Joe Biden may not know what time it is at any given moment of the day, but with his administration’s whole-hearted embrace of just about every limit on firearm ownership and use that the gun control industry has been pushing for the last few decades, he’s making his old boss look like a piker in terms of gun sales.
It turns out that talking up his desire for more gun control, demonizing gun makers, and threatening to ram through restrictions via executive order only serves to goose Americans into buying more. This, despite many models being hard to come by these days.
The National Shooting Sports Foundation is out with their adjusted background check numbers for March and they’re…impressive. These are the FBI’s raw background check totals adjusted to strip out checks done for permit renewals and the like. They’re a reasonable, if admittedly low estimate of actual gun sales (many states down’t require carry permit holders to undergo a background check when buying a new heater).
About March’s numbers, the NSSF’s Mark Oliva had this to say . . .
March 2021’s figures were the second strongest for the month on record, surpassed only by March 2020, when 2.3 million background checks for a firearm sale were conducted.
It is clear that firearm sales in March were driven by gun control calls from politicians to ban entire classes of firearms and enact onerous gun laws. Americans continue to vote with their wallets when it comes to lawful firearm ownership. Over 2 million chose to exercise their right to keep and bear arms last month.
March’s background checks shows that President Biden’s demand to enact a ban on AR-15s and the push by Democrats to enact laws that would deny Americans their rights is out of step with Main Street, U.S.A. The firearm industry will continue to serve those law-abiding citizens who choose to protect themselves and their loved ones and, at the same time, pursue real solutions to keep firearms from criminals and other prohibited individuals to stop them from victimizing innocent lives.
The challenge facing America today isn’t the law-abiding gun owner. It is crime. We urge our lawmakers to join us.
Here are the raw, un-adjusted FBI background check totals. Note that March’s total was the highest ever (by a lot), as was the 1Q21 total.
Heres’ the NSSF’s press release . . .
The March 2021 NSSF-adjusted National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) figure of 2,044,136 is a decrease of 14.0 percent compared to the March 2020 NSSF-adjusted NICS figure of 2,375,525. For comparison, the unadjusted March 2021 FBI NICS figure 4,645,609 reflects a 25.2 percent increase from the unadjusted FBI NICS figure of 3,709,562 in March 2020.
The first quarter 2021 NSSF-adjusted National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) figure of 5,483,342 reflects an increase of 13.3 percent over the 4,841,126 figure for first quarter 2020, making this the highest first-quarter on record.
Please note: Twenty-five states currently 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 and NSSF does not adjust for these transfers.
The adjusted NICS data were 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. NSSF started subtracting permit rechecks in February 2016.
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 check transactions for sales or transfers of new or used firearms.
It should be noted that these statistics represent the number of firearm background checks initiated through the NICS. They do not represent the number of firearms sold or sales dollars. Based on varying state laws, local market conditions and purchase scenarios, a one-to-one correlation cannot be made between a firearm background check and a firearm sale.