Black Friday has become a gun buyer’s bonanza as marked by FBI records of processed background checks, which serve as a rough indicator of gun sales activity. Last year, the FBI processed about 176,000 background checks on Black Friday. This year, checks on Black Friday were up five percent from last year to a record 185,345, according to the New York Times. Background checks do not exactly measure gun sales, since not all people who get checks purchase guns and since once checked, buyers can purchase multiple guns. However, if only one in every ten background checks resulted in a single gun purchase or more, America sold more guns than there were children born on that day.
The other notable news about Black Friday: the mass shooting at Planned Parenthood, where Robert Lewis Dear killed three people and wounded nine others.
It is hard to establish correlation, especially given how much other climate factors over the past year could contribute as well, but the relationship between the Planned Parenthood shootings and gun sales is not coincidental, either. This year saw the biggest June gun sales ever. That month was marked by Dylann Roof’s deadly rampage through Emanuel AME Church, killing nine black Americans in an effort to start a race war. The last daily record for background checks came shortly after the Sandy Hook school shooting in Connecticut. The AP reports:
The previous record for the most background checks in a single day was Dec. 21, 2012, about a week after 20 children and six adults were shot to death in a Connecticut elementary school. The week following the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary saw the processing of 953,613 gun background checks.
After the Colorado shootings, President Barack Obama once again called for stricter limits on the availability of guns.
These numbers are staggering, and reports from gun manufacturers indicate that mass shootings like yesterday’s San Bernardino, California and Savannah, Georgia shootings are not just blips in the market, but regular and predictable sales-driving occurrences for guns.
The Intercept, in a review of investor statements from gun manufacturers and related companies, found that Sandy Hook and other mass shootings brought new gun buyers into the fold at high rates, both from fear of new gun legislation and from fear of attacks. The Intercept reports:
“The gun business was very much accelerated based on what happened after the election and then the tragedy that happened at Sandy Hook,” Ed Stack, the chief executive of Dick’s Sporting Goods, a leading gun and ammunition retailer, said in September 2014 at the Goldman Sachs Global Retailing Conference. Stack noted that the industry saw “panic buying” when customers “thought there were going to be some very meaningful changes in our gun” laws. The new sales “didn’t bring hunters in” but rather “brought shooters into the industry,” he added.
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Last year, Tommy Millner, the chief executive of Cabela’s, a retailer that sells guns, boasted at an investor conference in Nebraska that his company made a “conscious decision” to stock additional weapons merchandise before the 2012 election, hoping Obama’s reelection would result in increased sales. After the election, the Newtown mass shooting happened, and “the business went vertical … I meant it just went crazy,” Millner said, according to a transcript of the event. Describing the “tailwinds of profitability,” Millner noted Cabela’s “didn’t blink as others did to stop selling AR-15 platform guns” and so his company “got a lot of new customers.” The AR-15 is a high-powered assault rifle based on the military’s M-16 model but without the full automatic capacity,
Steve Miller, the chief executive of Big 5 Sporting Goods, another gun retailer, was asked by investor analysts in 2013 to describe the state of the market during a conference call that year. The “real surge” in firearm sales, Miller said, “took place following the tragedy in Sandy Hook.”
Each of these surges occurs in the wake of not only attacks, but at the slightest provocation of anyone saying anything about gun control or reform. After each of the aforementioned attacks, President Obama was criticized by the rabid National Rifle Association and their base of paid praying politicians for even daring to consider any alternative to arming every adult and child. The NRA then in turn stokes angst about gun control and fear of attacks into calls for more people to buy guns.
It is of course worth noting that the NRA is mostly propped up by gun manufacturers now, functioning as a “a virtual subsidiary of the gun industry,” according to sources cited by Business Insider. In essence, the NRA is the middleman for the gun industry’s efforts to use mass shootings to sell more guns. According to The Intercept:
Gautam Khanna, an analyst with Cowen & Co., a market research firm, interviewed Mark DeYoung, then the chief executive of ATK, an ammunition manufacturer, at the Cowen Aerospace conference in 2013. Khanna asked DeYoung if he would make pricing decisions based in part by the “Newtown shooting tragedy.”
DeYoung responded that “obviously we are all shocked” by “what happened in Newtown and what happened in Aurora, Colorado and what happened in Tucson, Arizona with Gabby Giffords.” But, he added, the company will continue to “respond to market pressures,” including increases in demand. On a separate conference call that year, DeYoung noted that certain “spikes” in demand have driven sales.
The more disturbing implication here is that gun industry and NRA activity not only respond to mass shootings, but have a positive correlation on their likelihood. There have been more mass shootings than there have been days in 2015, also the year when the number of guns in American homes crossed the 300 million threshold. What follows is a runaway train of violence, gun purchases, and more violence, leading to more gun purchases. The rate of mass shootings has been accelerating since Sandy Hook, and at the very least the NRA’s call for guns to flood our homes and streets has occurred alongside a marked decrease in safety as opposed to an increase. This information further casts into doubt the NRA’s dedication to safety in the first place, though. It’s far more profitable for their masters and for their pockets for mass shootings to continue.