this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2026
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Hold up. The US has over 100 guns per 100 people? π³ So on average, everyone owns at least one gun? Tell me I'm reading that wrong!
Close, but the best estimates are there are 470 million guns in US civilian hands. With a population of 338 million, you're looking at approximately 1.4 guns per person in this crazy land of free-dumb. π
Jesus Christ.
If it makes you feel better, most gun owners own many guns, so there isn't actually a gun in everyone's hands.
Just a lot of them in a few hands... Much better...
Some people are collectors, but a lot of people just have some old guns around.
Also if guns are a hobby or interest of yours, you are likely to own several. Just like people who are into headphones, mechanical keyboards, vintage gaming consoles, bicycles, etc.
I was about to compare it to telescopes. Most people don't have one, most people who have one only have one, but a few of us have upwards of five
You can call these things "collectables" but their nature doesn't change because you put a friendly term to it. It is psychologically fucked up to stockpile lethal weapons that can only be used for taking life without even having a practical application in mind.
I'm going to push back a little bit. For one thing, have you ever gone hunting? Some would say that taking life (specifically deers and rabbits and stuff) is a practical application. For two, sport shooting is a thing. Being good at using a weapon can be rewarding in and of itself, whether you're talking about guns, bows, slingshots, or throwing knives.
That dude would have been shot so damn quickly in Texas.
Most gun owners have more than one. If you're a hunter, you might want to shoot different rounds for different game or seasons.
My state bans the use of rifles for deer hunting in most circumstances. In that example, you'd want 12ga for deer hunting, 20ga for duck, and 5.56 would be used for coyotes, boar, or groundhogs. And if you go boar hunting you'll want a sidearm (9mm or .45) because they'll gore you if they get the chance.
So that totals 4 guns for a single person with decent reasoning. Plus, if you had kids and took them hunting, you'd want at least 1 more of each type.
And for people who live in non-rural areas, you might decide to concealed carry a 9mm for protection. But handguns aren't as ideal for home defense, so you might want a shotgun or 9mm carbine for that task, so that'd be 2 guns for 1 person.
My jaw figuratively dropped when you suggested putting rifles and side arms in the hands of kids.
Gotta have an age limit on those things.
I'm saying to hand rifles to toddlers, nor that the kids get unrestricted access to the guns. JFC it's like you're deliberately trying to misunderstand.
Where I live it's normal for teens to go hunting alongside there parents, and when the guns aren't in use they are stored in the family gun safe that only the parents can get into.
These parents also teach their kids gun safety, and with exposure the kids know that the guns aren't toys to be played with. This shares similarities to how many European countries' drinking age of 16 removes the novelty and rebellion of drinking, generally preventing them from drinking to excess
I understood what you meant. No misunderstanding there. I do not think teens under 18 should be handling a lethal weapon. Matter fact it should be over 21. My opinion. π€·ββοΈ
Cars are a lethal weapon, but they're allowed to drive on public roads under supervision before they're 16, and can drive without on private property. Kids under 18 are allowed access to cooking knives at whatever age, and should be taught how to cook before they're adults. Teaching kids safe firearm operation under supervision is useful. Not only that, sharing hobbies with parents help with communication and bonding, giving the kids a better support structure while growing up.
Your black-and-white mindset of infantilizing teens like they're completely incapable of handling anything before they're 18 is demeaning and ultimately damaging to society as a whole. It leads to adults who've never learned skills they need to survive on their own.
I personally think there's a distinction to be made between cooking knives, cars, and guns. I understand all that about cars and knives being lethal weapons too, but it's about how easy it is to make a mistake, and HOW DETRIMENTAL it might be. And it's about at which age you are capable of fully understanding every aspect of handling each thing, and the risks that come with it.
You could make the same argument about piloting an airplane. Statistically, being in an accident in an airplane is far, far less likely than being in one in a car. But if you are in a plane accident, the chances of it being lethal to everyone involved is far greater than accidents in a car, statistically, surely. Nobody freaking survives a plane crash. Sometimes everyone perishes even it if happens before takeoff. That's why you don't see 18 year old pilots of passenger airplanes, let alone 16 year old pilots.
