The entire US civilian small arms industry is tiny. The largest publicly traded gun company has a stock market capitalization of about 0.05% of Apple. The entire gun industry has an annual revenue of only $70 billion, which doesn't even register as a significant line item in our $20 trillion GDP. Any political influence the industry has is more to do with cultural factors than with size.

I think there's a hint of truth in his supposition though. The gun lobby enjoys significant popular support from the general public who want to buy guns, but they also receive support from the gun industry that want to sell guns. The intersection of these two interests is protecting Americans' right to buy guns from American gun manufactures. In this, the gun lobby has been effective.

However the gun lobby has been generally ineffective and uncaring when it comes to protecting Americans' right to import guns from other countries. Collectors like importing guns, but American gun manufacturers have little interest in that. For instance, the NRA doesn't seem very upset about the Norinco ban, even 20+ years ago when the political/strategic situation between America and China was not on the minds of many. Another example is 922(r) compliance concerning domestic/foreign part counts; notorious among gun collectors as inane, arbitrary and pointless. Yet there doesn't seem to be much drive from the American gun lobby to get this fixed.

It takes very little money to buy your politicians. Tens of thousands of dollars to sway their opinion, a few hundred thousand to buy it outright. The gun companies own a lot of your politicians.

Which bulk of the aggregate number? The number 1 cause of gun deaths in the US is suicides.

He wants to talk about black on black crime. As opposed to white on white crime which is not talked about as separate issue. Because, most murder by large number are among people who know each other - are friends, family, do business. And those groups tend to have same race.

TIL that people think "black on black crime" has any meaning. I would have thought he wanted to talk about gang violence, which is probably #3 or #4 on the list of gun death causes, behind domestic violence and maybe accidents (with suicides eclipsing both of these).

That's an interesting point, so I did some digging. I'm using 2007 as the reference year, because I can't find any more up-to-date sources on domestic murder.

There were 18,361 total homicides in the US in 2007, 10,129 of which were committed with firearms.

There were 1,975 gang homicides in 2007, or ~10.8% of all homicides [1] I can't find anything contemporaneous, but a 1995 study said that 94%-96% of gang homicides used a firearm. Using the lower number, that would mean 1,857 of those were firearm homicides, or 18.3% of all firearm homicides.

There were 2,340 domestic murders in 2007 [2] (the header says female victims of domestic violence, but that stat is for both genders). [4] says that in 2002 54% of domestic violence homicides were carried out with a firearm, so that would be about 1,264 or ~12.4% of all firearm homicides.

Neither of those numbers is isolated to firearms; I couldn't find any studies specifically scoped to firearms. I also didn't dig very hard into how they get those numbers.

Estimates on accidental deaths put them at ~400 a year. [3]

CDC data for 2007 says there were ~17k suicides with firearms in 2007 (these aren't counted in the homicide numbers above).

Gang violence does seem like it has more firearm homicides than domestic violence, but not by a staggering margin, and it may have flipped since 2007.

1: https://nationalgangcenter.ojp.gov/survey-analysis/measuring... (scroll to the bottom, couldn't get a direct link)

2: https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/fvv.pdf

3: https://injepijournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40...

4: https://www.futureswithoutviolence.org/userfiles/file/Childr...

If you only care about the black lives ended by white cops, you might not care about black lives.

I think you're proving my point with this response. And if you don't see why, then maybe some deeper reflection is in order.