I kinda expected more than a billion firearms to be honest. Though there are probably tons lying forgotten in bunkers and depots, and buried in fields and such.
Don't think destroyed firearms like ones in fields count. Storage ones do for sure.
How the hell can civilians own 85% of all the firearms? Countries have HUGE arsenals of weapons to keep nation alive from either external or internal threats. Not to mention how many guns does a country have is sensitive information because it can be used to determinate to attack or not. So yeah not really believing any of this.
maybe its something like civilians own 85% of in-play firearms or something
Now... How do we arm the other 6 billion?
you've been doing that in the middle east for years, it hasnt worked out
Something to keep in mind: "private security" IE PMCs are counted as civilian in this measure. There's mercenary companies who put actual armies to shame.
Meant more, deliberately hidden in fields. Officially unaccounted for ones.
those are rookie numbers
we gotta get those numbers up
I don't know. In the US at least, some people own not just one, but several firearms. My uncle owns 4 pistols, 3 rifles, and possibly some others that I don't know about. Some are antiques, others are old mementos. Others I know own more than that. I would imagine that most militaries, while stocking an excess of firearms, likely don't issue multiple firearms (more than a rifle and sidearm, or just a sidearm depending on the branch) to each soldier. Additionally, I would imagine that certain weapons like LMG's and specialist weapons are as needed weapons that are issued depending on the mission rather than issued to a particular individual to keep.
Basically my thought is that militaries don't stockpile multiple weapons for each individual whereas some civilians do.
The actual report on military firearms says it's pretty difficult to estimate the number of firearms maintained by militaries.
The Small Arms Survey estimates that at the end of 2017 the
total global holdings of the armed forces in 177 countries
included at least 133 million firearms. More are believed to
exist. Military firearms holdings are the least public of all
major small arms categories. Of more than 100 governments
polled by the Small Arms Survey to date, only eight reported
their total military firearms inventories. Another 20 countries
supplied data independently, or to other projects or researchers.
Secrecy and the Small Arms Survey’s uncertainty about the
disposition of older weaponry mean that it is only possible to
estimate most countries’ military firearms inventories. Military
holdings also have been affected by some of the largest disarmament
projects focused on destruction of military surpluses,
not all of which have been made public. Global military small
arms data seems certain to remain less accurate than data on
worldwide civilian and law enforcement holdings, a nagging
source of ambiguity in global small arms totals.
I mean it doesn't surprise me. I own 4 and I'm British. Half my mates own 2 or 3. Thats with going through all the rules and stipulations here. So I can imagine its easy to get carried away in less stringent nations.
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/2454/5df2648c-bb26-4db2-a98f-db59a9c53019/image.png
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/2454/64c3ba29-ca71-4605-9dba-5ae5639fcd39/image.png
Fucking hell, that's a lot of guns.
Not enough.
Theres a prettt clear rule about always needing more dakka.
”Accessing accurate data for small arms is always a difficult task. In the arms trade, small arms are considered the cancer of any society, as they facilitate human rights abuses, criminality, insurrection as well as murder, particularly in developing countries or countries subject to war,” said Martin Drew, British arms trade expert and government consultant.
“These governments need to have the capacity to control the registration and movement of such weapons, as well as implementing legislation with a capacity to enforce it. The also have to contend with the issue of longevity. Revolvers can survive up to 100 years, AK-47 assault rifles 50 years and ammunition 40 years. The figures for the US might appear significantly high, however this may be due to accurate record keeping.”
LOL “expert”
Figures that the British Arms Trade expert knows fuck-all about firearms.
I suppose you need to start arming babies in the womb
That British arms "expert" is the kind of retard that keeps our laws shit lmao
"DUDE REVOLVERS LAST FOR 100 YEARS YOU GOTTA DESTROY EM"
I mean I would rather have the guns in the hands of the civilians than the governments to some degree
While individual guns, with proper care and maintenance, can be kept working pretty much indefinitely, it's fair to treat guns as though they have a limited lifespan for legislative purposes. How many original-production Type 1 AK-47s are still around? Not that many, as evidenced by their pretty high value on the collector's market.
It might be best to think of a production run of a particular gun as having a half-life. Say I produce ten thousand rifles, and sell them to civilians. After some amount of time, half of them will be destroyed - some through lack of maintenance, some through accidents. Some will get resold and eventually find their way to a combat zone, which quickly chews up every type of materiel. Some will die very strange and sad deaths - how many C96s have prop makers rendered unusable by turning them into DL-44 replicas?
So after one half-life (let's say twenty years), there'd be five thousand left. Forty years on, we're down to 2500. After a century, about three hundred will be left. That doesn't seem all that unreasonable to me.
The expert does seem to be talking sensibly, when you look at it that way. They're saying "Look, even if we ban all new guns, we'd still have lots of old ones still around for quite some time. Or if we start mandatory registration now, unregistered guns will remain a problem for decades."
Damn I only got like 9! Well off to the gun shop on Friday!
