[jdfellow]

With as popular as Glock is, you'd think Austria would be bigger than a basically insignificant sliver.

I suppose if it was scaled by units sold instead of dollar values that may swing it towards inexpensive small arms like Glock pistols. Actually, that may be why USA and Russia are so enormous as exporters: they make expensive heavy arms like tanks, artillery, warplanes, ships, machine guns, bombs, while lots of places "gun guys" (which I sort of am) would think may show up (like Austria) won't because they only make relatively cheap small arms.

All of my arms are made in Russia or USA, if that means anything.

EDIT: Some other commenters have mentioned the stats don't include firearms and crew-served machine guns. Again, it's all the big stuff.

[bottled_poe]

> All of my arms are made in Russia or USA, if that means anything.

As an Australian, I found this statement difficult to parse. The idea of owning a gun is so foreign to me, let alone multiple.

[fit2rule]

As an Australian, I remember when guns were not something to be feared, but rather used if you need to .. my grandmothers 410 was used to dispatch snakes (dangerous) and rabbits (vermin) on a regular basis, and I remember fondly the bush trips with my uncles and cousins to eradicate invasive swine in the region.

Fortunately, Australia is yet to be invaded (unless you count our own ancestors heinous actions against the native owners of the land), or you would perhaps have a different perspective on just how foreign gun ownership can impact your life .. the time may well come, in our lifetimes or shortly thereafter, when Australians are even more subservient to a foreign power than they currently are ..

[EliRivers]

Many nations in which guns are commonplace amongst the citizenry have been invaded, many times. The armies fought, the occupation happened, the vast majority of citizens did not pick up whatever weapon they had to hand to fight the invading army. The prevalence of weaponry amongst the citizenry of the countries involved has no bearing that I can see.

[fit2rule]

America lost the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan because of the prevalence of arms among the population ..

[classicsnoot]

Can you explain what you mean by 'lost'? What would you define as 'winning'? IMO those labels are subjective. To assess them, one should state the goals of the operations and the achievement thereof.

[fit2rule]

How much money was bled out of the American economy to support those wars? What state are those countries in now? How much debt did the American people incur as a result? What sort of resources were returned to the American people?

All of the answers to these questions are a total loss. Did it make the world a safer place? No. It made the situation in the middle east far worse that things were 15 years ago and its still not looking like its going to get better any time soon.

[classicsnoot]

Commonplace =/= prevalent. What wars are you thinkint of? No snark, just curious.

In terms of prevalence, I don't think there is an apt comparison in the historical narrative for the US. I heard, but cannot confirm, that we blow off more rounds for target practice than the active conflicts around the globe use in combat. Even if that statement is incorrect, I can think of no other nation with an equivalent saturation of small arms.

[hga]

Target practice plus bird hunting, which can use a lot of shotshells with little to show for it if you're not so good at it like me ^_^. I don't think most other forms of hunting use that very many rounds.

US civilian production is between 13-14 billion rounds per year (military production at Lake City, I don't know, but we get sold canceled orders and lots that fail milspec tests but are otherwise good ammo). Rimfire production alone is 3 billion. For some time a lot of that has been getting stored for ... a rainy day. And if you do the math that's only a bit more than 40 rounds/person/year.

But the number is still very very large. Heck, in one high school academic year on the JROTC rifle team I probably shot over 2,000 rounds of .22 LR (for every morning of practice, 3 sighting in shots plus 10 rounds each in two positions).

As for "saturation", yeah. In the last three years, the number of Missouri state issued concealed carry licenses (note any state's is good, and many are cheaper) in my county has almost doubled, to the point where 5% of the age eligible adults have one. And the 19-20 age range has only been eligible for about a year, while those getting them are largely the older, age and less ability to defend yourself + the Baby Boomers entering retirement age is a major driver.

42-3 states have "shall issue" concealed carry regimes, and California and Hawaii look to be following soon (it's being litigated, but some large population counties have already thrown in the towel); the Supremes could extend that to all states. In the last 4 years, Chicago went from nobody but the anointed being allowed to own handguns to shall issue concealed carry and more than a few incidents of legal self-defense with them.... Etc. etc.

[classicsnoot]

Point being that if it ever goes Red Dawn whoever is doing the invading is going to have a rough time of it. We ['muricans] shoot a lot. We even hit stuff occasionally :|

[EliRivers]

What wars are you thinkint of? No snark, just curious.

I was thinking of the invasion of Western European countries during the second world war, but those are just the first ones that came to mind. Weaponry easy enough to come by (especially during an actual shooting war), but civil uprising and rebellion relatively sparse.

[classicsnoot]

I think there is a difference between the weapons technology available today v. what was available in the 1930's. Many regulars went into battle with WWI era weaponry. The civilian arms complement was even older in many cases.

An interesting example of a 'heavily' armed society in WWII would be the Balkans region. Germany was smart; short of paras and specialist, they left the chekist and partisans to slaughter each other [sewing the seeds of the 90s conflict] as well as their Jewish populations.

To date, i can think of no example of a well/heavily armed society being invaded. There really aren't that many to pick from.