There Are Now More Guns Than People In This Country

I have been saying that there were nearly as many guns as people in this country. It turns out that I was wrong -- there are more guns than people in this country! The NRA and the gun manufacturers have used the racist hatred of President Obama to kill efforts to pass reasonable (and constitutional) gun laws, and to vastly increase the number of guns produced.

Here is part of an excellent article by Christopher Ingraham (pictured) in The Washington Post:

It's tough to know exactly how many guns we have in the United States. Most estimates of the number of guns in the U.S. use federal tallies of the firearms manufactured, imported and exported by U.S. gunmakers. A 2012 Congressional Research Service report published exactly one month before the Sandy Hook school shooting put the number of civilian firearms at 242 million in 1996, 259 million in 2000, and 310 million as of 2009.

If that 310 million number is correct, it means that the first year of Barack Obama's presidency was an inflection point: It marked the first time that the number of firearms in circulation surpassed the total U.S. population.

Data on gun manufacturing from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives now goes through 2013. If we were to update the CRS numbers with the most recent data, we'd get a chart that looks something like this:

Regardless of the actual number of civilian firearms in circulation, there's no ambiguity around one crucial fact: U.S. gun manufacturers have drastically increased their output during the Obama years. In 2009, according to the ATF, gunmakers produced 5.6 million guns. By 2013 their annual production had just about doubled, up to 10.9 million guns that year.