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The nation’s gun craze propelled by politics and the coronavirus has now hit 16-straight months of shattering records, with April sales of at least 1.8 million and FBI background checks logging over 3.5 million.
The agency’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System recorded more checks in April 2021 than any other April. The FBI also said that each of the past 16 months has tallied record counts, dating back to December 2019.
Pushing the most recent surge has been concerns about President Joe Biden’s calls to ban semi-automatic firearms, namely AR-15-style rifles. They continue to be the most popular guns purchased in the United States.
US Firearm Sales See Small Year-Over-Year Increase to 1.8 Mil Firearms Ammoland Inc. Posted on
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U.S.A. -(AmmoLand.com)- Small Arms Analytics & Forecasting (SAAF) estimates April 2021 US firearms unit sales at just over 1.8 million units, a year-over-year increase of 2.1% from April 2020.
Detailed data by firearms type and state are available for purchase at SmallArmsAnalytics.com/shop/.
SAAF’s firearms unit sales estimates are based on raw data taken from the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), adjusted for checks unlikely to be related to end-user firearms sales. For example, while the FBI’s raw numbers (for April, 3,485,016) increased year-over-year by 21.1%, this is largely due to background checks unrelated to end-user sales.