Bottomless hunger for guns pushes 2023 sales past 14 million

The public has purchased at least 14 million guns this year, proving that there is no end to the country’s appetite for firearms and support of the Second Amendment.

In November alone, sales hit the high point of the year, fueled by a historic Black Friday and growing concern that foreign-influenced terrorism would spread to the nation.

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The National Shooting Sports Foundation, the industry representative that adjusts FBI background check data to estimate gun sales, said that there were 1,595,476 sales last month. The group said earlier that there were 214,913 guns sold on Black Friday alone, a new high for the day known for Christmas sales and buying.

For the year, the group estimates sales at 14,072,224.

“This bucks the narrative by some that the firearm market is saturated,” said NSSF spokesman Mark Oliva.

The high sales also bucks the expectation that efforts by liberal governors and President Joe Biden to ban popular guns and accessories would trim sales.

In fact, while Biden’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives has moved to slash, regulate, and end the sale of AR-15-style pistols, sales of AR-15 rifles are surging.

Gun stores and Second Amendment experts said that is the result of Main Street Americans taking charge of their own safety and security. Not only has the FBI been warning of potential terrorist attacks, but the nation’s media are full of stories of random armed carjackings and robberies by out-of-control teenagers, mostly in urban liberal cities such as Washington, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

Secrets regularly checks in with Hyatt Guns of Charlotte, North Carolina, one of the nation’s biggest, to hear what buyers are doing. Thursday, Hyatt Marketing Manager Justin Anderson told us, “We saw a spike in sales following the October 7th attacks on Israel and that carried forward helping us report strong sales on Black Friday and into Cyber Week. We have also seen steady sales during this first week of December. While the COVID bubble has burst, business has been increasing steadily and we expect a successful December.”

At NSSF, sales were expected to remain steady, but the November bump was a bit of a surprise.

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“November’s figures of nearly 1.6 million background checks for the sale of a firearm at retail is a very strong indicator of a vibrant demand for lawful firearm ownership,” NSSF’s Oliva said.

“The firearm industry typically sees a slight upswing in the number of background checks in the later months of the year, which coincide with hunting seasons and the holiday shopping sales. However, there are many communities with sustained levels of crime that have not abated. Those concerns, along with the punishing anti-gun measures by the Biden administration and threats of more gun control promised by the Biden-Harris reelection campaign, cannot be discounted as contributing factors. Americans have demonstrated month-after-month, and year-after-year, Second Amendment rights matter, and they are investing their hard-earned dollars to exercise their right to lawfully possess firearms before the right can be further infringed,” he added.