In a somewhat sobering statistic, more Americans received background checks in order to purchase guns on Black Friday than on any other day on record. This information was released by the FBI earlier this week.
On what is typically the largest retail sales day of the year in the United States, 185,345 requests were processed by the National Instant Criminal Background Check System.
Stephen Fischer, the FBI’s chief of multimedia productions reported that, “This was an approximate 5% increase over the 175,754 received on Black Friday 2014. The previous high for receipts were the 177,170 received on 12/21/2012.”
In another interesting statistic, previous spikes in background checks – which are conducted before gun buyers can purchase a firearm – have occurred after mass shootings prevalent in the media. This happened in December of 2012 shortly after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
The 2012, 2013 and 2014 Black Friday shopping days are also included in the FBI’s “top 10” list of 24-hour periods that background checks were processed.
Since 1998, FBI data shows that the agency has processed more than 220 million background checks conducted pursuant to the purchase of firearms.
As the laws currently stand, licensed sellers deny firearm sales to those who fail their background checks based on a number of factors, including restraining orders, domestic violence convictions and criminal backgrounds.
In another twist, this year’s firearm purchases on Black Friday came on the same day as yet another mass shooting incident took place, this time in Colorado Spring. In this shooting, three people were killed and nine others were injured during an attack on a Planned Parenthood facility.
In the wake of the Planned Parenthood shooting, President Obama again called for tighter controls on “weapons of war.”
Obama professed that, “This is not normal. We can’t let it become normal. If we truly care about this – if we’re going to offer up our thoughts and prayers again, for God knows how many times, with a truly clean conscience – then we have to do something about the easy accessibility of weapons of war on our streets to people who have no business wielding them. Period. Enough is enough.”
