Guns get stolen. In a country with 300 million guns and a very porous border with lots of criminal activity along that border, there are going to be many, many

Guns get stolen. In a country with 300 million guns and a very porous border with lots of criminal activity along that border, there are going to be many, many illegal guns. There are a lot of controls on new firearms transactions now, but there weren't always, and even now, some States allow private transfers w/o a background check (I believe Florida does, where it suffices that the seller not have reason to believe that the buyer is disqualified from owning a firearm, but IANAL and also am not a Floridian). It's entirely possible that just based on stolen guns, and transfers made back before background check were required, that there might be several million firearms in the hands of persons not permitted to own them. Even if it was just one million, that would be thousands in certain cities. Add to this that drug traffickers along the southern border have ways to sneak in enormous amounts of illegal drugs, and you have to imagine they would also bring some firearms too, no? so probably quite a few over the past 40 years. Here's a link I just found searching for this: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/guns/procon/guns.html https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/guns/procon/g...