According to the FBI background checks for March broke records yet again. Axios. 4,691,000 checks were done in the month of March and 6 out of the 10 biggest background check days happened last month. On March 17th, the FBI conducted 236,295 alone, shattering records for the most background checks in a day. Democrats in congress and at the White House made a push for gun control laws in March, which, along with a pair of high profile mass shootings, increased demand.
The FBI's NICS numbers can be found here.
My Comment:
No surprise that the great panic buy is continuing. It began last year with the first reports of the Coronavirus and got worse as the country fell apart this summer thanks to BLM and Antifa. The election disaster made things dramatically worse with the Democrats gaining the White House and the congress. And now with a gun control push things are even worse.
I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand I am happy that so many people are buying guns. Many of these people are first time gun owners and in theory they will oppose new gun laws because they now own firearms. Indeed, many of them found out for the first time how restrictive our gun laws actually are and may question the wisdom of our various laws.
The bad news is that the great panic buy has pretty much dried up gun and ammo supplies. Guns are still available but not anywhere near the numbers they were back in 2019 before the panic. Ammo is pretty much completely unavailable and if you do manage to find any it will be extremely expensive. Indeed, the other day I saw steel cased .223 for more than 60 cents a round. Before the panic buy it was probably closer to 25 cents for steel cased.
It's pretty much forced me to give up shooting as a hobby. Though I had bought pretty much everything else I needed in the lead up to the pandemic, ammo wasn't one of them. I have quite a bit of ammo left over but not enough to regularly go shooting. I could afford to go shooting even with the higher prices but not if ammo is totally unavailable.
The good news is that it seems likely that the gun control push is done. The Democrats realized that even if they nuked the filibuster they didn't have 50 votes because Senator Joe Manchin was against it as well as every single Republican in the Senate. Even the massively overhyped shootings we had last month didn't change anything and they quietly dropped the issue in order to avoid further embarrassment.
So when will the gun industry get back to normal? My guess is that it will probably not be until after the 2022 election and only if Republicans take back the house or the senate. If/when that happens gun owners will realize that no new gun laws are coming and people will cool off on the buying frenzy.
Of course that assumes that the country is stable and there aren't the kind of riots we had last summer. That is no guarantee. Riots could begin as soon as the Derek Chauvin trial ends and if it ends in an acquittal (which it should, George Floyd died of an overdose, not through the actions of Chauvin). If that happens the 2020 panic buy could just be the beginning...
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