counting gunsmiths today

[Clayton E. Cramer]

As part of my current book writing project, I would like to be able to compare the percentage of the population that are gunsmiths today with the percentage that were gunsmiths in the early Republic.  There are some problems with this: gunsmith has a somewhat different meaning today than it did back then.  Gunsmith included everything from a guy who did repairs, someone who made just gun parts (a stock, a barrel, lockwork), someone who assembled parts into complete guns, all the way to what we would recognize as a modern manufacturer, who made the whole gun.  Therefore, to get a fair comparison, I would need to know all the gun manufacturers in the U.S. (1,841 in year 2001, based on manufacturer licenses at http://www.atf.gov/pub/fire-explo_pub/firearmscommerce/firearmscommerce.pdf), as well as what we today call a gunsmith.    My understanding is that gunsmiths are licensed by BATF, and I get the impression that this license is different from a dealer license or a manufacturer license.  From looking through their reports, however, I can't find any such distinction in their tables of counts.  Does anyone have any ideas on how I might be able to locate this count?