This looks like a close match to @mordecaiB 's points, but not sure it’s the same source he got the numbers from:
In terms of the numbers you’ve mentioned @SenorBeef , that sounds more like this one:
Which is probably a bit misleading, in that it compares total rounds produced vs kills, which leaves out training, stockpiles, ‘slippage’, destroyed or lost in shipment, etc. A useful quote from the second article -
For the four fiscal years 2002-2005, the military’s small-arms ammunition “requirements” totaled nearly 5.6 billion rounds. With approximately 3.6 billion being added during the next two years, the total for fiscal years 2002-2007 comes to about 9.2 billion rounds. If we assume that U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq have killed 50,000 people with small-arms fire (a high estimate, I suspect), then they have needed, for training plus actual fighting, 184,000 bullets per person killed. If they have killed only 30,000 in this way, then the figure rises to almost 307,000 bullets per person shot dead, which is roughly equal to the estimate Pike ventured two years ago before he decided to “round that down to 250,000 so that we are underestimating.”
So it depends upon how you count. And it also doesn’t include the fact that many of the small arms calibers are ALSO used in vehicle mounted anti-personnel weapons specifically for suppressing fire, rather than soldiers using direct fire. So, yeah, a complicated subject.
Either way, that’s a lot of bullets expended that end up being part of the landscape. I guess we’re lucky nobody ever invented bullets that were meant to explode on impact. Just think of all the places in the world that are still finding unexploded bombs or land mines and add all the unexploded bullets to that. Nobody would be able to walk around without popping off a toe.