The USA also has plenty of gun production capacity. Unless you really believe 25% of Americans own 20 guns each, there is a lot of winking and nudging that guns are going south for drugs coming north.
Generally if you're going to own guns you're going to own several, just like you likely own more than one screwdriver. Small gauge shotguns for small birds, larger for larger birds, smooth bore for deer depending on state. Rifles there will be several, same for pistols. With rifles and pistols you generally practice with small caliber rounds like 22 as it's much much cheaper ($.02 / rnd vs $2), and really more pleasant (quiet, doesn't kick) than hunting rounds.
Everyone I know who has a gun has at least 4.
My friend's grandfather owns 73. In many areas that's an unremarkable number, especially for older shotguns where you didn't have interchangeable chokes.
> Rifles there will be several, same for pistols. With rifles and pistols you generally practice with small caliber rounds like 22 as it's much much cheaper ($.02 / rnd vs $2), and really more pleasant (quiet, doesn't kick) than hunting rounds.
Most of my experience, thanks to the US taxpayer to whom I am permanently indebted, is with an M60, an M240, and an M249.
I would like my wife, and my daughters to have skill with weapons too, so I was thinking about an HK417 for myself, and then getting an HK416 clone chambered in .22LR for practice.
It takes a healthy respect, and practiced expertise in weapons to build competency, and I think that relates to a number of rounds fired. Hopefully, small caliber for cost savings!
I got a 22lr slide for a 40sw sig for $300 and paid for it in about 3 trips to the range and a few thousand rounds. Benefit, it stovepipes all the time so it lets you practice failure modes all the time. Very worth it. I swap between it and real rounds to keep myself from getting recoil-shy.
I'd also recommend something like a mantis-x which lets you practice smooth trigger pulls while dry firing. It's actually a pretty smart bit of tech, it's all based on the one of the solid state accelerometers like you have in your phone.
I was thinking this would be something similar to the trigger squeeze and breathing monitors I used with weapons training VR, but this actually looks like it would be really useful, and very data driven. Appreciate the info!
> Unless you really believe 25% of Americans own 20 guns each
On average, that's entirely believable.
I think the vast majority of those people own 4-10 guns, but there are enough people who own hundreds of guns to make the mean a lot higher. In fact this is a classic example of a situation where mean can be significantly higher than median.
