The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATFE, or ATF) has graced us with its annual report on firearms commerce in the United States, offering up an all-inclusive picture of the state of the gun industry through a series of tables, charts and graphs.
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Data lovers will find much to pore over here. For example, the report includes a section on the total number of firearms made in the United States from 1986 through 2015 (the last year for which data is available); the total number of gun exports from 1986 through 2015; gun imports from 1986 through 2016 broken down by firearm type, importation application type and country of origin; the total number of FFLs from 1975 through 2016; FFLs by state; actions taken on FFL applications; the complete number of NFA registered weapons by state and type—AOWs, machine guns, destructive devices, silencers, short-barreled rifles, short-barreled shotguns —through April 2017, and much, much more.
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We decided to take a look at short-barreled shotguns, which the ATF’s Firearms Commerce report defines as follows:
Short-barreled shotgun is defined as a shotgun having one or more barrels less than 18 inches in length, and any weapon made from a shotgun, whether by alteration, modification, or otherwise, if such weapon as modified has an overall length of less than 26 inches.
Here are the 10 states with the most registered short-barreled shotguns.
- California—13,675
- Pennsylvania—13,134
- Georgia—11,397
- Kansas—8,974
- Florida—8,710
- Virginia—8,389
- Texas—8,199
- New York—7,591
- Tennessee—6,029
- Ohio—6,002
Right now, there are 146,098 registered short-barreled shotguns in the United States. When the ATF released its annual firearms commerce report around this time last year, there were 140,474 registered short-barreled shotguns. The other categories of NFA registered weapons also increased in numbers from the 2016 report. All told, there are 5,203,489 NFA registered weapons as of April 2017. The 2016 report tallied 4,436,096 NFA registered weapons as of February 2016.
To read the full report, go to atf.gov.
