During my flu, I've been passing the time by watching the increasingly terrible Resident Evil movies. As I watch the heroine dispatch countless zombie hordes with a hail of gunfire, I thought to myself "There aren't enough bullets in the world for her to kill all these monsters."
But then I second guessed myself. There are, after all, only around 7.5 billion humans, and I seem to recall that back in World War II it took something like 250 bullets per person killed in that war.
A little investigation reveals that according to this 2012 press release from Oxfam, the world produced about 12 billion bullets per year at that time. I imagine the numbers haven't changed much, and since we're not using up 12 billion bullets a year (thank goodness), we can presume that there are more than enough bullets in the world to plug every one of us many times over.
You can't even really joke about this sort of thing. Why have we, as a species, chosen to expend so much time and effort into making bullets?
I wonder how many bullets humanity uses each year for legitimate purposes: target shooting, hunting, starter pistols? Even if we used up a billion bullets a year for non-lethal purposes, that still leaves billions of bullets piling up...in stockpiles, I guess? There must be giant bullet bins all over the planet.
The mind truly boggles. On the other hand, I guess I don't need to be so skeptical when I watch action heroes in the movies use up thousands of rounds in a couple of hours. Goodness knows there's no shortage.
