Free Republic

By Dean Weingarten A writer for The Trace recently complained about the numbers of guns Americans own. From twitter:Due diligence is indicated. The 270 million number is over a decade old and rather low. We know better now. The best current number is there are over 400 million private firearms in the United States.You can see the 270 million number was published in 2007.From smallarmssurvey.org:The 270 million number is repeated on the anti-Second Amendment site smartgunlaws.com, for the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.  The link fails to mention the estimate from the Small Arms Survey was done in 2007....

The number of private firearms in the United States continues to soar. According to the Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, (ATF) numbers released in September, 2017, the number of firearms added to the private stock in 2015 was 12,945,416. That number lags a bit more than a year behind because the ATF is legislatively bound to hold the numbers for at least a year before releasing them. This protects the various companies proprietary rights and possible competitive advantages that come with the numbers. The 2015 numbers bring the total private firearms in the United States to 388.5 million, rounded...

While various pundits and scholars have claimed that more guns equal more murders, the raw numbers reveal that to be untrue.  The graph above plots the per capita firearms rate in the United States (stated as number of firearms per 10 people) against the murder rate as tabulated in the FBI Uniform Crime Reports (UCR).  The UCR includes both murder and non-negligent homicide in the murder numbers.  The UCR murder rate is per 100,000 people in the United States.The murder rate may be one of the most reliable numbers in the UCR, because murders are more likely to be...