[quote=Pepperm1nts]
I think you're severely underestimating the lack of resources/materials that comes with literally everything being torched by nuclear fire, and then deteriorating over 200 years. You're also probably overestimating how smart the average wastelander would be considering very few of them would have access to even the simplest form of education. I think it is safe to say the games have a lot of guns only because it'd be boring otherwise. Realistically, there wouldn't be much to go around.
[/quote]

Let's be generous to your perspective and assume that at the Great War's beginning, the United States had the same level of gun ownership and same population that it does in the current day. Today's America has ninety privately owned small firearms for every hundred people. When you combine together military equipment, large firearms and the logical drastic increase in the number of both military and private firearms in Fallout's Pre-War America, you're left with (at the very least) more guns than people. Being that guns don't need to be fed or watered, and can't suffer from radiation poisoning, we can assume that more people were destroyed during the Great War in America than guns. Since firearms are an extremely valuable commodity in a post-apocalyptic world, it can be reasonably assumed that care was taken to preserve them by the earliest of the post-war societies that were established (as well as by independent individuals who happened to not be stupid).

In all likelihood, the amount of guns per capita in Fallout's post nuclear war America would be [i]drastically[/i] higher than in real world America today. Real world America today doesn't exactly have a shortage, so I'm going to go out on a limb and say that guns aren't exactly exotic commodities in our Washington wasteland.