Knives are much easier to monitor and control by the supervising adult, so kids can learn handling them safely. Making a mistake is rarely lethal with a knife, especially since a lot of kids' knives aren't even very sharp.
My country does gun law pretty well, IMO:
This is exactly what I feel is appropriate. You're not allowed to have a driver's license until you're 18 either... π€·ββοΈ And not allowed to purchase strong alcohol until 21, just like America. Should alcohol also be allowed to children perhaps? Like I said, it's not about learning, it's about being capable of determining risk and making judgement calls, etc.
I didn't say teenagers shouldn't be able to learn. But having their own guns is not an option IMO. They can borrow in very controlled circumstances.
I don't have a black-and-white mindset about it, just like you don't. But it's good to have rules of thumb because society can't be run on a case-by-case basis. And that's what I'll say about it.
Then why did you go after me for pointing out that some parents teach their kids how to hunt? That's literally what you're claiming to not be against.
No, not like in the US. Here, you can't get any alcohol under 21. That's the source of the taboo. High school students love to get older siblings and crappy parents to supply them with way too much alcohol and regularly host giant parties where they drink to the point of passing out or vomiting, and often drive drunk afterwards.
Thankfully for me, my parents took the European route, and let me have a beer with dinner on occasion, and that's it. It also helps that I don't like loud crowded parties so I rarely attended and generally left after a few minutes.
Not really. A student can just go buy a knife from the local store or steal one from the kitchen outside of meal prep. If they wanted to, they could acquire one and shank someone without their parents knowing. Meanwhile in the US, a teen's main option for getting a gun trying to convince Uncle Cleatus to illegally sell them one, which he generally won't do because that's a felony with a 10 year sentence (though admittedly this was different 15-20 years ago).
Your example doesn't fit very well. A plane crash will kill everyone, regardless if it's deliberate or a mistake. And it's very easy to mess up when piloting a plane.
A negligent discharge from a firearm is 1: not guaranteed to hit someone, 2: not guaranteed to kill someone, and 3: is going to be isolated to a single shot. You don't have guns spontaneously firing in all directions. Not only that, the 4 core rules of gun safety are very effective at protecting everyone in the general vicinity of a firearm, and they aren't difficult to teach and learn.
The main concern with minors having access to firearms is deliberate attempts at violence. I don't think I need to go into detail on why that's a larger problem for teens, but that's prevented by 1: keeping the guns in a safe that the kids/teens can't get in to, and 2: being good parents that communicate and support their kids.
Now I'm not one to say "everyone should have a gun" because that'd be fucking stupid. If you (or someone in your house) are depressed or you're a shitty parent then you shouldn't have a gun because it's just asking for trouble. But a lot of people build guns up in their head as some giant boogeyman that will go off on its own and murder everyone in the room like a rabid bear.
And don't get me started on a rant about the left's insistence on gun control and disarming themselves is contributing the the fascist takeover currently going on in the US.
I am neither "going after you" (separate yourself from your argument, I'm not attacking you), nor am I against teaching your children to hunt. What I wouldn't support would be kids carrying their own weapons like that. They should be handed a weapon when it comes time to pull the trigger perhaps, but not carry around their own loaded rifle or sidearm. That's too dangerous, in the general sense, in my opinion.
So that's basically what I reacted to from the very beginning. So if you didn't mean that, this whole discussion has probably been moot.
That's the the lower boundary. The real number is probably closer to a billion.
You have to remember that untold millions of firearms were sold before anyone really started keeping track, no federal authority was keeping track before 1968ish, and that firearms will easily last a century if they are not fired too often and given even a minimum amount of care.
I myself inherited several pre-'68 firearms that would never have been counted. My 90 year old father in law has a dozen or more that he inherited or bought (western ranching family) that are still functional despite being manufactured over a century ago!
