this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2024
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72 million gun owners seems low to me...
Here's a stat that pegs the total number of guns at around 434 million and just under 20 million AR-15s.
https://www.guns.com/news/2020/11/17/data-us-has-434-million-guns-20m-ars-150m-mags
At only 72 million gun owning homes, that would mean, on average, 6 guns per gun owner?
https://americangunfacts.com/gun-ownership-statistics/
22% of gun owners have only a single firearm. So if the 72 million number is correct, that means 15,840,000 single gun owners, and the remaining 418,160,000 guns are owned by 56,160,000, or 7.45 guns per owner.
The population of the US is ~330 million total.
By the pigeonhole principal, that means that some gun owners must own 2 guns, because there's more guns than people.
Anyways, multiple guns per owner makes intuitive sense, because different guns are for different things. You aren't going to hunt an elk with the same caliber rifle you'd hunt a rabbit with. Either you won't kill the elk, or you'll just have a fine mist that used to be a rabbit.
For another thing, ammunition costs are different for different calibers. You can buy .22 lr for under 10 cents per round. Meanwhile, 30-06 is over $1 per round. So you can do more target practice for the same money with a cheaper round.
Oh, definitely! A .22 and .45-70 both have VERY different applications. I still think 72 million owners on 435 million guns is a low estimate.
Looking it up, gun ownership is apparently very uneven.
In 2016, according to one study half of all the guns in the US were owned by the 3% of Americans with 8-140 guns. That group had an average of 17 guns each, while most gun owners had 3 or fewer guns.