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The Old Dominion can list another category in which it leads the United States: machine guns. Virginia is home to more than 30,000 legally registered, fully automatic machine guns, the most of any state in the country. In fact, there is one legal machine gun for every 267 Virginians.

Virginia’s machine-gun collection isn’t that much larger than Florida’s or California’s, but those states—which are second and third in total number of machine guns—have far larger populations. The statistics were compiled by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and reported by The Roanoke Times.

The ATF cited privacy concerns in declining to break down the geographic distribution and types of machine guns, but according to the Times, the abundance of the weapons does not pose a safety threat. Some are owned by police departments, the rest are antique weapons owned by private collectors, who pay $200 per gun and undergo a far more rigorous screening process. People who want to buy machine guns must submit photographs and fingerprints to an ATF database.

And machine guns for private ownership can also be incredibly expensive, thanks to the National Firearms Act. Under that law, machine guns manufactured or imported after 1986 cannot be owned by civilians. As a result, the supply of machine guns is limited, thus driving prices to $10,000 or more.

But just why do so many Virginia residents own machine guns. According to people The Roanoke Times interviewed, they’re tons of fun:

“They are a blast to shoot,” said Philip Van Cleave, president of the pro-gun Virginia Citizens Defense League.

“They are a hell of a lot of fun. Shooting a gun is fun anyway, and this just magnifies it.”

Gun clubs often hold machine gun shoots in rural locations, with participants pumping loads of lead into targets with a single pull of the trigger.

“Fun for the Entire Family,” read a flier for one such event in the Roanoke Valley.

Sounds like a real blast. Get it?