The drop is all the more remarkable considering that there are at least 168,000,000 more guns in circulation in the US now than when gun homicide peaked in 1993.[1]
[1]: https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/nics/reports/1998_2013_sta...
[1]: https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/nics/reports/1998_2013_sta...
I imagine the total's quite a bit lower than the stated figure since many of these background checks would be for transfers and sales of used weapons, not always just new guns entering the system. I also imagine some people go through the background check but then for one reason or another don't complete the sale. Still, the number of new guns in circulation is likely very large.
One additional data point - nearly 9 million guns were manufactured or imported into the US in 2010 alone: http://www.businessinsider.com/more-gun-stores-in-america-th...
1993: 257,746,103
2012: 315,809,000
= 58,062,897 more people since 1993.
So 2.8x as many guns than population increase.
(I agree that there are lots of people that like to collect guns, I just don't think they could possibly be driving (that much) manufacturing, making a lot of something makes it less collectible.)
Absolutely. Plenty of gun-owners are just flat-out "gearheads" in the same sense as guitar players (who often own dozens of guitars and amps) or whatever. If I had money to burn, I personally would own a few dozen guns, and most of my collection would fall into the "modern, mass produced, non-scarce" category. The exceptions would be a few older military rifles, like maybe an M1 .30 carbine, an M1 Garand rifle, or an old British Lee-Enfield 303 rifle.
I have a friend in Illinois who's soon going to be moving back to Maryland, he's a WWII buff and has a M1911 (Argentine) and a beautiful Garand in .308 and he doesn't have to worry about those or any other state's "assault weapons" bans, except again NY, where you're only allowed to load 7 rounds in your magazines....
Recharging it with its 8 rounds clips is quick, and in general it's one of the most ergonomic gun designs of the century, e.g. it has very little in the way of protrusions to catch.
Agreed on FN's 5.7mm stuff, though; fun, but with a round only about 10% more powerful than the hottest .22 rimfire magnum, not practical except in full auto, which thanks to the Hughes amendment means we can't own any. But, boy, would I like to own a PS90 ... just can't justify it.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/crime/2012/12/20/assault_rifle_st...
It makes a credible case for less than 5 million. So you only need 20 or 30 similarly collectible guns to get to 100 million.
We also should not bother to argue too much over what constitutes collecting (that is, we should find middle ground or agree to disagree and abandon the whole discussion). I certainly wouldn't include someone buying 1 or 2 reliable and cost effective guns.
At work at the moment and don't have time to pull up the details until tonight, but the examples given say of romania where none of the above is legally available still has a high crime rate. The general gist of things are that having to keep around kids a parent doesn't want tends to lead to bad outcomes for the children in life. Its much more complex than that and obviously we can't run randomized trials across multiple generations to validate things (not that it would even be ethical), but its interesting nonetheless.
Freakonomics says this.
If you're going to talk about gun inflation, it helps to also mention human inflation.