Earlier on Facebook, I posted a link to an ATF report which I thought showed the number of firearms sold in the US since 1986. From that, I concluded that the recent spate of massacres and calls for stricter gun controls had the  effect of boosting sales rather than controlling them. Quite a feat that I reckoned was not coincidental.

Turns out I was wrong, at least about the facts (I was reading from my phone, and you can imagine how hard it gets to accurately analyze tables and charts on that). The report only shows figures for firearms manufactured, imported and exported, not sold.

The numbers of firearms sold in the US is not documented anywhere I could find. But I did find this, from 2012, documenting the number of applications to register a firearm:

The figures show that there have been 16,808,538 applications in 2012 so far to the end of November. If they were approved, that would be enough weapons to stock every member of Nato’s armed forces nearly five times over. The system has received 156,577,260 applications since 1998 and the US has the highest gun ownership rate in the world.

So, according to the table below (from the report), in 2012, 8,578,610 total firearms were manufactured. But twice as many applications for a license to carry a firearm were filed. Of the ones produced, only 287,554 were exported. This means that the country is awash in small arms.

Whether these events are staged or not, the fear that guns will be confiscated in the US is clearly unfounded. If anything, these incidents and the political grandstanding on gun control that surrounds them has the opposite effect.

The US is being staged for a very bloody conflict.