Usually we think of Black Friday shopping excesses in terms of deep discounts at Walmart, Best-Buy, and other similar stores.
Few of us would think of Black Friday as being a special day to shop at one’s local gun store, and our own informal checking revealed little or nothing in the way of Black Friday special deals at local gun stores in Washington.
But, special deals or not, the day after Thanksgiving this year (called ‘Black Friday’ because traditionally it represents the point in the year where retailers have finally covered their year’s expenses, shifting from the ‘red’ into the ‘black’) probably saw a huge increase in gun sales, with the number of FBI/NICS background checks called in by gun dealers on behalf of customers intending to buy guns soaring 32% above the previous busiest single day since records began.
This year saw 129,166 NICS checks on Black Friday. The previous busiest day, since the NICS system was instituted in November 1998, was Black Friday of 2008, with the last two months of 2008 being two of the three busiest months of all time (perhaps due to the outcome of the 2008 elections earlier in November).
It is unclear exactly how many gun sales are represented by the NICS checks. On the one hand, the FBI only counts each call in to its center, and sometimes (if a customer is buying more than one gun at the same time) a single call can represent more than one gun sold. On the other hand, sometimes NICS checks are required for ‘administrative’ purposes such as perhaps part of a state’s check when issuing a concealed weapon permit, or a gun being transferred between two people, through an official dealer, and as such it is not so much a new gun sale as it is a swap in ownership between one person and another.
A leading industry group, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, generally adjusts the NICS numbers considerably down to arrive at what it estimates to be net new gun sales numbers. But treat the raw NICS numbers any way you wish, and the fact remains clear that Black Friday this year probably saw more new guns sold than any other day since records started being kept.
NICS checks for the entire month of November closed 16.5% up on the same month in 2010, meaning that already, for the first eleven months of 2011, more NICS checks (and therefore, presumably more gun sales) have occurred than in all of 2010. This will make 2011 the ninth year in a row in which more checks/guns sold occurred than in the previous year. With an estimated total checks for 2011 somewhere greater than 16 million, this is nearly twice as many checks as was the case in 2002, the base year from which each following year has seen an increase.
Gun supporters suggest that this steady growth in firearms sold and owned, and the massive increase in states allowing concealed carry, is a major factor in explaining the similar significant drops in violent crime statistics. Violent crime dropped a massive 5.5% in 2010, 5.3% in 2009, and lesser amounts in almost every previous year, even though our population as a whole continues to steadily increase. In the period 1993 – 2010, violent crime has almost halved.
Here are the FBI’s month by month statistics on NICS calls.