Forget the electronics, clothes, cars, and other stuff on sale for Black Friday last week. Americans wanted guns.
Breitbart News, citing data gathered by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, reported on Monday that the FBI conducted a record number of background checks for potential Black Friday gun purchases.
The feds did 214,913 National Instant Criminal Background Check System checks that day. That was 22,164 more than the previous record, which was set just last year, according to Breitbart.
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Overall, the NSSF data indicated that almost 681,000 background checks related to firearms sales were done during the entire week of Black Friday.
The 11.5% spike in background checks year-over-year for 2023 was the biggest Black Friday jump in recent years.
NICS queries in 2021 were up just one-half of 1% over 2020, and increased just 2.8% in 2022 over the year prior.
Breitbart noted that the numbers don’t necessarily reflect the total of guns actually sold.
The NICS checks “conducted on Black Friday do not translate into a precise number of guns sold, as background checks are conducted on the buyer of firearms rather than the firearms themselves. And a would-be purchaser who passes a background check can then buy multiple guns,” Breitbart noted.
“This means the 214,913 NICS checks could mean 214,913 guns were sold on Black Friday or, if every buyer bought two firearms, it could mean that 429,826 guns were sold.”
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The news about possible Black Friday gun sales comes just days after a new NBC News poll revealed how much gun ownership has skyrocketed in recent years.
NBC News found that 52% of Americans claimed that they or someone in their household owned a gun, which was the highest ratio since NBC first began asking the question in 1999.
An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll in 2019 pegged that number at 46%, while in 2013 it was 42%.
“In the last ten years, we’ve grown [10 points] in gun ownership. That’s a very stunning number,” Public Opinion Strategies pollster Micah Roberts told NBC News. “By and large, things don’t change that dramatically that quickly when it comes to something as fundamental as whether you own a gun.”
Republicans are far more likely to own guns than Democrats, the poll noted.
Yet gun ownership has grown equally among Republicans and Democrats in recent years, up by 11 percentage points in each party over the past decade, the poll showed. The share of GP members who were gun owners rose from 55% to 66% since 2013, while among Democrats that number increased from 30% to 41%.
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