We reported in early August how the nearly six-year-long streak of firearms sales above 1 million had finally come to an end. Many in the anti-gun camp even hailed the decrease as being a positive first step.
However, August sales jumped back up above the 1-million mark, with the National Shooting Sports Foundation-adjusted National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) figure of 1,091,342. Most recently, figures from September show that the new monthly 1-million-plus streak has been extended.
According to the NSSF, the September 2025 NSSF-adjusted NICS figure of 1,179,424 is an increase of 2 percent compared to the September 2024 number and also an increase over the previous month.
The third quarter NSSF-adjusted NICS figure of 3,249,497 reflects a decrease of 5.7 percent as compared to the third quarter 2024 figure of 3,432,008. Still, Mark Oliva, managing director of public affairs for the NSSF, said the 1-million plus number is a good sign.
“September’s adjusted NICS figure of over 1.1 million background checks for the sale of a firearm is encouraging and reflects a steady interest by law-abiding Americans to exercise their Second Amendment rights,” Oliva said. “September is also the beginning of many hunting seasons across the nation and the firearm industry typically sees background checks for retail firearm sales increase during these months, as hunters go afield and want to take with them the latest in firearms to harvest clean protein for their tables. It is a matter of pride to those in our industry that Americans from all walks of life trust their safety and their treasured pastimes to the products our industry provides.”
According to the NSSF, the Top-5 States for Adjusted NICS checks were Texas, Florida, California, Pennsylvania and Colorado. For handgun NICS checks, the Top-5 were Texas, Florida, California, Pennsylvania and Tennessee, while Texas, California, Pennsylvania, Florida and Tennessee topped checks long guns.
Though not a direct correlation to firearms sales, the NSSF-adjusted NICS data provide an additional picture of current market conditions. In addition to other purposes, NICS is used to verify transactions for the sale or transfer of new or used firearms.
Notably, more than half the states—28 to be exact—have at least one qualified alternative permit, which, under the Brady Act, allows the permit holder, who has undergone a background check to obtain the permit, to purchase a firearm from a licensed dealer without a separate additional background check for that transfer. The number of NICS checks in these states does not include these legal transfers based on qualifying permits, so the real number of gun sales is likely much higher.
The adjusted NICS data are derived by subtracting out NICS purpose code permit checks and permit rechecks used by states for CCW permit application checks as well as checks on active CCW permit databases.
I almost posted this as Water Walker, lol. Luckily I fixed it.
With Chicago and Portland both fighting ICE’s efforts to remove violent illegals from those cities, I expect the run on guns will continue into October and November.
With Chiraq going to hell (they poison ILLannoy) I may get another gat. This site has gone to chit. I’ve been here going on 13 years. I notice very few oldtimers left. Maybe time to go…
It was over when Dan left. Now it is like visiting the grave of a legend.
And this time SAF/sean private info appears in my reply fields. Other half thinks the stubborn red post button is a fingerprint reader.
And my reply to this topic has yet to appear.
The one thing that did improve was the sickening ads are gone without having to use a private browser.
Best get cozy with the art.
Canukians (current ownership) ruin what they touch.
I’m surprised that you think 30-06 “may be adequate for elk”. I bet more elk have been killed by 30-06 than any other cartridge. It is a classic elk cartridge. Sure, 300 win mag and 7mm rem mag are a little better (as are some newer rounds like 300 PRC and 6.8 Western).
I personally consider my hunting rifles in .308 and .270 fine for elk (within reasonable range), and 30-06 is slightly more potent than either of those.
The old ought six is a little light for Kodiak brown bear, but is enough for everything else in North America.
The .400 Legend does look pretty slick.
I can’t think of any guns I want to buy.
Maybe some old antique stuff.
You can never have enough ammunition.
I am doing my part.
In September I purchased a break-action rifle with a threaded barrel chambered in .44 Magnum. I will use my suppressor on that rifle and am hopeful that I can shoot hardcast 255 grain Keith semi-wadcutters at subsonic speeds for a seriously quiet and seriously effective white-tailed deer hunting platform at distances within 65 yards.
