March 2018 was the busiest March on record for NICS firearm background checks, and the third highest monthly total ever. Only the monthly totals for December 2015 and 2016 were higher, though December checks are usually the highest. Note that NICS checks include not only background checks for purchasing new guns, but also for concealed handgun permits and for gun transfers in many states. …
Gun control advocates live in a media bubble. After Lois Becket wrote a story in the Guardian that focuses on how gun sales for one company have fallen, the Washington Post’s Christopher Ingraham followed up, thinking that anything showing that gun sales are down as great news. While it might be tempting to look at the sales of one or two publicly traded companies, the firearm industry has a large number of very small firms, and looking at one or two companies (even if larger than others) may not give a very good measure of total sales. …
A new report from the BATF points out that Federally Licensed Gun Dealers had 6,163 firearms stolen from them in 2015. With the Obama administration finalizing a new rule to enhance dealer reporting of stolen or lost firearms, this BATF report allows us to investigate the size of the current stolen or lost firearm problem for dealers and to compare those rates to other retail outlets. …
Click on table to enlarge picture. Original source available here. That is about a 10 percent increase over the previous highest year, 2013.
…Click on figure to enlarge
For the last six months, NICS background checks have been setting a records. On Black Friday, there were 185,345 NICS checks, over 8,000 more than the previous record of 177,170 set on December 21, 2012. The previous Black Friday record was last year and it was 175,754.…
John Lott’s letter to the editor at USA Today can be found here.
Original Post: USA Today repeats what is a popular claim, that gun sales are driven by pushes for gun control. Even when a spike in sales occurs after a shooting, there are two possibilities: 1) that they are worried about more gun control or 2) that people are more convinced that they have to defend themselves. …
A news article in the Washington Times:
…. . . The biggest change in production has come under President Obama. From 2001 to 2007, gun production held steady at between 3 million and 4 million units a year. It topped 4 million in 2008 but shot to 5.6 million in 2009, held steady in 2010 and then spiked to 8.6 million guns in 2012 and a record 10.8 million in 2013, according to ATF data.
You can compare these adjusted numbers to the official NICS numbers.
This adjustment is significant — the NICS numbers are 42.6% higher in 2013 than these adjusted numbers. But the numbers show similar changes in gun ownership over time. The adjusted numbers show a 64.5% surge in gun sales from 2008 to 2013, while the NICS numbers show a 65.9% change.…
The audio of the interview that I did with George Noory is available here.
Click on table to enlarge it.
Gun sales on path for near record sales, Ferguson stories might be helping increase, but sales were already high for the year
The FBI NICS checks are on path for near record sales — probably hitting near 21 million this year.…
