[matthew fuller]

"American citizens purchase more than One Billion rounds of ammo each month, every month, year after year. "

I don't disbelieve you for an instant, but do you have a source for that? I'm sure that I will be asked when I use it.

[meadsjn]

Don't have a link, but I remember seeing the numbers discussed in articles during the Spring of 2009, when the monthly sales of small arms was around 1.2 Million per month. A few months ago, I had a spreadsheet of the NCIS checks for the past twelve years, and the low months were more than 850,000 when GWB was still in office. They've been consistently over one million per month since August 2008 for some reason.

I just can't imagine anyone picking up a new rifle without at least one box of 20; or a new pistol without at least one box of 50.

The discusion has come up on The High Road a few times over the years. Here's one link from there for 1997 data.

http://www.census.gov/prod/ec97/97m3329f.pdf . Table 6a on page 15 has the data for 1997