And a couple days ago (early October) I went into a local sporting goods store to purchase a camouflage bucket with swivel lid. Before finding the bucket, I checked the ammunition aisle. For the first time I saw several boxes of .400 Legend ammunition. On a lark, I asked the clerk at the sales counter if they had any firearms chambered in .400 Legend. All they had was a single Savage Axis XP bolt-action rifle with a useable 3x-9x Weaver scope on sale for $430. And I had just over $500 cash in my pocket. I bought that rifle instead of the bucket seat.
Wow, nice! You’re putting the rest of us to shame, I think!
I am heading out tomorrow (Wednesday) to a cousin’s forested property (40 acres adjacent to National Forest) for our annual 5-day camping shindig with several cousins and friends. I am excited to site-in both new rifles at that shindig (assuming that I can get enough time at the bench on the 50 yard shooting “range” where all of the other participants will also be enthusiastically shooting all manner of firearms).
Doh! Above should be “sight-in”, not “site-in”.
On a “site” that features articles written by people at sometimes a high level of journalistic integrity, I find it short”sighted” for the comments section to not allow commenters to edit, correct, or otherwise adjust their comments.
It’s a poor “sight picture”, if you ask me.
Carry on! 😀
Regarding my comment above (assuming that it shows up), I have been wanting to purchase a bolt-action rifle chambered in .400 Legend for more than a year. Alas there was never any ammunition nor any rifles for sale at any of my local firearms retailers. That changed this past week. Oh, and not only was my rifle on sale, boxes of 20 rounds were also on sale for $28 each, which is about the going rate these days for rifle cartridges.
I really like the .400 Legend caliber. I chose Winchester PowerPoint cartridges with 215 grain bullets and a muzzle velocity of 2250 feet-per-second. That load is outstanding for white-tailed deer out to 200 yards. And if I ever get around to bear or hog hunting, it should be an excellent platform out to 100 yards.
The really fun question is what I should use if I ever draw an elk tag. I have a rifle chambered in .30-06 Springfield which may be adequate with 180 grain bullets, although I tend to think that is on the light side for a 900 pound elk. I am thinking that my .400 Legend with 215 grain bullets out to 100 yards for elk may be superior to .30-06 Springfield with 180 grain bullets.
I can’t claim to have much other than several anecdotes ranging from first hand to third hand, but it certainly seems based on the questions I’ve gotten and heard from friends about getting that this is just 2020 repeating.
It seems to me that over time more and more *normies* are waking up to the fact that along this trajectory you’re going to want to be armed because they can feel the pricking of their thumbs and have some vague conception of what it means.
They also seem to be buying multiple firearms over time. The trend seems to be shotgun –> pistol — rifle, and it seems to repeat through families where one adult does it then others do it too. I cannot count the times in the past few years where someone has said to me “… and now my wife wants a gun”.
IMHO, from a 2A activism standpoint this is both a positive and a negative. Positive in terms of “buy in”, negative in terms of the reason for that buy in.
At this point, it’s pretty wild how full the threat matrix is and I really do have to wonder what happens if people start to really fill in their own version of that. I have the suspicion that it won’t end well.
At this point exterior cameras and upgraded thermal and night vision are the priorities. Well that and property somewhere south and west as if things get bad that would be the likely escape route anyway. Figures I do all that COIN and other training over a decade too early.
It’s never too early. Only too late.
SAFEupstateFML,
Dang it, I am at the point where I really need to stop dipping into my cash reserve and start replenishing it. Now I have to seriously consider dipping into my cash reserve one more time to buy a thermal imaging scope for home defense.
I already have a thermal imaging monocular for surveillance purposes. Sounds like I should really step up my game and buy a thermal imaging scope.
Honestly you would know your local threat profiles better than I would. I would always suggest financial independence over moderate capability upgrades until well that moderate upgrade may be a major factor. If it helps paying off other things is higher up than the cameras on my end for a while unless we get something nasty kick off then ready or not there it comes.
That cash under your mattress is losing value everyday. That prep you purchase (buy at wholesale) is not. Keep some cash but don’t overdo it.
