Your last statistic ... isn't so useful, I haven't heard of Bloods and Crips laying down suppressive fire with General Purpose Machine Guns ^_^!

Even going to, say, the statistic I read some time ago of police hitting about 1 in 4 times they fired isn't so useful, because this I take this to be a metric of shooting incidents, in which multiple gun shots were probably fired.

To clarify, I doubt gang members in LA are firing hundreds of thousands of rounds... but I also doubt they're only firing at live targets and hitting as high as half of them. There's a reason they have reputations for "pray and spray".

> Given that the US military uses up 250k rounds per killed insurgent

I'm willing to bet that average engagement ranges in street violence in the US are closer, and the involved parties less effective at using cover and concealment, than is usually the case in battles between professional modern military forces and insurgent groups that still exist after several years of ongoing combat with professional modern military forces. Also, the weapons used are different.

So, generally, I wouldn't use statistics for the latter as a yardstick for evaluating shots/victim ratios for the former.

The US military kills people with high powered machine guns, uses tactics like suppressive fire, trains constantly with live ammunition, etc. I'm not the comparison is very relevant.