~700,000 cops, 1.4 million active duty military and ~200 million gun owners (many of whom have had military training) is quite a mismatch, all right, but not in quite the way you think.
Where are you getting this number from? 200 million gun owners means that nearly 2 in 3 US citizens owns a gun which doesn't sound close to correct.
http://rense.com/general62/gns.htm says 80 million gun owners.
http://www.justfacts.com/guncontrol.asp says 70-80 million adult gun owners.
I can't find any better numbers, but 80 million sounds more reasonable.
(still an order of magnitude more than police/military, but not 66% of American citizens).
I think this is a fact gun rights folks miss. We can clear people when they purchase guns, but a gun is a lethal weapon for years. You can't guarantee it won't fall into other hands in 30 years.
Some people argue we should give up, and embrace the number privately owned weapons in the US: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/12/the-case...
Others argue that registration of weapons is a better solution: http://swampland.time.com/2013/01/24/fact-check-the-gun-regi...
But the sheer number of these things is amazing. FWIW, the country with the second highest number of guns per capital is YEMEN. With a gun for only 5.4 out of 10 citizens. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_guns_per_capita_by_co...
(IMHO, gun registration and improving our mental health system would go a long way toward addressing gun violence)
2) Even using your number, it's still 80 million compared to 2 million (and not all of those two million are going to go along with it anyway).
So true. My favorite:
"Busted: Gun Control Legislator Dianne Feinstein Discusses Why She Concealed Carried Firearms"
http://www.ijreview.com/2013/01/32591-busted-gun-control-leg...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Rowan#Gun_Control_Controve...
2) "still an order of magnitude more than police/military"
The figure of 270 million guns total is somewhat more reliable because there's at least some idea of how many have been manufactured.
We could try using the Fermi estimation technique ("how many piano tuners are there in Chicago?").
270 million guns / claimed 80 million gun owners -> mean number of guns owned per owner is ~3.3. That seems high. Most gun owners I know own one gun. Some own two. Some own more, but I would bet money that the mean number is closer to one than it is to three.
The reason is that different guns have different uses. If someone is concerned about personal protection, they'll have a handgun. A big rifle is useful for hunting or just messing around, but the ammo might be expensive (ammo for my M1 Garand is over $1.25 per round!) so someone might have something like a .22 rifle (ammo has historically been less than 10 cents per round) that can be used inexpensively for fun. If you hunt birds a lot and/or like to shoot clay pigeons, you'll also have a shotgun.
3.3 seems pretty reasonable to me.
If you hang around with woodworkers, the number of hammers owned is going to be more than one. If you're talking about random people, it's going to be much lower.
At any rate - 3.3 still seems reasonable to me. Although I'm not incredibly confident about it, your anecdotes and assumptions aren't enough to convince me that it is substantially higher than the actual rate.
I have to agree with suresk people, out of all of the folks I know, the number of guns is either 0 or >1. I don't know anyone with just one gun. I suppose if you divided the number of people in a household by the number of guns you may get a number closer to 1, but that means assigning gun ownerships to babies.
So you would agree that the 200 million number is also unreliable?
Another data point: the NRA-ILA puts the number of gun owners at 60-65 million http://www.knobcreekshoot.com/FirearmsFacts.htm
The figure of 270 million guns total is somewhat more reliable
Agreed, but that wasn't the statistic given.