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Comment by morsch | Hacker News Reader

Lovely. He claims it's 2000 firearms per day, so more than 700000 per year. A 2013 article puts the number at around 250000[1]. Time for a war on firearms, maybe?

[1] http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/world/article24...

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>2000 firearms per day, so more than 700000 per year

Someone should tell them that firearms can be reloaded...

There's a large blackmarket in Mexico for firearms not all of these are going exclusively to cartels they sell them at 2-3x the price to whoever locally. Same in Canada, weapons smuggling is rampant because US truck drivers can stop off in a state that has no maximum buy limits and get a dozen handguns to sell at double the price once they cross the border.

Unless that truck driver is a resident of the state in question, no, they can't. Handguns can't be purchased unless you are a legal resident of the state. This applies to every state in the US.

Only in theory. Here in Florida, the traffic in undocumented firearms is huge. Websites for selling, flea markets, gun shows every month, etc. Most states are similar.

--NRA member

Perhaps the parent should have added a "legally" to his statement, but out of state handgun sales violate federal law unless they're done through a federally licensed firearms dealer.

Is the US even manufacturing non-military firearms at a rate sufficient for 2k/day to slip out through smuggling? That seems extraordinarily unlikely.

There are more guns in the US than residents. 2k/day is peanuts.

...except these are going to a very small group of people? And very likely not collectors or hunters.

in texas you can go on armslist.com and buy guns from individuals in a face to face sale. The only paper trail is your contact through armslist. no doubt they are taking advantage of this as well as having mules to legally buy the firearms.

The number of background checks should roughly track non-military firearm sales. There were 2.4m of those in March 2017 per the FBI [1]. (No, this doesn't speak directly to your question about manufacturing levels, but this does roughly track how many firearms are available for transfer.)

So yeah, there are more than enough guns in America to support this level of smuggling.

1 - https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/nics_firearm_checks_-_mo...

Beretta, who currently supplies the standard issue M9A1 handgun for the US Marine Corps, considers their military sales to be approximately 2% of total gross, so they're definitely doing more in civilian sales than military.

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