Okay, before anyone says it, this will be a purely academic, likely futile exercise. Just for fun. If your brain is not the variety that ponders random stuff like this, you should probably just stop reading.
The common retort to an anti after a mass shooting usually goes along the lines of "There are 300 million guns in America that did NOT shoot up a school yesterday. Just because ONE did does not mean the rest should be banned."
It got me thinking, how many rounds are fired annually, that don't hurt anybody except targets? This goes back to "common use" although the main purpose is just as a thought experiment. 300 million guns is almost impossible to imagine, and even stacked up against approximately 10,000 homicides, 19,000 suicides, and 55,000 injuries/accidents, still proves to be about 3,500:1 ratio. But ammo can be even starker contrast, because it stands to reason that most criminals don't usually train with their guns regularly, or shoot recreationally, and therefore the only times they are fired is in the commission of a crime, while a law-abiding citizen may fire thousands of rounds every year. This makes proposed ammo tax legislation absurd, but we all already know that. "How absurd?" is the question, just for fun... (begin assumptions, which hopefully get us within an order of magnitude, but let me know if you think some are way off)
Assuming about 4 rounds are fired for every murder, 2 rounds for every non-fatal gun crime/accident, and 1 round fired for every suicide, that adds up to about 169,000 rounds fired for bad reasons.
Assuming about 100,000,000 gun owners in the US, and that population evenly split between (1) serious enthusiasts, (2) casual gun owners, and (3) occasional hunters or people who own a gun but never take it to the range. I would argue the following:
1 - range every month, average fire 250 rounds each trip. Obviously I know some people shoot A LOT more than that, but a lot also shoot less...this is an exercise in guesstimation and law of averages working to balance things.
2 - range every 6 months, or maybe shoot some clays, 50 rounds each visit.
3 - range once a year to sight in, assorted hunting...average: 20 rounds per year.
That all adds up to 104,000,000,000.
Yes, that is over One Hundred BILLION rounds, per year.
When a cartridge is "born" at the factory, it is over 600,000 times more likely to be used lawfully than unlawfully. But yet, some people think we should tax them all, to account for the .00016% that are used to do evil.
Cut another way, even if every gun owner in America only fires 200 rounds per year (a very conservative estimate I am sure, since most of us here shoot more than that in one range trip), that is still 20 billion lawful rounds (118,000:1).
Well, that was fun. Let me know where you think I am wrong, or your estimates. I may be wildly over-estimating the number of serious shooters in the country, but I tried to limit my sample bias from THR I wonder if all the manufacturers that produce ammo can even keep up with a 100 billion rounds/year rate? Of course you have to factor in reloaders and hoarders, but I am just interested in rounds FIRED. But the moral of the story I guess is that it is a wildly spectacularly high number, and no matter how you slice it, the pie graph will have one really really large piece, and one tiny little sliver.
The common retort to an anti after a mass shooting usually goes along the lines of "There are 300 million guns in America that did NOT shoot up a school yesterday. Just because ONE did does not mean the rest should be banned."
It got me thinking, how many rounds are fired annually, that don't hurt anybody except targets? This goes back to "common use" although the main purpose is just as a thought experiment. 300 million guns is almost impossible to imagine, and even stacked up against approximately 10,000 homicides, 19,000 suicides, and 55,000 injuries/accidents, still proves to be about 3,500:1 ratio. But ammo can be even starker contrast, because it stands to reason that most criminals don't usually train with their guns regularly, or shoot recreationally, and therefore the only times they are fired is in the commission of a crime, while a law-abiding citizen may fire thousands of rounds every year. This makes proposed ammo tax legislation absurd, but we all already know that. "How absurd?" is the question, just for fun... (begin assumptions, which hopefully get us within an order of magnitude, but let me know if you think some are way off)
Assuming about 4 rounds are fired for every murder, 2 rounds for every non-fatal gun crime/accident, and 1 round fired for every suicide, that adds up to about 169,000 rounds fired for bad reasons.
Assuming about 100,000,000 gun owners in the US, and that population evenly split between (1) serious enthusiasts, (2) casual gun owners, and (3) occasional hunters or people who own a gun but never take it to the range. I would argue the following:
1 - range every month, average fire 250 rounds each trip. Obviously I know some people shoot A LOT more than that, but a lot also shoot less...this is an exercise in guesstimation and law of averages working to balance things.
2 - range every 6 months, or maybe shoot some clays, 50 rounds each visit.
3 - range once a year to sight in, assorted hunting...average: 20 rounds per year.
That all adds up to 104,000,000,000.
Yes, that is over One Hundred BILLION rounds, per year.
When a cartridge is "born" at the factory, it is over 600,000 times more likely to be used lawfully than unlawfully. But yet, some people think we should tax them all, to account for the .00016% that are used to do evil.
Cut another way, even if every gun owner in America only fires 200 rounds per year (a very conservative estimate I am sure, since most of us here shoot more than that in one range trip), that is still 20 billion lawful rounds (118,000:1).
Well, that was fun. Let me know where you think I am wrong, or your estimates. I may be wildly over-estimating the number of serious shooters in the country, but I tried to limit my sample bias from THR
I wonder if all the manufacturers that produce ammo can even keep up with a 100 billion rounds/year rate? Of course you have to factor in reloaders and hoarders, but I am just interested in rounds FIRED. But the moral of the story I guess is that it is a wildly spectacularly high number, and no matter how you slice it, the pie graph will have one really really large piece, and one tiny little sliver.
When my backyard was my own personal shooting range (last home) I could not believe how many rounds of empty .223 & .38 brass seemed to pile up in my reloading room between reloading sessions, and this from a sedate bolt action and S&W revolver!
I either had great foresight or great luck last fall when I got into reloading.