To put a fine point on the issue; into the 1970's you could buy firearms off the shelf at hardware stores or even CoD via mail order. 470 million is a low number.
It's that the people who own guns tend to own gunnnsssss. Like an entire arsenal. Most people don't own any.
Around 40% in the USA own at least one firearm. It's probably higher now since trump is back in power.
That is higher than I thought, but still not most.
Do remember that we have no registry, which means that number is self reported and it's just a educated guess. Myself and many others buy private sales. I've never purchased from a FFL or online. Everything I own is purchased from private owners in my state. I don't fall into that 40%. With trump in power, many new owners are buying locally as well and many on the left are now armed.
Some of us put ownership around 50% at this point.
Still an insane amount π
Think of it this way. The majority of our gun deaths are from suicides, then the next largest amount is from gang/drug violence, after that it's police (on average 1k a year) then it's the rest. Meaning that around 4k deaths a year are from literally everything else (domestic/robberies/random acts). We don't really have a gun problem, we have an issue with our society. 99.99999999% of all firearms in civ hands have never been used to harm another person.
Poverty creates the violence, lack of education, lack of social support, lack of opportunities, lack of healthcare. If we fixed those things, our guns violence would plummet overnight. But the owners of this country would rather have us fighting each other than them.
you do have a gun problem. You're not using them enough. Start today. On yourself.
With this logic, saying poverty is what creates the violence, and that the existence of the guns have nothing to do with it, should mean that if you removed all the guns, you'd still have the same proportion of homicide with knives instead, or some other weapon.
And I don't think that would be the case.
Poverty necessitates the violence, I agree. But the availability of guns makes the violence accessible.
Both are problems.
Brazil and Mexico both have some of the strictest gun laws in the world. Basically civs are banned from owning firearms, but their homicide rates are 10 fold ours. A lot of countries in Africa are the same way.
The guns are just the tool used. You solve the why and overall violence will plummet.
Gun laws are probably not going to matter if the guns are still available. You gotta get rid of the guns as well. And also the poverty of course.
But would you oppose my knife argument? Say there are no guns. Ever. Anywhere. What would happen in the streets? Would there be as much killing?
Which will never happen, there are like 500 million guns in civ hands now. That box is open and will never be closed. And please don't point to Australia's buyback because only 60% turned in their firearms which at the time were only around 1mil in civ hands, which are now around 3mil in civilian hands. So they have more guns owned by more people since the ban/buyback.
Same conditions we have now? Yea...you do realize that around 4k people a year are murdered with knives/blunt objects right? It's right up there with the number of murders with guns that don't include gangs or police. End of the day, violence happens because our society is broken, not because of a tool that's accessible.
Why are you excluding murders by gangs and police? I don't see how that's fair or logical.
Gangs are targeted violence towards other gangs. It doesn't really effect the public, most people think of gun violence as random acts done by people. Gang violence is something that is spawned again from our lack of safety nets and lack of education.
Police killing people is also something that people don't usually think of when it comes to gun deaths.
Statistically you account for what the public perception is, but most anti-gun groups don't. They lump everything together, which isn't how you solve problems, it's how you create a narrative that the US is the wild west with people getting murdered in the streets while crossing the road every minute of the day.
It's the same with the abortion debate, anti-abortion groups don't like to see the nuance, they just want to paint a picture that an abortion at 2 weeks is the same as a 3rd trimester abortion. Which isn't true.
Nuance to problems is how you solve them, not ignoring the details.
The more I think about it the less sense it makes to me to exclude gang violence. I'm not able to grasp why it should be excluded. Gang members perpetrating violence are also people, are also members of society, and are also a product of poverty and their environment, just like non-gang members involved in gun violence. They might be driven by different factors but it's still gun violence. I don't get it.
It might not make sense for nuance's sake to "lump it all together", but it doesn't make sense to me to completely exclude it either.
