If you’re in need of a gun, you won’t lack a place to find one in Maine. In fact, out of all the states, Maine has the 12th highest number of federally licensed gun dealers per resident.

A federal firearms license is basically when the government gives you permission to sell guns and ammo. Basically.

It covers places like pawn shops, Wal-Mart, gun stores and antiques dealers who sell historical firearms. Here’s a list of the different classes of license holders.

The website Outdoor Hub ranked all the states by the number of licensees. It also noted the population rank for each state.

Here’s what those data look like (courtesy of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives):

But that doesn’t really tell you a whole lot. Nine hundred seventy eight firearms licensees seems low in this context. Conversely, it also seems like a lot when you consider that there are only 58 McDonald’s restaurants in the state, according to this 2006 analysis. Just look at Texas. It has 10,829 licensees.But Texas also has the country’s second-highest population among the 50 states.

So here’s a chart that shows all the federal firearms licensees per capita. I divided each state’s number of firearms licensees by its total population.

By this measure, Maine has the 12th most licensees per capita in the country.

New Hampshire and Vermont both have more, and Wyoming, Montana and Alaska top the list.

Dan MacLeod is the executive editor of the Bangor Daily News. He's an Orland native who now lives in Unity. He's been a journalist since 2008, and previously worked for the New York Post and the Brooklyn...

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