Are you having a down day today? Well here’s a little pick-me-up. According to something called the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, The United States is – far and away – the most heavily armed country in the world. In fact, it wasn’t even much of a race. Read on to put a spring in your step and a frown on mikeb’s apple-cheeked face…
As gunreports.com relays the news, we have 90 guns for every 100 citizens. That doesn’t, of course, mean that 90% of the population owns guns. Just that we have lots o’ guns. As in more than anyone else. A lot more.
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.
So we have 31% of all the known guns in the world. Clearly, other countries aren’t trying hard enough. It looks like we’re about to lap the field. The next closest countries in terms of the number of guns are India and China. But it’s probably the per capita figures that are more telling.
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.
We’ll be happy to send a TTAG representative to the Graduate Institute to accept our first place trophy. Any volunteers?