For three years straight, background check figures point to the fact that Americans have purchased over a million guns every month.
The 36-month streak was announced by the National Shooting Sports Foundation after they crunched the figures for the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System for last month. The unadjusted July 2022 FBI NICS figure of 2,358,150, after the data is sifted by NSSF to remove checks and rechecks for carry permits, remains at 1,233,115. In the end, last month’s figures represent three years straight – from July 2019 through July 2022 – where background checks for the sale of a firearm have exceeded 1 million each calendar month.
"That’s a tremendous milestone, especially taken in light of the actions of Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives last week," Mark Oliva, NSSF's public affairs director, told Guns.com. "The House held committee hearings and passed legislation that would ban the most-popular selling centerfire rifle in America – the Modern Sporting Rifle (MSR), along with some models of semiautomatic shotguns and handguns. They did this even after admitting they knew the legislation was unconstitutional and defied U.S. Supreme Court precedent. Law-abiding Americans also voted – over 1.2 million times last month and hundreds of millions of times over the last three years – to remind Congress that Second Amendment rights belong to the people."
Going past the NICS data, the true number of guns sold nationwide is even higher.
It should be noted that the federal background check numbers do not include private gun sales in most states or cases where a carry permit is used as an alternative to the background check requirements of the 1994 Brady Law, which allows the transfer of a firearm over the counter by a federal firearms license holder without first performing a NICS check.
Over 20 states accept personal concealed carry permits or licenses as Brady exemptions.
Banner image: CZ pistols on display at the 2022 NRAAM. (Photo: Chris Eger/Guns.com)