- There are 20 million AR-style weapons in circulation in the US, according to the
NSSF . - They're part of a total 393 million
guns owned by US civilians, more than the American population.
Around 19.8 million
The more recent estimate comes from a November 2020 statement by the National Shooting Sports Foundation. In the statement, its President and CEO Joseph Bartozzi called the AR-15 the "most popular rifle sold in America" and a "commonly-owned firearm."
The debate over gun ownership and the public sale of AR-15-style weapons has intensified after the killing of 19 children and two adults in an elementary school shooting last week in Uvalde, Texas.
The gunman carried an AR-15 variant during the attack, and the semi-automatic weapon type has been used in other high-profile shootings and incidents, such as the massacre in Buffalo and in the case of Kyle Rittenhouse, who was acquitted in November after fatally shooting two people and injuring a third.
Statistics show that the number of AR-15s owned by the American public has increased dramatically in the last two decades.
There were around 8.5 million AR-platform rifles in circulation in the US before 1994, when the weapons were prohibited under a federal assault weapons ban, per the Associated Press.
The bill, signed by then-President Bill Clinton, only applied to assault weapons manufactured after the law was enacted.
During the 10-year ban, many AR-style weapons were still legally used because they could be heavily modified so they wouldn't fall under the bill, and the number of such rifles in circulation stayed the same, according to the AP.
After the ban expired in 2004, the net import and manufacturing of AR-15 style weapons jumped from 314,000 that year to more than 1 million in 2009, according to the latest firearms production report by the NSSF.
The production rate has consistently stayed above 1 million per year since 2012, and surpassed 2.2 million rifles per year in 2013 and 2016.
An average of 4.14 million guns were manufactured every year between 1990 and 1999. And an average of 3.7 million were manufactured annually between 2000 and 2009, according to the 2021 Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives report by the Department of Justice. That annual average jumped to 8.57 million per year from 2010 to 2019, according to the ATF.
US consumers own around 393 million firearms, both legal and illegal, according to 2018 data from the Small Arms Survey, a Swiss-based project from the Geneva Graduate Institute. That means there are more guns than people in the US.
Of that total, around 741,000 are fully automatic machine guns registered in the US, up from almost 457,000 in 2010, per ATF reports.
A November 2020 Gallup poll found that 44% of Americans said they live in households with guns. That would mean that of the 122 million households in the US, the hundreds of millions of firearms owned by Americans are spread among 53.7 million households.