World's Top Arms Exporters Visualized

China both imports and exports if I read correctly.

Wow, top 6 importers were surprising: India UAE Saudi Arabia China Pakistan Azerbaijan

Thank you for the great visualizations! Here some ideas:

Personally, I would be interested in sensitivities instead of absolute values to capture trends. Say,

    * the rate of change of CO2 production per country
    * ...sensitivities of your given interactions

or

    * money invested in reforestation
    * change of healthcare expenses per country over time...
    * expenses for "bio" products vs. "discount"/fast food

Thanks again, and have fun! :-)

Target practice plus bird hunting, which can use a lot of shotshells with little to show for it if you're not so good at it like me ^_^. I don't think most other forms of hunting use that very many rounds.

US civilian production is between 13-14 billion rounds per year (military production at Lake City, I don't know, but we get sold canceled orders and lots that fail milspec tests but are otherwise good ammo). Rimfire production alone is 3 billion. For some time a lot of that has been getting stored for ... a rainy day. And if you do the math that's only a bit more than 40 rounds/person/year.

But the number is still very very large. Heck, in one high school academic year on the JROTC rifle team I probably shot over 2,000 rounds of .22 LR (for every morning of practice, 3 sighting in shots plus 10 rounds each in two positions).

As for "saturation", yeah. In the last three years, the number of Missouri state issued concealed carry licenses (note any state's is good, and many are cheaper) in my county has almost doubled, to the point where 5% of the age eligible adults have one. And the 19-20 age range has only been eligible for about a year, while those getting them are largely the older, age and less ability to defend yourself + the Baby Boomers entering retirement age is a major driver.

42-3 states have "shall issue" concealed carry regimes, and California and Hawaii look to be following soon (it's being litigated, but some large population counties have already thrown in the towel); the Supremes could extend that to all states. In the last 4 years, Chicago went from nobody but the anointed being allowed to own handguns to shall issue concealed carry and more than a few incidents of legal self-defense with them.... Etc. etc.

> the deal was signed and not followed up on.

Yanukovich left the country (illegally, BTW), before the deal could even be followed upon. There wasn't anything for the parliament to do, but appoint an acting president and call for new elections.

> can you point to where it says that annexation began before Feb 21st (the earliest I can find it mention is March)?

Not in the article, no. But there are plenty of sources showing that. The Girkin interviews[1] or the Crimean annexation medal[2], among others.

> I would have to admit that it was EU membership, not NATO, in this case.

This is a big difference. Finland and Austria are both EU countries, but they've never been NATO members. EU is a political and economic union, not a military one. Russia's claim that Ukraine becoming a EU member poses a military threat to them is dishonest at best.

> and training and funding groups in the Ukraine, and having controlled the election process in Kiev (calling afoul when Russia performed the same in the Crimea)

What groups? There wasn't any paramilitary training or funding, contrary to what Russia would like us to believe. The West may have supported some NGOs, but that was perfectly legal (and acceptable) way of trying to sway the public opinion, as opposed to capturing the Crimean parliament building with commandos and herding the MPs into it in the middle of the night to force them to vote for a farce referendum[3][1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcCqrzctxH4

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medal_%22For_the_Return_of_Crim...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUH-A3IF3h0