Sure comes in handy if you have to move in a hurry though. Haven’t gotten to the point where gold and silver are common currency and there are high yield savings accounts that almost keep up with published inflation. Still hoping to be optimistic and put away in the IRA but it is about as risky as putting money into my home in NY for long term value at this point.
strych9,
It is really hard to predict what “normies” will do in the near future much less the distant future.
I am sensing a glimmer of hope in the up-and-coming generation which seems to pay zero attention to legacy media and their commensurate propaganda. Of course that hope only applies if the next generation gets quality and accurate information from other sources. Time will tell.
I’ve debated how to respond to you here. My unfiltered response is… suboptimal communication for anyone else who might read it and this is an open forum. (No, not fedposting).
The overall issue for me is that we don’t have a single issue, we have a ton of them. As I’ve said, there are bright spots, but mostly we’re not trending in a good direction.
The top five things in my matrix kinda freak me out and that, in and of itself, freaks me out because, frankly, I’m not used to that. Generally, I’m the one with ice in their veins when things go sideways and a generally optimistic disposition mixed with a blackhole-dark sense of humor. This particular set of issues, however, puts me on edge because:
1. I don’t think some of them can be addressed. As in there’s no solution, no trade off, it just is what it is and what it is is fucking bad.
2. A number of them need attention but drawing attention to them makes things much worse when people freak out, a problem amplified by the click-bait grifter nature of nearly all media today.
3. A combination of them, just two, at even 25% of expected amplitude and it’s, frankly apocalyptic.
strych9,
I hear you. I can also see where multiple dynamics are simmering right now and could erupt into a boil.
Best I figure that we can do is to share simple truths with as many people (who have a reasonable chance of receiving those truths constructively) as you can and start today with personal family preparations that insulate you as much as reasonably possible from anything that graduates from simmering to boiling hot.
For example in my case, I live on a one-acre lot. I have a well for water (and septic system) and just fired up a huge solar electricity generation system which allows me to live almost completely off-grid from about early March through middle October. I have about 5 cords of seasoned split hardwood that I can burn for cooking and heat. I planted apple, pear, and plum trees years ago that are starting to produce a LOT of fruit now. I have a raspberry patch that I planted two years ago which has produced about two quarts of raspberries so far (and are still going strong here in October). Of course I have a sizable garden (about 15 feet wide by 60 feet long) where I can grow a LOT of food, especially potatoes, tomatoes, bell peppers, green beans, and squash. Plus I have a lot of additional yard space available if I need to plant more. And then I have a modest supply of dry foods in my basement available for long term use if necessary. Last but not least, I have the skills and equipment to hunt small game and deer in my semi-rural area to provide meat, although I recognize that everyone else would probably be doing the same and wild game prospects would dwindle rapidly.
Honestly, my biggest threat to survival is if society really goes in the dumper and roving hoards of bandits surround my home to raid it. At that point all I can do is defend my home and family as best as possible. Of course I have a respectable cache of firearms and ammunition for such a task. I even have ideas on how to enlist neighbors for mutual aid if things get to that point, although I have not broached the topic yet.
No, there is another risk. The government can still fly over your land. And therefore, can drop anything ONTO your land. Flammables. Explosives. Or they could be more subtle. Glyphosate. Mercury. Anything that they can aerosolize and put on a plane (or now a drone). Which is anything.
Our governments increasingly hate us. I give you Portland (all of Oregon, really), Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, the entire state governments of Chicago, Washington, New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, and EVEN PARTS OF TEXAS.
Some of our politicians claimed that they could cease to render medical or emergency care to anybody who simply didn’t get an unproven “vaccine” just a couple years ago, and we had a “president” who said he was losing patience with us.
They’ll even imprison us for defending ourselves if we’re on the “wrong” side of a physical altercation. If we’re not on their side, then we’re on the wrong side. And if you’re still wondering which side is which, just by being here, we’re ALREADY on the wrong side. Surprise!
Hiding on our rural compounds is NOT the sustainable answer. We must engage. We must turn the tide that was created by our government schools over the last 6 decades. And that might mean that WE become teachers, administrators, judges, and lawmakers…even WHILE we keep trying to help the next generations come into their own.
