New estimates show that there's 412 - 660 million firearms in the U.S, not the 300 million that the media constantly states.
>"ATF maintains a system, introduced in 1999, called Access 2000 or A2K (GAO report; details are in the .pdfs linked at that .html link). This system allows voluntarily participating manufacturers, importers and wholesalers (no retailers) to enter their firearms by the identifying data that goes on a 4473 directly into an ATF computer. The firms can’t see the data on this system, they can only feed it in."
>"As of 2 October, 2015, the data in A2K included 252,433,229 records, representing one firearm each. That means that at least those 250 million firearms have been manufactured, or imported, or sold at wholesale in approximately 15 years."
>"Applying the Pareto Principle, it is possible, probable even, that a small percentage of high volume manufacturers and jobbers produce the largest percentage of the nation’s new firearms. Selecting 80/20 as a rule, which seems improbably generous over the lifespan of A2K, during this period these 66 FFLs produced 80% of all firearms traffic. Thus, the 252 million is 80% of 315 million new-to-the-market firearms."
>"One easy thing we can do is add 2016’s numbers, because we know they can’t be included in A2K’s 1999-2015 data set....According to the FBI, there have been 19,872,694 NICS completed through 30 Sep, 2016; and NSSF adjusts that to a conservative 10,837,308. Using a conservative algorithm to extend these numbers through the end of the year, we get 26,496,925 from FBI and 14,449,744 with NICS."
>"At this point we have a reasonable and very conservative, very low estimate of 329 million new firearms to the US market 1999-2016."
>"We can make a SWAG that about half the guns in circulation are pre-1999 (about 660 million)"
We need to bump up those rookie numbers, boys!