If Black Friday shopping trends are any indication, the gift of cold, hard steel will be more popular than ever this holiday season. According to USA Today, on that day dealers called the FBI with a total of 154,873 background check requests for shoppers seeking to buy firearms. That’s 20 percent more than last year’s record of 129,166 calls in one day. Sixty-two percent of the Black Friday requests were for long guns like shotguns or rifles, such as the Bushmaster .223 reportedly used by the suspect in today’s shooting in Newtown, Connecticut (a state where you don’t need a permit to carry a rifle).
The FBI doesn’t keep track of guns sold—only the background requests it fields—but that number is almost certainly higher than the number of calls received, given that consumers can buy more than one firearm per request. Overall, background requests have jumped 32 percent since 2008 (PDF). As Bloomberg Businessweek pointed out, gun manufacturer Smith & Wesson reported a record number of sales for their last quarter, up nearly 50 percent from the year before. The rise in gun sales doesn’t necessarily mean that there are more first-time gun owners, though: A CNN investigation in July showed that fewer people own more and more weapons.
Gun purchases always rise as the holidays approach. This year, though, the Christmas rush might not be the only thing prompting people to buy firearms. In the weeks after President Obama won a second term, background checks spiked, just as they had after he was elected back in 2008. In a New York Times op-ed about this, columnist Charles M. Blow quoted a National Rifle Association spokesperson who said that “gun sales are undoubtedly going up because gun owners know that at best President Obama wants to make guns and ammunition more expensive through increased taxes and regulation, and at worst he wants to make them totally illegal.”
Gun enthusiasts like to say that possessing a firearm is a way for civilians to step in and prevent tragic shootings. But when Mother Jones‘ Mark Follman analyzed data about mass shootings during the last 30 years, he couldn’t find a single instance of an armed civilian saving the day. In fact, when civilians attempted to intervene, they were often wounded or killed.
