Maine’s got about as many guns as a foreign country 24 times its size

All 50 States Renamed For Countries With Similar Gun Ownership By Movoto Real Estate

In a map that has since been picked up and distributed across a range of websites and social media, the real estate site Movoto earlier this year compared the approximate number of guns owned in each state with a similarly stocked foreign country.

The Movoto analysis isn’t perfect — the website researchers used the estimate of 270 million guns nationwide listed in a 2007 study, did the math to determine that’s an average of about .88 guns per person, then applied that ratio to each state’s 2010 population to reach an educated guess for how many guns are in each state.

Of course, gun ownership rates are probably not the same across all 50 states. And a lot of time has passed since 2007 and 2010, respectively, and it’s likely there are more guns in America in 2015 than there were in 2007.

It’s actually almost impossible to know how many guns there are in circulation. In Maine, neither licensed dealers nor private purchasers are required to report the transactions, and who knows how many rifles have been handed down from hunters to their children over the years?

The state long required residents seeking to carry concealed weapons to get permits to do so — the Legislature threw out that requirement in the most recent session — but those numbers only provided a glimpse of a certain slice of the gun-owning population.

But given all those qualifiers, Movoto estimated Maine is home to about 1,179,585 small arms.

That puts the state on par with Uzbekistan, a country in Central Asia with more than 31 million people — about 24 times as many people as Maine. (Uzbekistan is about five times as large as Maine in terms of square mileage.)

Movoto estimates that California has about 33 million guns spread out across the state’s 37 million residents, a firearm count that places it most closely in the neighborhood of China, which in comparison has more than 1.3 billion people.

Gunpowder ignites as Karen Moffett fires her flintlock rifle during one of the Penobscot Longrifles monthly shoots. (BDN file photo by Gabor Degre)

Gunpowder ignites as Karen Moffett fires her flintlock rifle during one of the Penobscot Longrifles monthly shoots. (BDN file photo by Gabor Degre)