How do you get $100,000? If 30% of households own guns, that's about 37 million gun-owning households. If there are 300 million guns, that's about 8 guns per gun-owning household. If that's $100,000, that means a gun is worth on average $12,500. I'm hardly an expert on guns but that seems about an order of magnitude too high from what I do know.

This was in reference to a statistic about who's buying newly manufactured "assault weapons", particularly the mass quantities of AR-15 pattern rifles and the like that have been selling like hot cakes since the 2008 election.

It insisted that only us "gun nuts", not e.g. the large number of households that only have one or two guns for self-protection, were buying almost all of these new guns; to review and improve my estimate we'd have to find that particular statistic/study.

I see. Is there some context in the gun world that I'm missing out on? Since the comment you replied to said nothing about AR-15s or indeed anything beyond the number of gun-owning households and number of guns overall changing over the years.

The economics of firearms look a lot more like ham radio where a lifetime of "trading up" and selling for about the cost of purchase result in some interesting statistics, for older people anyway. Very few 20 year old kids have a $10K gadget, however, 60 year olds are another story.

Also there are occasional rashes of criminals with phone # to address database access surveying people for firearm and jewelry ownership. Even "innocent" corporate or written/mailed survey data can be assumed to be entered in a computer and that means it is only a matter of when, not if, it'll be stolen/hacked. So if someone has no need to know whats in my safe (aka, absolutely everyone other than immediate family members) then the only intelligent answer about the contents of my safe is no, I own no guns, no collectible coins, no jewelry, and I keep no cash on hand other than $20 in my wallet, and I have no idea why I'd ever tell anyone any other response.