As of September 2024, there are an estimated 398.5 million firearms in the U.S.—that's more guns than the country's entire population. However, there are only about 7.5 million registered firearms in the country, according to the latest report from the Department of Justice. In 1934, Congress ratified the National Firearms Act, legislation requiring that guns be registered and taxed. On the surface, the act's goal was to take a cut of the money the burgeoning industry was bringing in. But there was also a secondary motive: to restrict the sale of guns—and potentially limit the number of guns being used in crimes—by charging gun buyers a $200 fee.
In the decades since then, the NFA has essentially remained unchanged. Many still look to it as a way for the United States to regulate how many guns make it to the market and into citizens' hands.
While the NFA's creators undoubtedly designed it to check on the gun industry's growth, it has failed to do so. This is partly because the $200 tax has never gone up, and while that fee was once prohibitive, many people can afford the one-time payment today. The significance of the gun industry, fueled by an ever-increasing demand for guns, has only intensified in the decades since Congress ratified the act.
In 2020, the most recent year with available data, 11.3 million firearms were produced within the U.S. Firearm imports have also increased—in 2021, America imported a record-breaking $1.19 billion worth of handguns, a roughly 37% increase from the year before. More recently, the Mexican government filed a $10 billion lawsuit against U.S. gun manufacturers in January 2024, claiming that the "flood" of illegal guns across the border fueling cartel violence is a deliberate business strategy by American gunmakers. Though companies like Glock, Smith & Wesson, and Beretta have launched a bid to stop the case—a bid that the Supreme Court will consider in their next term, which starts October 2024—the ongoing case reflects the role America's gun industry plays in violent crime and militarization across the globe.
Gun ownership and industry, like gun culture itself, vary. The degree to which the gun industry is entrenched in a given state is not merely a matter of how many firearms people purchase. It also has to do with the number of dealers and if manufacturing occurs in the state.
Stacker analyzed firearms commerce data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to rank states based on their total number of tax-paying occupational entities related to the manufacturing and distribution of firearms. In short, this data allows us to see which states have the most gun owners and largest gun industries.
Read on to see where your state falls in the rankings.
