With Donald Trump about to regain the White House and Republicans in control—barely—of both houses of Congress, gun owners and Americans who think they might want to be gun owners someday can relax, right? Right? Beginning January 20, 2025, the federal government probably won’t be harassing gun dealers or trying to write extra-constitutional rules to turn millions of Americans into instant felons for possession of guns or accessories that were lawful the day before, right? Let’s review the status quo on the way to an answer.
For 65 consecutive months, Americans have bought more than a million guns. That’s measured by NCIC record checks mandatory whenever one buys a gun—or guns—from a federally licensed gun dealer after filling out the standard ATF Form 4473. Private sales surely count for many more, but aren’t recorded.
After 2024 monthly gun sales — as measured by adjusted NICS data — trailing 2023 for most of the year, they started to accelerate in July and jumped even more in August. This may be due, at least in part, to the impending election. Americans tend to hedge their bets every four years by stocking up on firearms and related gear. And then there’s the general state of society that seems to have an increasing number of people concerned about self-defense.
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Graphic: FBI data via NSSF. Public Domain.
The August 2024 NSSF-adjusted National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) figure of 1,210,995 is an increase of 8.3 percent compared to the August 2023 NSSF-adjusted NICS figure of 1,117,821.
For comparison, the unadjusted August 2024 FBI NICS figure 2,163,540 reflects a 5.7% percent increase from the unadjusted FBI NICS figure of 2,047,512 in August 2023.
Note the sharp jump in 2020, when the Biden era was on. Americans were apparently worried about what they were in for. Americans’ worries were somewhat reduced for a few years as Biden’s handler’s kept losing Second Amendment challenges in the courts, but as 2024 approached with the possibility of another Biden term, or worse, a Kamala Harris term, sales again trended up, keeping in mind how many months have seen a million+ sales. Obviously, Americans don’t trust the federal government regardless of who’s president, and they have good reason for that lack of trust:
Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) under the Biden Administration has sought to suppress data proving that armed citizens help prevent crime by removing its estimates of defensive gun uses from its website. For almost a decade, the CDC referenced a 2013 National Academies of Sciences report noting that people used guns to stop crime anywhere from about 64,000 to 3 million times a year.
This decision was taken after gun control activist Mark Bryant, founder of the Gun Violence Archive, lobbied the CDC to remove “misinformation” regarding defensive gun use estimates because of they are cited by “gun rights folks” to stop gun control legislation. Soon after, the CDC took down these estimates and now lists no numbers.
As I’ve so often written, the FBI has also proved to be unreliable:
The FBI has also shown itself to be susceptible to political pressure. The FBI defines an active shooter attack as occurring when an individual actively kills or attempts to kill people in a populated, public area. This measure includes everything from just one person shot at, even if the target isn’t hit, to a mass public shooting. It doesn’t include, however, shootings involving other crimes, such as robbery or fighting over drug turf.
To compile its list, the FBI hired researchers at Texas State University. Police departments don’t record these cases, so the researchers relied on Google searches to find news stories about these incidents. As such, the FBI’s evidence relies on a dataset that is actively hostile to the truth.
Google searches and news stories? Could there possibly be better sources for statistical accuracy?
From 2014-2023, the FBI claimed out of 350 “active shooter” cases, armed citizens only stopped 14. During the same period, Dr. John R. Lott of the Crime Prevention Research Center, conducting legitimate, replicable, research found this:
Out of 515 active shooter incidents from 2014 to 2023, armed citizens stopped 180, saving countless innocent lives. Our numbers even excluded 27 cases where a law-abiding citizen with a gun stopped an attacker before he could fire a shot.
How could there possibly be such an enormous discrepancy?
When questioned about their omission of this and other instances, the reason the bureau official gave for this mistake was that their reports “are limited in scope.”
But they issued faulty statistics anyway.
Even without knowing this information, Americans have, for more than 5.5 years, continued to buy more than a million guns per month, and a substantial number before that. Perhaps things will improve, and liberty will be preserved and enhanced under Trump, but Americans aren’t taking chances. That’s because they are Americans.
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Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, life-long athlete, firearm instructor, retired police officer and high school and college English teacher. He is a published author and blogger. His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor.
This article was originally published at www.americanthinker.com
