Obama Is Indeed Gun Salesman Of The Year

Obama Is Indeed Gun Salesman Of The Year

Maybe of the century. This report from the April 22, 2009 Ammoland (a gun industry newsletter) is startling:

Law abiding US citizens bought on average 3,177,256 guns every 3 months in 2008.
In just 3 months Americans bought enough guns to outfit the entire Chinese and Indian army’s combined.
You also bought 1,529,635,000 rounds of ammunition in just the month of December 2008. Yeah that is right, that is Billion with a “B”.
This is an evaluation of overall firearms and ammunition purchases based on low end numbers per Federal NIC instacheck data base. The numbers presented are only PART of the overall numbers of arms and ammunition that have been sold. The actual numbers are much higher.

I think what they mean that is that Americans bought more than three million guns in the last quarter of 2008. (And of course, those are guns being sold through licensed dealers. I would expect that there were some private party sales going on as well.) And more than 1.5 billion rounds of ammo in a single month? Impressive.

I wasn't clear on the source of those numbers, so I found the FBI's National Instant Background Check system statistics by state for the first quarter of 2009. They total by state, but not for all combined. Assuming that I didn't make any typing mistakes when entering them in the calculator, the total for the first three months of the year is 3,812,546.

Now, this is the total of background checks performed. It includes those who were denied purchases--but over a little more than ten years, there have been a bit more than 700,000 denials--out of about 99 million checks run. That's about 0.7% of the checks have led to denials. Assuming a similar denial rate in the first quarter of 2009, that still means about 3.79 million approved purchases--or more than one gun purchased for every hundred Americans in three months alone.

Some of those are unquestionably used gun purchases, and some are redemption of pawned guns, but still, it seems likely that most are new guns. Americans are arming themselves to the teeth. It isn't because the economy is doing so well that Americans feel like buying recreational toys.

UPDATE: A reader points out that if you are buying more than gun at a time, that's a single background check. I'm sure that the majority (perhaps even vast majority) of these background checks are for a single firearm purchase--but there are certainly people who bought more than firearm at a time. Consider this number the absolute minimum number of firearms purchased.

It also occurred to me while I was out for a walk that the percentage of transactions involving used guns may be higher than normal. Guns are among the most liquid of assets when you lose your job--and a lot of people are in that boat recently.