United States Has More Guns than People

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist

This holiday season I received one of "those" cards.  It was a family photo of a woman whom I used to know well along with her husband and two teenage daughters.  Every member of the family had a rifle cradled in their arms - signifying, I suppose, happy birthday to the King of Peace.

I read an article recently which stated that the United States has more guns than people.  Even though I don't own a gun and I know others who also eschew personal weaponry as well, I do know a few people whose love of guns borders on psychotic and who undoubtedly have weapons buried in caches around their property for that dreaded day when their own government comes rolling in and tries to strip them of their firepower.

So I decided to do a little research.

The Small Arms Survey is an independent research project from the Graduate Institute of International and Developmental Studies in Geneva, Switzerland, which has been conducting research into the world's weaponry for more than twenty years.   Their work focuses on "small arms" which they describe as:  revolvers or self-loading pistols, rifles and carbines, assault rifles, sub-machine guns, and light machine guns.

According to the group's report for 2017, the United States was the world's leader in civilian-owned small arms, a finding that would probably surprise no one.   However, what was surprising, at least to me, was the amount of firearms in civilian control in the US.  During that year's survey it was estimated that there were 393,347,000 small arms owned by civilians in the United States, at a time when the entire county's population was 326,474,000, or, as the researchers chose to  quantify it:  the United States had 120.5 guns for every 100 people living in the country.  The United States had more guns than people - and that was even counting small children and infants!

I guess that makes us pretty damned safe, you betcha!

At that time, when the citizens had just under 400 million guns, our military had 4,535,380 and our nation's police had 1,016,000.    The country's citizens had almost 400 times the individual firepower of the nation's police.   Maybe that reality plays into the police tendency to fire first and properly assess the situation later.

Two other nations were above the 50% level (barely) for gun ownership, the Falkland Islands and Yemen, and a few were between 30% and 40%, but the vast majority were far lower than that.  In Israel, as an example, there was an average of six civilian guns per one hundred individuals.

The United States stands alone as the most paranoid nation on earth, the only one where guns outnumber people, and  the one where the Christian religion manages to conflate itself with firepower.

Happy birthday, Jesus.  We weren't able to do much about hunger and poverty this year, but we did manage to outfit the entire family in new body armor!  

Praise be!