Underestimating the danger

The left is trying to pick a fight where they have underestimated their foe.

According to the US census, Florida has a population of 20.6 million. 20 percent of that population is under the age of 18, meaning that there are 16.45 million adults living in Florida. There are 7.4 million households in the state of Florida, equaling an average of 2.1 adults in each household.

According to the Department of Agriculture (the state agency that issues CWPs), there are over 2.1 million non-law enforcement citizens in Florida who can legally carry a firearm. (pdf warning) That means that, on average, 27 percent of Florida households contain at least one permitted firearm carrier.

Just in the past 20 years, over 42 million rifles have been manufactured. Between 20 and 50% of all rifles manufactured in the USA are AR-15 pattern rifles, including all of the variants like the AR-10, and all of the miscellaneous caliber variations. This means that there are somewhere around 20 million or more weapons that would be subject to any sort of so-called "assault weapons" ban.

There have been more than 320 million NICS checks done since the system was set up 20 years ago. This means that there are more than 650 million firearms in this country. Each year, Americans are busy buying 27 million firearms and 10-12 BILLION rounds of ammunition a year. To put that in perspective, that is more ammunition than  was used by the entire US military during each year of World War 2, when the average was just over 10 billion rounds a year.

What all of this means is that, outside of the major antigun metroplexes of NYC, Boston, Baltimore, San Francisco, and LA, more than half of households have at least one firearm, and more than a quarter of them own at least one "assault weapon."

If even one percent of the gun owning public decides to respond in kind to being called an enemy of the people, there will be somewhere around 1.5 million people who are armed, pissed off, and know how to shoot. They will not be lined up in neat ranks out in a field somewhere, just waiting for you to nuke them.

The US police cannot even begin to control the gang problem in our inner cities, and the membership of those gangs is only around 800,000 or so. This is a fight that cannot be won, but they don't care, because liberals are not the ones who will be getting killed. Or so they think. That is dangerous thinking indeed. The people of each who are the least stable will be the ones who decide when the violence begins and how far it goes.