Wednesday - December 23, 2009
Firearms Sales Slowing?
National Instant Criminal Background Checks were slightly down for November. This doesn’t surprise me; November is typically the heart of the hunting season, and the gun owners are out using the new guns they bought earlier in the year. November is the only month so far in 2009 that hasn’t broken all previous sales records; expect holiday sales in December to put the firearms industry over the top once again. All told, it is estimated that close to 14,000,000 NICS checks will be performed for 2009. That’s a solid 10% gain over 2008, which itself was a 10% gain over 2007, which was in turn a 10% gain over 2006. And 2006 was more than 10% more than 2005. So 2009 is up more than 50% compared to 2005. That’s quite a gain in just 4 years.
The NICS system, now a bit over 11 years old, checks prospective gun buyers to make sure they aren’t criminals or crazy people or other undesirables. And in 11 years and 1 month, this is what they have caught:
5.5 million negative hits from over 107 million checks. That’s just over 5%. And nearly 71% of those hits are from illegal aliens. A miniscule 0.00505% - about 1 in 2000 - were hits relating to the so-called Lautenberg Amendment, which prohibits people charged or convicted of domestic violence from purchasing guns.
Meanwhile, the National Shooting Sports Foundation has taken a look at their own data and shown us the most popular gun purchases by region:
So overall NICS looks like a pretty decent system. But look what NSSF can extract from the same data! If only those records were kept longer, and had more detail, the government would know everything! So ... as always, here we go again. Lautenberg, Bloomberg, and Chucky Shumer are at it again ...
This week Lautenberg introduced a separate bill (S. 2820), calling for NICS firearm transaction records to be retained for 10 years on a person suspected of being a member of a terrorist organization. That, however, is a smokescreen for another provision in the same bill, to retain NICS records of approved firearm transfers for 180 days for other gun buyers.
While Lautenberg introduced S. 2820 in the wake of Ft. Hood (with terrorism fresh on Americans’ minds), gun control supporters have wanted NICS records retained for longer than 24 hours since NICS’ inception. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), a co-sponsor of the Lautenberg bill, argued in favor of a 180-day retention back in 2001. After all, the Brady Act, as passed by Congress, required that NICS “destroy” the records of approved firearm purchases.
Along with the Lautenberg bills described above, gun control supporters are concurrently campaigning for a law to force all private gun sales to be run through NICS. Connecting the dots is a simple task. The goal shared by gun control supporters and by government entities for whom no amount of knowledge about American citizens is too much, is to incrementally increase the amount of information the government possesses on gun owners who, through no fault of their own, end up on a secret government list.
As I said earlier, it never ends. Absolute power corrupts. Absolutely.
Posted by Drew458
on 12/23/2009 at 02:12 PM
Filed Under: • Guns and Gun Control •
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