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). (Read more…)
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.
[VIA MoJo Blogs and Articles | Mother Jones]