The drones are probably the least considered threat especially the agricultural sprayer variety. Ultimately only so much you can do there and as to going on the offensive see PATRIOT act and consider where your actions will land your family. Also .gov is only one of the potential threats that have access to such tech with any level of imagination.
I don’t much worry about roving hoards, but then I also commute 71 miles each way for a reason.
The issue here, I suppose, is that when I say “frankly apocalyptic” what I mean is that “society really goes in the dumpster” is kinda the shallow end of the pool.
But hey, let’s take “society goes in the dumpster” and play with that a bit.
First, let us consider that the vast majority of “Conservatives” are normies and if there’s one thing that’s always true about normies it’s that they’re, at best, midwits who don’t do any research and are confused by basic critical thinking. They pay little attention and, so much as they do think, think in simplistic stories handed to them by others. Sorry, it’s true. A huge number of Conservatives don’t think or reason, they’ve simply picked a tribe. This is why so many of them support policies that make no sense, but I digress on that topic, let’s do some basic arithmetic.
I keep seeing people trash Pritzker (or Newsom or [insert bigwig Dem or influencer here] as stupid. They’re not, they’re engaged in calculated escalation as I pointed out to Geoff the other day. Now, I’m not going to go through the entirety of calculating the range that I gave him, but I’ll give you an initial back of the envelope version. Which, by the by, is WHY these people are escalating because they already know this and they realize that played right, they probably can’t lose.
They want a reaction so that they can move forward. That’s why, in a small example, Kash Patel won’t perp-walk Comey today, because Kash is actually smart enough to know how Alinksy-type tactics work and NOT give these people what they want where he can avoid it.
Long story short, this is a Tragedy of the Commons problem in terms of coming up to speed on reality.
===
First, a couple stipulations for this calculation, so you can see how conservative it is. This assumes that zero illegals, foreigners or people under 18 are involved in what I’m about to say. It is ONLY adult Americans who are 18+.
There are about 350 million people in the country, officially. So, let’s assume 50 million are illegals and will flee or sit on the sidelines. Further 72 million are under the age of 18, so they will join the illegals and entirely sit this out.
Further, no more radicalization will occur and people aging “in” to this cohort will not occur. IOW, toss COIN assumptions and rules out the window. No one else will be further radicalized, ever. The calculated pool is the pool now and forever.
===
Calculations in millions:
That’s 350 – (72+50) = 228 million adult non-illegals.
28% will openly tell a pollster today in 2025 that they’re proudly Democrats and another 18% will claim to be “Democrat leaners”. 28% of Democrats also already claim that political violence is acceptable. That’s not something I’d expect to see go lower, in fact we have to ask ourselves about the people who think it but won’t say it.
228 x .28 = 63.84 million Dems
228 x .18 = 17.86 million Dem leaners
63.84 x .28 = 17.86 million Dems interested in violence
Assume a willingness-towards-violence rate of 1/4 that of self-declared dems for leaners (.28 x .25 =.07)
17.86 x .07 = 1.25 million leaners who are violence prone.
17.86 + 1.25 = 19.1 million violence prone Dems + Dem leaners.
===
So, along the current path, with conservative numbers, they keep slicing the salami until they get what they want, St. Floyd II, they expect what amounts to an insurgency of 19.1 million people. For everyone else, the main alternative is to fold and just give in.
That’s not something we can probably deal with, if we’re honest. That’s not some A-stan style insurgency, that’s an insurgency with something on the order of 4.5x all military and LE combined, assuming 100% loyalty of .mil and LE, which we already know we don’t have. It’s also at home, not abroad so they can actually reach out and touch you.
That’s the end of the republic and the installation of whatever those people want and what they’ll “inherit” to enforce that on you is the full force of .mil, LE and intel agencies to come after anyone guilty of whatever they don’t like.
And I would point out that we need to disregard the American concept of “the blue and the grey”. I said “insurgency” for a reason.
