PLA (Chinese Army) - ~3 million men
Indian Army - 1.8 million men
In order to top that we'd have had to purchase 1.6 million guns in one month (the article cites a 3-month period).
From the article: Law abiding US citizens bought on average 3,177,256 guns every 3 months in 2008.
So it wasn't quite true in 2008 (but not off by much). At least through the FBI sources:
This is an evaluation of overall firearms and ammunition purchases based on low end numbers per Federal NIC instacheck data base Statistics. The numbers presented are only PART of the overall numbers of arms and ammunition that have been sold. The actual numbers are much higher.
So, well...it's probably pretty accurate, especially given the increased rate of sale since last November. Of course, not every Chinese soldier would be happy with that little .22 single-shot I bought...
So if the average joe can shoot 1,000 rounds of 223 ammo in a afternoon, how much then is a LIFETIME supply?