States military has some insane technology that we just don’t and will not have — this isn’t supposed to be an article claiming we can trounce the United States military or police force. We’re just talking small arms numbers, here — relax.

Stephen Gutowski of The Washington Free Beacon noted that not only do we have almost 100 times more small arms than is estimated that the military owns, but just in the last two months Americans bought more small arms than the military owns.

The Small Arms Survey estimates there are 393,300,000 civilian-owned firearms in the United States. The survey, performed by the Graduate Institute of Geneva, estimated the United States military has about 4.5 million firearms. It put the number of firearms owned by police throughout the United States at just over 1 million.

That means American civilians own nearly 100 times as many firearms as the U.S. military and nearly 400 times as many as law enforcement.

Federal Bureau of Investigation background check records suggest that civilians bought more than 2 million guns in May alone, which means civilians purchase more than double the number of firearms owned by police departments. The number of gun-related civilian background checks in May and April, at over 4.7 million, is greater than the number of firearms currently owned by the American military.

Yowzers.

Now, as we all know, there are some differences; Americans often buy handguns and shotguns as opposed to longarms, etc., but as noted before — that’s hardly germane to the topic after the hundred millionth small arm or so.

It also raises another point — folks think that taking guns away from Americans is as easy as 1, 2, 3 — it’s not. Even if everyone rolled over and let it happen, collecting a little under 400,000,000 of anything spread all across one of the largest nations on earth isn’t probably impossible — it just ain’t happening.