Saturday, May 11, 2013

Gun Purchases

Days Of Our Trailers has some stats up from Illinois. There a new gun buyer must first obtain a FOID card, the Chicago equivalent of the yellow star formerly used in Europe. Existing gun owners will already have one of these and not need a new one.

Applications are running an average of 53,300/month in a population of some 12 million.

Extrapolating the numbers, the FOID figures for Illinois imply that the country as a whole is adding 1,325,153 new gun owners every month. That's people who didn't own one before.

Couple this with 2.181M NICS checks average for this year, and existing gun owners are buying some 856,000 additional guns per month. Probably a bit less as not all NICS checks are for gun purchases.

The U.S. Military is about 3 million strong, including cooks, clerks, and bottle washers.

1 comment:

Brad K. said...

I am not concerned about the strength of the military, so much, in a domestic sense. I am concerned about the armed strength of Homeland Security, the BATFE, the FBI/CIA (since the strictures about the CIA staying outside the US seem pretty fluid, recently), the border guards, national guards in repressive states (NY and IL come to mind), the Dept of ED and other Federal tactical teams, and other local and state tactical/SWAT personnel. And, I guess, freelance and government sponsored mercenaries.

Presumably the worst would have to happen before the military would represent anything other than a source of weapons-trained and disciplined veterans, constantly enriching communities and states across the land. Oh, and the uniformed services continue to provide an outlet for communities with young people needing discipline, guidance, and the ability to move between social and economic strata, in return for seasoned, mature veterans with social and cultural experience beyond their birth places.

Obama campaigned in 2008 for an armed civilian internal security force, after all.