The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives reports that 64,747 licensed gun dealers (defined here as gun shops, pawnbrokers, or individual sellers) existed in the U.S. as of December 2015. But that raw number alone might not mean much to you. So a new mapping project by data viz company 1point21 Interactive tries to contextualize this number by comparing it to something all Americans know exists in abundance: Starbucks.
Looking at the Federal Firearms License data, the first question I asked myself was, Is that a lotit sounds like a lot? Brian Beltz, who helped put the project together, tells CityLab. That's why we chose to compare it to something that everyone knows and has a reputation of being on every corner.
In their analysis, Beltz and colleagues found that there were six gun dealers in the U.S for every Starbucks (of which there are 10,843, according to 2013 data). Gun sellers also outnumber grocery stores (37,716 in 2014), McDonalds (14,350 in 2014), and total coffee shops (55,246 in 2016) in the U.S. If gun collectors, manufacturers, and importers were all counted as gun dealers, the total number balloons to 138,659far more than, say, the number of public schools in the country (98,328 in 2011-12).
