From January through July of this year, Americans bought an estimated 12,141,032 guns. This is just less than the 13,199,172 likely gun sales that occurred in all of 2019.
These numbers are based on likely sales from the National Shooting Sports Foundation’s (NSSF) adjusted background check numbers—taken from raw data from the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS).
Whatever the precise numbers are, this year’s sales will surely break previous gun-sales records.
Since the COVID epidemic shutdown the country in March, Americans have been buying a lot of guns. The latest numbers show that the FBI carried out 3.6 million background checks in July—making it the third highest month on record. When adjusting to reflect checks for likely gun purchases, the NSSF says this translates to 1.8 million gun sales for July 2020—a 122% increase over July 2019.
The Biden campaign would be derelict not to be worried about what this means for the upcoming election, as Joe Biden is all-in for taking away the Second Amendment-protected freedoms of the citizens buying guns.
In a 3,400-word treatise on his campaign website, Biden tells us he wants to ban popular rifles, to use trial lawyers to bankrupt America’s many gun makers, to confiscate guns from law-abiding people, to force gun-owners’ licensing schemes on more than 100-million Americans, to mandate that citizens buy, not reliable, time-tested firearms, but some kind of “smart gun” … and that’s just the beginning of what Biden wants to do with our freedom.
President Donald J. Trump, meanwhile, is touting his pro-Second Amendment record at every opportunity.
Clearly, the policy contrast between these presidential candidates, especially on this issue, could not be starker. Trump talks up the Second Amendment at every rally, whereas Biden actually called gun manufacturers “the enemy” earlier this year. In March, Biden even told an auto worker who accused him of trying to “take away our guns” of being “full of s—.”
That auto-worker is plainly right, which is why so many of them voted for Trump in the last cycle.