Indians For Guns

Report: U.S. most armed country with 90 guns per 100 people.
Written by Tactical-Life.com. Author Archive »

The United States has 90 guns for every 100 citizens, making it the most heavily armed society in the world, a report released on Tuesday said.

U.S. citizens own 270 million of the world’s 875 million known firearms, according to the Small Arms Survey 2007 by the Geneva-based Graduate Institute of International Studies.

About 4.5 million of the 8 million new guns manufactured worldwide each year are purchased in the United States, it said.

“There is roughly one firearm for every seven people worldwide. Without the United States, though, this drops to about one firearm per 10 people,” it said.

India had the world’s second-largest civilian gun arsenal, with an estimated 46 million firearms outside law enforcement and the military, though this represented just four guns per 100 people there. China, ranked third with 40 million privately held guns, had 3 firearms per 100 people.

Germany, France, Pakistan, Mexico, Brazil and Russia were next in the ranking of country’s overall civilian gun arsenals.

On a per-capita basis, Yemen had the second most heavily armed citizenry behind the United States, with 61 guns per 100 people, followed by Finland with 56, Switzerland with 46, Iraq with 39 and Serbia with 38.

France, Canada, Sweden, Austria and Germany were next, each with about 30 guns per 100 people, while many poorer countries often associated with violence ranked much lower. Nigeria, for instance, had just one gun per 100 people.

Source: Laura MacInnis for Reuters.
I wonder if these stats are correct? I do read the word 'had' so where are they now?
Bruno22

These stats have been discussed before and moore than once.

Also note that this number also includes illegal arms including kattas.

You know the press keep bringing up the "46 million guns" number. I have never seen an actual study published or linked to anywhere that corroborates it.
Does anyone know where this number comes from? Or is it just something made up by the anti-gun groups to sound impressive?

xl_target wrote:Does anyone know where this number comes from?

especially the number of illegal firearms??? did they just take a visual survey of (say) a Naxalite dominated area and extrapolate those numbers to India's population of 1.18 billion?

+1 XL's point....

How the hell do the plonkers count illegal guns?

Sometime last year I met with a researcher from the Small Arms Survey (SAS), another NAGRI/ IFG member was also present at that meeting. When asked by the Gentleman what I thought of the oft quoted figure of 40 million guns in India, I responded that I didn't think much of it as it was a guess based on a guess. He smiled and told me that the person who made that "guess" was a colleague of his and he had been amazed at how often people in India had been quoting that figure to him and stating it as fact (in his various meetings here)!

So how did that figure come about? Someone sitting at SAS in Geneva had to estimate the number of firearms in India and since there was no concrete data available on either legal/ illegal firearms in India, the following guesstimation was made: First they looked at the total number of illegal arms confiscations in India, then they "ASSUMED" that for each illegal firearm confiscated a certain multiple would remain undetected, based on these premises they came up with the GUESS of 40 million firearms in India.

So when someone throws such figures at you:

1) Ask about the source

2) Do not be intimidated on hearing someone quote the name of xyz research agency/ think tank - ASK about the methodology adopted in arriving at the quoted statistics, their sources of raw data etc. No one is infallible and the same data can often be interpreted in widely different ways.

3) DO NOT take for granted that everything you read in print is FACT, quite often it is not! Journalists don't always do thorough research and when in a crunch situation they'll grab the first available "figures" they can find (more often than not, they will simply pull what they find on the net) and go to print without properly vetting their source. So don't just blindly believe in stead Question, Question, Question!

Cheers!
Abhijeet

our country is run by lies and scams.so is this.

To echo what Abhijit said:
It is very hard to believe very much of what is reported in the press nowadays (on any subject) as Journalistic ethics seem to have hit a new low worldwide. Maybe it is that they have always been that way and we could never check sources before. The ubiquity of the Internet now allows the ordinary man in the street to actually check facts for himself. Fact checking doesn't seem to be in the vocabulary of most of todays newspapers or periodicals. They are very good at giving you their opinion, which for the most part is not based on verifiable facts, When they do quote "facts" most of them seem to be pulled out of their behinds.

About 4.5 million of the 8 million new guns manufactured worldwide each year are purchased in the United States, it said.

For the last few years (since 2006) NICS checks numbers are over 10 million per year. Remember multiple purchases can go on the same NICS check, so the number might be even higher than that.

As far as fact checking goes, it doesn't looks like they have made an effort to check any facts. The above figure is not even close. Even though the FBI publishes yearly statistics for NICS checks, whoever came up with that report didn't even bother checking that easily accessed source. The whole report seems to be pure guess work. The US probably maintains the most comprehensive record of firearms purchased. If they cant even get the US number correct, how can we believe anything in that report.

When a report proves to have a fabrication in it, why should anyone believe anything that report says. Taking that a bit further, if the organization publishing a report knowingly publishes a false report, it loses all credibility.



Source: NICS checks by year.

To quote Mark Twain: "If you don't read the newspaper, you are uninformed. If you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed." As true today as in his days.

shooter wrote:Also note that this number also includes illegal arms including kattas.

90% of this huge firearms are illegal..

In our locality there are several number of illegal firearms but no licenced arms..