FBI says skyrocketing demand for guns has broken record for background checks

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Hmmm…

According to an old article from NBC, previous spikes were recorded after significant events, which, IMO, were related to worries of anti-2a bills. However, if the increase from Dec 2015’s record 3.3 million to March 2020’s 3.7 million is correct, I would assume that the percentage of “new gun owners,” particularly anti-2a new gun owners, might not be as much as people are suggesting.

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Tim and Joe Bartozzi, President and CEO of NSSF just got finished with a live broadcast where they were talking numbers of new gun owners - and it was fairly large. You can see the video here:

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Thank you for the link. Although I might have skipped over some relevant info, the closest information I found in the video referencing new gun owners was at 39:20, where Tim mentioned that between January and February there were over 5 million gun purchases with 90% new gun owners. I didn’t catch a reference to that statistic.

This is terrific if true, and I would be very happy to think that this percentage would play into the March madness… but with the increase over other panic buying in the past, I really wonder if that 90% still holds. I would be happy if it did. However, with an increase of only 10% from previous gun owner panic buying in December 2015 to March 2020’s numbers, I’m wondering if most of those purchases are from previous gun owners.

To put this into context, you can see in some of the charts listed over at Ammoland.com, that there is a pattern in background check numbers (although I am little confused with the chart numbers vs the article’s referenced numbers) which might suggest that much of the increase is from former gun owners plus a small amount of new gun owners:

Comparison of 2019 to Jan 2020 from:
NICS Background Checks up for January, New Format

Year over year firearm sales from:
U.S. Firearms Sales: February 2020 Unit Sales Again Increase Drastically

It just seems that many posts and pro-2a videos and comments assume that the lines at the gun shops are mostly new gun owners, and I haven’t seen any official statistics to verify that. I also wonder if the increase in background checks is influenced by some of the newer restrictions i.e. requiring a background check every time you purchase ammo in CA.

FYI, I’m just discussing it, as I like to look at statistics.

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