Because like I said, gang violence is not a random act of violence. It doesn't effect 99.999999999999999% of the public. They don't and probably will never be effected by it. It's its own category to be viewed and solved. Ending the war on drugs, ending for profit prison systems, increase in funding of education, creating safety nets, and helping those with drug addiction. These are things the general public really don't run into (education and single payer healthcare are the only two that they do). You're average person is not going to go in jail multiple times, they're not going to sling drugs and be in a gang. Yes members of gangs are the public, but they are a different side of the gun violence and need a different approach.
I'm not excluding it though, I'm calling out the nuances of our gun violence problem, and how anti2a groups lump it all together to scare the public into seeing a picture that truly doesn't exist.
Suicide is a good example of this, they claim that you're more likely to get killed in your own home if you own a firearm than if you don't. That's true, only if you include suicides, which make up 66%+ of our gun deaths. Which doesn't paint the picture they're trying to convey when you point out that their "fact" includes people killing themselves 99.9999999% of that fact. People don't hear that, they hear "if you have a gun in your home, you're more likely to be killed by someone breaking in and taking the gun and turning it on you". Because that's what they want people to think.
Cartel gang violence doesn't affect the public? You're joking. π It even affects tourists! It affects people. People killing each other is the same, regardless of who the civilian is. I think we basically disagree on this fundament, so I don't think this discussion is going to go much further here. All I see is people killing each other as a result of poverty and availability of guns. They both need to go. (The availability, that is, not the items themselves.)
We're talking about the USA here...not Mexico.
Again, nuance. You're doing the same shit as the anti-abortion groups do. You're lumping everything together.
Which is fine, and thank you for having a discussion about this topic without resorting to personal attacks.
Why is that not relevant? It's poverty and guns in combination.
Can you explain more how it's the "same shit"? What does the nuance actually provide? I don't get it. Why exactly does people in gangs killing each other due to poverty and gun availability differ from other people killing each other due to poverty and gun availability? Serious question.
Of course, brother/other. π€
Because Mexico has basically banned citizens from owning guns there. It's nearly impossible to own them, unless you're wealthy. And that's the end goal of anti-gun groups. Ban the guns because they cause the violence and not society. But Mexico is an example of the guns are banned but society is still violent.
Because it's used as propaganda to get people to believe that crime is actually worse than it really is. It's like when Republicans point out how Chicago is a death hole, and that it's riddled with gangs. And no one should go to that blue city, they're doing it because it's propaganda to their side. They want red voters to go "yea, blue votes = unsafe cities". When you and I know that Chicago as a whole is very safe, it's certain areas with gang violence that skew the statistics to make it seem like it's a hell hole. It's all about the nuance of the problem and if you don't look into how facts are twisted by each side then you'll never see the agenda being driven.
It's a breath of fresh air, to actually have a discussion on this topic without being called a baby killer or that I'm a Nazi or some other crazy shit just because I'm a very pro2a person.
since you can't prove a counterfactual, we will never know
I'm not sure what you mean by that. What do you want me to provide, exactly?
you can't know what would happen in a world where there were never guns. I'm not asking for anything. I'm pointing out we can't possibly know what such a world would look like
I'm not asking for definite knowledge, I'm asking what this other person thinks would happen. Thanks though.
Good news: you can read a chart correctly!
Bad news: It seems that there are approximately 120 civilian owned firearms per 100 persons in the USA: 2017 survey. See particularly the "Estimating Global Civilian-held Firearms Numbers" briefing paper and its annex. That seems to be the survey that most reports are based on. I don't imagine the number has dropped over the interveneing years.
Knowing the people I know, I bet that's much higher now!
ππ
On average yes actually
The truth of it tends to be more that gun nuts own a dozen or more guns which skews things, but legitimately iirc over 40% of US households have at least one.
Still an insane figure π¦
Unironically, the average person doesn't actually own a gun, but the average gun owner owns several
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2017/06/22/the-demographics-of-gun-ownership/
This is from 2017, almost 10 years old. I'd be interested to see how much it's changed, if at all, especially since there's that 30% who could see owning one in the future.
There are plenty of reasons not to visit the US and this is just one of them.