Gun production, fueled by handgun purchases, spikes
WASHINGTON — The United States is in the middle of a great gun-buying boom that shows no sign of letting up as the annual number of firearms manufactured has nearly tripled since 2000 and spiked sharply in the past three years, according to the first comprehensive federal tally of gun commerce in two decades.
The report, released by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives on Tuesday — three days after a mass shooting in Buffalo left 10 dead — painted a vivid statistical portrait of a nation arming itself to the teeth. Buyers capitalized on the loosening of gun restrictions by the Supreme Court, Congress and Republican-controlled state legislatures.
The data documented a drastic shift in consumer demand among gun owners that has had profound commercial, cultural and political implications: Starting in 2009, Glock-type semiautomatic handguns, purchased for personal protection, began to outsell rifles, which have been typically used in hunting.
Embedded in the 306-page document was another statistic that law enforcement officials find especially troubling. The police recovered 19,344 privately manufactured firearms, untraceable homemade weapons known as “ghost guns,” in 2021, a tenfold increase since 2016. Law enforcement officials say that has contributed to the surge in gun-related killings, especially in California, where ghost guns make up as many as half of weapons recovered at crime scenes.
The numbers released Tuesday revealed an industry on the rise, with annual domestic gun production increasing from 3.9 million in 2000 to 11.3 million in 2020. A relatively small percentage of guns produced domestically are exported overseas, so those numbers are an accurate reflection of gun-buying habits, according to ATF officials.
Currently, there are around 400 million guns in the United States, according to a 2018 survey conducted by the nonpartisan Small Arms Survey, which monitors gun ownership.
The statistics, culled by ATF’S research division from industry, academic and government experts, offered few major surprises. Many of the broader contours and conclusions have been widely known through other sources or anecdotally for months, even years.
While Democrats have failed at their larger agenda of limiting easy access to firearms, especially semiautomatic rifles, they are succeeding in gradually pulling back an informational blackout curtain that has obscured gun commerce data since George W. Bush’s administration.
A year ago, President Biden ordered the ATF, an undersized agency with the oversized task of enforcing the nation’s gun laws and regulations, to collect and analyze 20 years of gun data after a series of mass shootings around the country.
In the introduction to the report, Gary M. Restaino, the bureau’s interim director, wrote that the purpose of releasing the data was to “prevent diversion of these firearms from the legal to the illegal market.”
During a White House summit about reducing violence on Tuesday, the deputy attorney general, Lisa O. Monaco, underlined a similar point, saying, “We can only address the current rise in violence if we have the best available information and use the most effective tools and research to fuel our efforts.”
Her remarks came on the same day Biden traveled to Buffalo to visit the scene of the racially motivated shooting on Saturday.