Name:   copperline - Subject:   How long is the lifespan of a gun? Date:   1/20/2013 7:28:30 PM

All of this has gotten me to thinking about guns and i wondered about how many new guns were coming into the marketplace each year.    Since there is no official registry, all i could find was how many new gun permits were made… and the results were pretty astonishing.  

Quoting from the source:

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 a 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. (http://www.businessinsider.com/number-of-guns-sold-in-us-each-year-2012-12#ixzz2iYwU9cHJ)

156,577,260 new gun permits issued since 1988.   

As amazing as that number is, there is another question that pops up:    How long is the lifespan of the average gun?   Looking around my house, i have 2 shotguns  50+ and 70+ years old, a pistol at built in the 1940’s,  and a musket built in the 1850’s.    All but the musket still work, and i expect the only reason that any of them will be rendered inoperative in the future will be if the ammunition isn’t available.   That’s the thing.    Guns don’t wear out and they don’t break very often.   We don’t throw them away, we pass them down from generation to generation.       i can’t think of any appliances in my home or tools in my shop that have a life expectancy like that.   is there another example of a consumer product that's sold in this volume and has an operational life so long that it has to be passed from generation to generation?  

So, if you take the new guns introduced to the US each year, and combine that with the existing number of weapons that continue to be operational for exceptionally long periods of time, you can see that we really are armed to the teeth already.  

Just an observation.   Everybody will draw their own conclusions.