8 million firearm background checks in the past 6 months
gun sales continue to rise, with april marking the sixth consecutive month of big increases in use of the fbi's national instant background check system. since some attribute rising gun sales to fears of gun control, i wanted to know how much sales have risen since president obama was elected in november.
firearms sales are seasonal, typically peaking in december and bottoming out around may. since i was interested in the post-election period, i plotted sales from november to april of each year since the nics system came online.
there were about 8.1 million background checks from november 2008 to april 2009, an increase of 29 percent over the previous period from november 2007 to april 2008. this was by far the largest increase of the past decade, though i can't really tell whether it was due to president obama's election, a deepening recession, or some other factor.background checks are closely but imperfectly related to gun sales, since some checks never result in a purchase and others result in multiple purchases. nevertheless, the sheer number of nics checks is impressive, if not astounding. in a nation of 218 million adults, i count 8,097,100 background checks in the past six months alone.
how can that figure be correct? i know that not every check represents a single individual, but i'm still having trouble getting my head around the idea of 8 million in just 6 months. it would be as if every single adult resident of wyoming, vermont, north dakota, south dakota, alaska, delaware, montana, rhode island, hawaii, new hampshire, and maine all walked into bill's gun shop to plunk down five hundred bucks for a glock 19. i wonder what the next six months will bring...
posted by christopher uggen @ 5:45 PM
6 comments
6 Comments:
Background checks are very important, especially when it comes to public safety. I think that the sale of guns increased by so much because of the election. I know the cost of ammo has skyrocketed due to the new President. People are worried that they might not be able to buy it in the near future.
For what it is worth (anecdotely), police cuts in Cincinnati have led some to the gun store - one for the recession I suppose...
A personal experience I had with background checks was when a friend of mine found a flyer on his car windshield for pressure washing. What he didn't know was that in Central Florida, flyers for that same pressure-washing service were a front for a burglar. Sadly, he and his wife were later burglarized. In retrospect, if the victims had simply gotten identification and run a simple criminal background check before hiring the young man in the t-shirt, they would have discovered he had a history of burglaries. It is probable that just asking for identification would have chased him off.
One possible explanation is that some states have been trying to beef up existing gun laws, by requiring background checks at gun shows, and for private party sales (which can account for a very large portion of gun sales). I don’t know enough about each of the states laws to comment, but it may be worth looking into gun laws in the more populous states to see if anything has changed. The best background checks will probably minimize this.
Another point I would like to make, is that, looking at the graph, since the 2003/04 period, background checks have been increasing exponentially. 2007/08 is the one time period that seems out of place with growth smaller than would be predicted by the trend of the years before this. It would be just as interesting, in my mind, to find out why check were so low that year.
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, if the victims had simply gotten identification and run a simple criminal background check before hiring the young man in the t-shirt, they would have discovered he had a history of burglaries. It is probable that just asking for identification would have chased him off.
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