These numbers just demonstrate the folly of the strategy of reducing the supply of guns as a way to reduce crime. There are orders of magnitude more guns available than the numbers necessary to meet every criminal "need"/input for hundreds of years.
This calls to mind the USAAF's* strategic bombing approach in Europe during 1943-45. They wanted to attack German's industrial output and thereby deprive the German military of the materiel required to wage modern war. Not surprisingly, our air force decided that among the most important tools for the enemy was his own air force - they wanted to destroy the Luftwaffe and its supply of planes. So the USAAF did a big analysis of the required inputs for German aircraft manufacture. They wanted to figure out which inputs to aircraft manufacture were not just required, but sufficiently concentrated/few as to be susceptible to material impact.
For instance, sheet metal bending is a required input for aircraft manufacture... but it's not hard to replace most simple sheet metal bending tools. There are a lot of them. And they either are or can be scattered around the countryside easily. A campaign of destroying German aircraft manufacturing capability by taking away the ability to bend sheet metal is a losing proposition. You could destroy hundreds of press brakes and other basic tools and German industry could quickly replace them and/or just commandeer those used for other purposes. You'd be bombing for a very long time before you moved the final number - German aircraft production - at all. The same would be true for bombing rivet production, or the sewing machines used to stitch headrests and parachutes. Those things are all critical - but they are so numerous and readily-dispersed/-substituted that it is folly to attack them.
So, instead, the USAAF tried to identify the real "choke points" - the highly-constrained required inputs. Ball bearings, for example. Making aircraft (and tanks and trucks and modern artillery and a lot of other stuff) requires ball bearings. A lot of them. And ball bearings are apparently pretty hard to make. https://insights.globalspec.com/images/assets/523/4523/Bearing_Manufacturing_Process.jpg It's not something that can really be done as a cottage industry or dispersed very well. The machinery required is big and complex and very difficult to replace if it gets blown up. So the USAAF spent a lot of time (and lives) trying to destroy the ball bearing plants, which were mostly concentrated in one big industrial center (Schweinfurt).
This strategy didn't completely work, because there were sufficient stocks, and bombing of Germany was extremely difficult and costly... but at least it made some kind of sense. It's plausible that it could have ultimately worked, and, according to post-war statements by Albrecht Speer (German's wartime minister of armaments - basically the head of wartime industry for the Nazis), it almost did and would have if the USAAF had focused on it just a little harder.
In the U.S., guns aren't like ball bearing plants. They're not even like press brakes. They're about like sheet metal itself. You could never impact the U.S.'s ability to wage war by attempting to blow up all the sheet metal in the U.S., even if sheet metal is often used by the U.S. military and its tools. The idea that we're going to materially degrade the ability of criminals to get guns by targeting "the supply" is just farcical.
*The precursor to the U.S. Air Force before it was a separate branch.
This calls to mind the USAAF's* strategic bombing approach in Europe during 1943-45. They wanted to attack German's industrial output and thereby deprive the German military of the materiel required to wage modern war. Not surprisingly, our air force decided that among the most important tools for the enemy was his own air force - they wanted to destroy the Luftwaffe and its supply of planes. So the USAAF did a big analysis of the required inputs for German aircraft manufacture. They wanted to figure out which inputs to aircraft manufacture were not just required, but sufficiently concentrated/few as to be susceptible to material impact.
For instance, sheet metal bending is a required input for aircraft manufacture... but it's not hard to replace most simple sheet metal bending tools. There are a lot of them. And they either are or can be scattered around the countryside easily. A campaign of destroying German aircraft manufacturing capability by taking away the ability to bend sheet metal is a losing proposition. You could destroy hundreds of press brakes and other basic tools and German industry could quickly replace them and/or just commandeer those used for other purposes. You'd be bombing for a very long time before you moved the final number - German aircraft production - at all. The same would be true for bombing rivet production, or the sewing machines used to stitch headrests and parachutes. Those things are all critical - but they are so numerous and readily-dispersed/-substituted that it is folly to attack them.
So, instead, the USAAF tried to identify the real "choke points" - the highly-constrained required inputs. Ball bearings, for example. Making aircraft (and tanks and trucks and modern artillery and a lot of other stuff) requires ball bearings. A lot of them. And ball bearings are apparently pretty hard to make. https://insights.globalspec.com/images/assets/523/4523/Bearing_Manufacturing_Process.jpg It's not something that can really be done as a cottage industry or dispersed very well. The machinery required is big and complex and very difficult to replace if it gets blown up. So the USAAF spent a lot of time (and lives) trying to destroy the ball bearing plants, which were mostly concentrated in one big industrial center (Schweinfurt).
This strategy didn't completely work, because there were sufficient stocks, and bombing of Germany was extremely difficult and costly... but at least it made some kind of sense. It's plausible that it could have ultimately worked, and, according to post-war statements by Albrecht Speer (German's wartime minister of armaments - basically the head of wartime industry for the Nazis), it almost did and would have if the USAAF had focused on it just a little harder.
In the U.S., guns aren't like ball bearing plants. They're not even like press brakes. They're about like sheet metal itself. You could never impact the U.S.'s ability to wage war by attempting to blow up all the sheet metal in the U.S., even if sheet metal is often used by the U.S. military and its tools. The idea that we're going to materially degrade the ability of criminals to get guns by targeting "the supply" is just farcical.
*The precursor to the U.S. Air Force before it was a separate branch.
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