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My favorite piece of trivia used to be: "US civilians own more firearms than every police force and military in the world combined". This was based off Small Ar
by desdiv 8y ago
My favorite piece of trivia used to be: "US civilians own more firearms than every police force and military in the world combined". This was based off Small Arms Survey's 2010 estimates of US civilians at 270 million and police + military at 226 million[0].
But according to the Small Arms Survey's 2018 report linked in the article, the factoid has been upgraded to: "US civilians own more than _twice_ as much firearms as every police force and military in the world combined". (US civilians at 393.3 million vs police + military at 155.7 million [1])
[0] http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/fileadmin/docs/H-Research_Notes/SAS-Research-Note-9.pdf http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/fileadmin/docs/H-Research_Not...
[1] http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/fileadmin/docs/T-Briefing-Papers/SAS-BP-Civilian-Firearms-Numbers.pdf http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/fileadmin/docs/T-Briefing-Pap...
- hirundo 8y agoI can't find the details, but I recently read of a county sheriff that told a state legislature that if they passed a law that would end up requiring him to send deputies to many homes in his territory to confiscate their guns, he would decline to do so, because he thought that it would be a suicide mission. Bottom line, the number of guns in private hands causes many government officials to fear the people. For gun rights advocates this is a feature; for gun control advocates, it's a bug. I think that this is the fundamental divide between the two camps.