Friday, January 6, 2017

2016 gun sales smash previous record   By  Katie

Photo: Private guns. Kelly McCarthy with permission.
Photo: Private guns. Kelly McCarthy with permission.

According to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), the FBI ran 27.5 million gun-related background checks in 2016. By comparison, the previous record set in 2015 was 23.1 million.
In other words, 4.4 million more Americans bought guns in 2016. Why? Well, the Obama administration is a pretty good guess:
The FBI processed twice as many firearms checks in 2016, the last full year of President Obama’s administration, than it did in 2008, the year Obama was elected. During President Obama’s eight-year tenure, the FBI has processed 157,233,157 firearms checks—61,249,149 more than the previous ten years.
“There is no doubt that President Obama’s anti-gun rights agenda really backfired,” said Alan Gottlieb of the Second Amendment Foundation. “All he accomplished was to set new records for firearm sales. He fueled the opposite of what the gun prohibition lobby wanted him to achieve. And I don’t think they learned anything from it.”
While “a one-to-one correlation cannot be made between a firearm background check and a firearm sale,” NICS firearm background checks are considered an accurate metric of gun sales. The number of background checks could also indicate that more Americans are getting carry permits, as many states use FBI checks during the licensing process.
Here’s to Obama, the greatest gun salesman in history.

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