I'm upset that none of you got the reference.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38vd_j7e2HY
That makes more sense. Slather a rifle in cosmoline and stick it in a crate, and it'll last pretty much forever. If it gets used? Different story. Accidents happen, and even without that, no matter how well you take care of it, every shot is gradually wearing down the lands of the barrel. It'll take awhile before it needs replacing, say 3,000-30,000 rounds depending on a number of factors, but it'll happen eventually. I see it pretty often with old surplus bolt actions, you shine a light down the muzzle and the damn thing is practically a smooth-bore.
Now, a firearm like that is still dangerous. It'll basically be a glorified musket, but even muskets can kill, and these often have the advantage of smokeless powder, jacketed bullets and repeating actions. Now, if the mechanism itself gives out, say a bolt-lug shears off or the action spring loses tension, then you have an over-engineered paperweight. That's not a given though, some firearms are built very cheaply and poorly, good for only a couple hundred rounds, while many are essentially indestructible. I'd dare say the latter are more common, if only because they tend to stick around longer.
When you compare guns per capita to military personnel per capita for the world this shouldn't be at all surprising. In most democracies, including those with stricter gun control, there are way more guns in the hands of civilians than the hands of the military.
Assuming you can get your hands on one. Finding parts for guns that have been out of production for the better part of a century is, all too often, an exercise in endless searching and cannibalization of other guns. You could always have a machine-shop fabricate a new one if need-be, but that can be expensive. And all that's without taking into account whether or not the gun in question, and its constituent parts, are still legal in the first place.
He was really over simplifying it and pulling numbers out of his ass to make his point, if he had worded it more like that he would have had more of a point, but even still it's individual parts that tend to wear out, not the entire firearm all at once, so coming up with a meaningful average life span for a single type of firearm seems kind of pointless to me, especially when you have to take into consideration the possibility of factory defects, user faults, proper maintenance, etc. Furthermore, how the hell do you back up something like revolvers inherently being able to last twice as long as an AK-47? It's practically a meaningless statement. Thinking of it as more like a half-life makes a lot more sense, though.
Also, ammunition can, and more often than not, does last more than 40 years. I have surplus 8x56r that's from 1938 that works just fine. Most surplus that I've fired is over 40 years old. My issue is more to do with whose ass he pulled these numbers out of than the idea that firearms can have an average lifespan.
Well Russia didn't produce that many Type 1's before moving on to the milled receiver Type 2 due to metallurgy issues and an inability to reliably bend the receivers, so that's not really a good example. There was a very high rejection rate for the Type 1 and even after it was dropped for the Type 2 in 1949 they had a hard time producing enough rifles to arm their entire military. Since the Type 1 had a lot more issues than later models, they were quickly put into storage as soon as they could be replaced and were later sold off to whoever wanted them, where most were likely shot to shit and never seen again.
A gun with a broken bolt or striker or other critical part, is just a bad club (or, if you've got a bayonet, a mediocre pike). Where do replacement parts come from? After a while, they're either being hand-crafted (not something that just anyone can do), or being scavenged from another gun. That changes the decay pattern from what it would otherwise be, but it still doesn't keep things going forever. You're still thinking too much in terms of an individual firearm, not a population. You can make similar criticisms of life expectancy numbers for humans - "there's no reason why people should drop dead at age 72, I know a guy who lived to be like a hundred, plus doctors exist and can fix broken people, the whole idea of a life expectancy is bullshit".
Revolvers in general are much more resilient than a self-loading rifle. Many designs used just a single, heavy-gauge leaf spring. There's no locking surfaces that need to be both precisely shaped and pressure-bearing - the hand only needs to rotate the cylinder, not withstand the pressure of firing. There's no gas pistons to foul or recoil springs to break. And, because many revolvers were designed so long ago, they are (again, in general) very overbuilt, especially when manufactured with modern steels. Prima facie I would expect the AK to have a lower life expectancy simply because there's more parts that can break, and more parts that can break the gun by simply being slightly out of shape.
Again, I don't have an issue with the idea of populations of firearms or ammunition having a general life expectancy, more I just want to know how these numbers were reached before I start taking this guy at face value. It seems perfectly reasonable to doubt random figures about the life expectancy of ammunition when one's experience seems to contradict it, at least until sources are shared. "Revolvers can last up to 100 years" is a bit different from what you're saying if not only for the fact that he's dealing in specifics.
But yeah, in general a lot of revolver designs probably are likely to last longer than an AK-47, it just seems strange to mention such a broad category then immediately after it mention a specific type of firearm. On one hand you have hundreds of different revolver designs, some which are massively different from the rest, which includes revolver designs that would have a hard time lasting a decade with regular use and on the other you have one specific type of firearm without much difference in variants. I guess he wasn't really comparing them, it just sounds odd to me.
Anyway I'm not really trying to argue with you, I really don't disagree with what you're saying, rereading my post, I came off as much more argumentative than I meant to. I'm going to blame it on being extremely tired and not being as coherent as I wish I were, so I'm just going to shut up before I start sounding like I don't believe in life expectancy.
The ammunition thing might be similar to the firearm half-life thing, where a given supply of ammunition is likely to be dried up in 40 years assuming no resupply. I have to wonder where that would come from though, I can't even begin to think how we would get reliable information on ammunition acquisition and expenditure rates.
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