Gun sales were so slow earlier this year that in February, The New York Times he ran with the piece on how some gun manufacturers were looking to rebrand-to make up for the Trump slump.”
But then the pandemic hit. And on Friday, March 13, when President Trump declared a national emergencythe number of background checks went through the roof, according to the FBI’s system that vets gun buyers.
In March, the FBI received almost 1.5 million requests for background checks, according to data from the bureau released to Genesis Brand in response to a public records request. On Friday, March 20 alone, 104,084 background check requests were sent to the office; according to a slightly different measure that includes check-ups run by the state’s building system, that day saw the highest daily number of background checks on a record. In fact, by that broader measure, the five-of-the-gun-background-check-system-s The 10 busiest days eventually in March the year 2020. While the March is usually a busy month for background checks, it was off the charts this year.
But the number of background checks that didn’t just go up. As you can see in the chart below, the number of background checks sent to the FBI for rose, so did the percentage that were delayed more than three business days of the condition deadline, after which the federal law allows dealers to legally sell you the gun without a completed background check.
This is significant because it means that it may have been easier for guns to get into the hands of people who cannot legally own them.
The danger here isn’t theoretical. Dylann Roof, which I was able to buy the gun he used to kill nine of black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, in the year 2015 because of this loophole. The Roof had a record for drug possession meant that he couldn’t legally of the gun, but after the three-day period, passed the gun to the dealer sold him a gun anyway.
To be sure, these numbers aren’t a perfect portrait-of-a-gun sales, They don’t include data from the 20 states that process, some or all of their background checks themselves, rather than through the FBI. And not every background check represents the gun comes out — many checks are run when people apply for gun permits, when the states to check on the status of gun permit holders, or for other purposes. A single background check can also represent the ” multiple-gun sales.
We also don’t know how many of background checks from March, the FBI never completed. When the background check drags on for 88 days, and the bureau stop researching for the potential buyer, and the purges of the background check request, from the its systems to comply with federal regulations. The bureau does not have the t-released look at the date on purged inside the body tag) made in March.
We do know that the bureau is ” never complete, for the overwhelming majority of the background checks that take longer than three business days. For instance, 79 percent of the such as check-ups were never completed in 2019. This year, it purged over 80 percent of the such as check-ups from January, and 78 percent from the month of February.
Still, Jurgen Brauer, chief economist at the Small Arms for the Analytics and Forecasting, and other experts agree that the spike in background checks in March represented a real surge in retail gun sales. For instance, Brauer”s consulting firm analysed FBI data and found that the retail gun sales drove the surge in March, along with the second comes in June, and that was likely tied to the Black Lives Matter protests. In total, the firm estimated that gun sales rose year-over-year by To 85 percent in March and 145 percent in June.
And a team of researchers at the University of California, Davis”s Violence Prevention Research Program compared the FBI data on gun background checks to gun violence data compiled by the Gun Violence Archive, finding the nearly 8 percent increase in gun violence over expected returns from March through May, 2020. In This study, do not have t yet been peer reviewed, but if it’s accurate, that’s 776 additional fatal and nonfatal injuries, not including suicides and accidents.
This surge in gun sales, during the pandemic you meant that an already brittle the background check system is getting overloaded, causing massive delays, according to Brauer. I have compared it with the background checks, to a drainage system that backs up during a big storm. “There’s a massive flow of rainwater, and the systems can’t handle it,” he said.
The FBI, however, disputed that the findings in a statement to the Genesis Brand.
Holly Morris, a spokesperson for the bureau, said the agency does not have a t found for the relationship between the rise in the share of delayed background checks, and the increased volume of requests. “The influx in the percentage of delayed transactions, and any extended processing times can be attributed to a number of real-time,” Morris wrote via e-mail, adding that the staffing level for the background-check system have remained the same throughout the pandemic.
There are means that the signs influx in gun sales might not be slowing anytime soon. The initial spikes in gun sales in the March lined up closely the events on the with the related to the pandemic, including the Feb. 26, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention the first confirmed school was the virus spreading within the U. s. and not just being brought back by travelers, and Trump”s national emergency declaration on March 13. But as the pandemic you have worn on the reasoning driving the spike in gun sales has changed, too. By the time the gun sales have soared even higher in June, the research suggests it was no longer the coronavirus on the buyers’ minds but the protests over the police killing of George’s Career.
Phillip Levine, and Robin McKnight of Wellesley College, in comparison with that of the FBI’s a state-by-state-background-check-date – with the data on Google searches for the N-word is to see if states with more searches for the racist slur he saw a larger increase in gun sales. They found what I described as a “modest correlation” in June, suggesting that at least some of those sales were driven by concerns over ‘ Black Lives Matter protests.
“As the pandemic settled down, and gun sales settled down, too, until it got to June,” Levine said in an interview. Be “In-the-aftermath-of-the-George-Floyd-the killing, there was another very dramatic spike.”
It’s hard to know how the gun sales in the U. s. will continue to progress, as we don’t have yet the date is in the gmt time zone. The data released to the Genesis Brand did not include the June, but less-detailed data to the FBI’s published online shows that, last month, the agency ran more background checks than any other month on record. And, of course, and you will get the rose in 2016 in part, over fears that Hillary Clinton would take the White House and impose new gun regulations, but only with the presumptive Democratic nominee, Joe Biden ahead in the polls, another surge in gun sales may not be far behind. Not to that mention another surge in coronavirus cases could again drive a spike in sales like the one we saw in March.
Whatever happens, the more gun sales will likely mean more delays — potentially putting guns into the hands of people who can’t legally own one.