Now, consider, post Kirk assassination exactly who we saw come out celebrating this. Doctors, lawyers, nurses, private business owners, housewives, K-12 teachers, professors, cops… they’re everywhere. Which isn’t just to say that they walk amongst you, but also to point out that they have a base of intelligent people for the logistical end from chemists making HE to god knows what else.
This turns into Algeria in the late 1950’s real quick. Oh, and let’s be honest, the illegals, foreigners, Islamists, kids and other actors WON’T stay out of it. They’ll be invited into it by leaders in “breakaway” states or join as soon as they see an advantage to themselves or just become radicalized because you smoked their parent, friend or older brother/cousin/whatever.
Of course, you could always go for the “peaceful divorce”, that is reward this behavior with its own country right on your border. Which is like creating Mozambique or Zambia a la 1970 right on your border as well as Mexico, which is already a problem in many regards, because I’m sure that ends well.
The fucked part is that this is like #3 on my personal list.
There’s a worse version of this that I have at #1 which has a lot of the same issues but a completely different flavor and much larger numbers, which is a French Revolution style problem because our economic demographics are shockingly similar to the French just pre-idiocy. It’s almost like we’ve been actively trying to create neo-Jacobins and neo-Montagnards.
This is yet another area that’s troublesome because one has to ask
OK, if we wanted to fix this we’d have to admit several very nasty realities that we’ve been lying about for 17 years and when we admit that we’ve done that the people getting the shaft are going to be more angry, not more conciliatory, where does that leave us? Then we have to tell all the older people that we’re sorry for gaslighting you against your own offspring, oh and also we’ve been lying to you for 75 years, just in a different way.
I mean, you’re just going to openly admit that the elites and older people in society have been basically knowingly feeding off the younger generations for nearly 20 years while talking shit the entire time? Ooooof. Then admit that you gaslit the Boomers into this from the day they were born because it maybe prevented some theoretical war decades ago? Oooooooooooooof.
Can this one happen? Yeah, I have it at #1 for a reason: Look at Luigi. We didn’t fix shit after 2008. We papered over it and lied about it while we gaslit the population against each other.
Locations will matter, the majority of near neighbors that are most likely to do something stupid are 65+ (apparently we have nursing home antifa) thankfully few have any idea about how infrastructure works and less than spectacular ownership of firearms. With that said doesn’t take much and a hunting rifle/shotgun is plenty to ruin ones day. When the map is zoomed out further there is a noticeable population of John Brown gun club/SRA/other assorted groups and a few legit cults that have more than enough resources to be a problem even if the state governments were looking to restrict their activities. Those clubs (and a few of those cults) are basically everywhere especially with localities with a population above 100k and even small towns of 5k. Reddit is a useful tool for surface level chatter and finding general locations (see 50501 or the groups above and your local region) but as Strych suggested earlier this year seek out the mailing lists. No matter if only 1/10000 of what pings is actually any danger as there are a lot that could do a lot of damage to invite retribution which could make Spain of last century look gentle. I am not looking forward to seeing how the PATRIOT act ends up getting applied especially when ends start justifying means in public perception.
What keeps me up at night isn’t actually kinetic.
It’s not about “people doing [thing]”, it’s about 2/3rds of people being gone in six months flat.
Sounds crazy, but the data is lining up behind Geert Vanden Bossche and I don’t think companies like Sanofi and GSK paid him the big bucks in vaccinology because he doesn’t know what he’s doing. His claims line up with molecular immunology (a class I now sort of wish I didn’t take) and the data now coming out of India.
The issue here is, there is no fix for this.
……..if it was something “mandatory” how much of that 2/3s would cover those most likely to be kinetic…….and from that was that the intention? Bit less dramatic than the blockade of population centers and disabling of utilities idea that was floated decades ago for your “less” horrific scenarios in previous posts but any of them are in line with local worst case scenarios up my way.
While I understand the *conspiracy theories* and can see where they come from I don’t tend to believe any of them.
First, the timelines and information available don’t line up with that. They line up with a witch’s brew of incompetence, arrogance, ignorance and stupidity,
Secondly, we’re talking about biology where things are not black and white. The results have an error bar to them that makes them… undesirable for weapons purposes.
Ultimately this is why no one has ever very seriously chased the idea of viral weaponry. Which is to say that attempts along those lines were never… fully brought to fruition. Simply put, you cannot avoid blowback because you’re creating something that involves evolution in a way you cannot control once you let it out. While the details can’t be predicted the broad strokes can and such a weapon will come back to bite you, hard. Which means that you need have literally God-like capacity to predict the future before you even think about weaponizing something like Ebola or Marburg.
(I have to admit that we came closer to that kind of project than I’d like to think with some of the shit that was done with Nipah virus. However, they never handed that off to incompetent ChiComs and were never really trying to weaponize it, though that could have happened by accident. The Chinese shortcomings in biology are another topic but they are the stuff of legend. They’re so bad at it that *my* department rarely sees one make it to sophomore year.)
People think “genetics” is magic and now makes this targetable to specific populations but the same rule applies here. If a disease wipes out a population the disease doesn’t say “Job’s done, nice” and die off. It’s now pressured to get into other people and that’s extremely easy because the genetic differences between all humans are quite small so jumping to “non-target population” is easy peasy. In fact, this will almost certainly happen long before the target population is effectively wiped out.
This is clearly elucidated by simple facts if you look at chimps and realize that they’re 100% resistant to HIV specifically because they’re a survivor population. Somewhere around 100K years ago, 99%+ of chimps were wiped out by HIV. The population today are all descendants of the survivors who were “un-infectable” because they entirely lacked the requisite surface proteins for HIV to gain entry to their cells.
The reason HIV didn’t disappear is because there are other monkeys that have this protein but not on critical immune cells, providing a population that can be infected with acute or chronic infection without dying from it.
The same thing is generally true, IMO, of the “product” that they pushed. It’s a product of arrogance, ignorance and stupidity with the “mandates” a product of hubris and power chasing.
You can see that in the way that Pfizer said “We need special immunity from lawsuits before we agree to make this”. They knew damn right well what the risks were with a product that was half-finished and never meant for this application in the first place.
It’s an area where as seductive as it is to blame Trump, he was obviously taken for a ride by his *advisors* and I can’t blame a real-estate guy for not understanding modern molecular and cellular biology, never mind vaccinology, virology and immunology.
And even with all that under your belt a bit of high end experience was necessary to really have any predictive power in the world of vaccinology. Vanden Bosche comes from trying to figure out how certain deployments of veterinary vaccines went terribly wrong. He spent years working to figure that out, and he along with a team of others, eventually did. That’s what we’d call “specialized knowledge”.
What was widely known was simply the adage of “don’t vaccinate into a pandemic”. The exact why was mostly theory to most people, even in the space. That’s because we’ve never done it except by accident in veterinary medicine and that kind of history isn’t something you’d get in most educational programs that are not specifically for vaccinology.
But you can blame the media who could have asked. You can blame the government for censorship of the people who tried to tell the truth at the time. You can blame people who were stupid enough to drive to a large parking lot to allow a total stranger to inject them with mystery juice too.
If you go to people “in the biz” and say “What part of installing foreign protein on self cells sounds like a good idea? Especially random cells?” they got it instantly even if they’d never considered it before. If you say that to anyone outside the biz they look at you like you just started speaking ancient Egyptian.
The actual truth here is that people like Fauci are a symptom, not a cause. IMHO, “hyperfinancialization” has allowed us to promote incompetence by papering over problems with capital. You can get away with that for a while but after decades you realize that there’s no one competent in charge of basically anything.
And this isn’t just for .gov. You can see it in private business as well. Hiring losers based on skin color, sexual preference or “gender” is an obvious loser over time. Yet they did it with great abandon because the executives are not actually competent, and haven’t been for a long time.
Competent people have, mostly, been sidelined or fucked off to go do their own thing.
Honestly I go with the conspiracy theories more because they are less scary than incompetence paired with the lack of intelligence and wisdom to recognize there is a problem and why it matters.
I can’t remember if I bought a firearm in August. I’ve slept since then. I know I did in September because I’m reminded every time I step over the box. I probably average one a month on 4473. Often one or two more private sales.