If Americans did one thing in 2016, they practiced their second amendment right to own firearms – over 27,538,673 times to be exact.
The FBI revealed that an impressive number of guns sold in 2016 broke any previous records for guns sold in a year. The crazy thing is, the 27.5 million guns sold don’t include private gun sales which require no background check.
The numbers provided by the FBI are based on the total number of NICS background checks and aren’t necessarily suggesting that every background check resulted in the purchase of a gun, but the number is fairly accurate indicator of the number of guns sold.
None of this is exactly surprising news. Gun sales have broken records for 19 months in a row. That continuing record had a lot to do with backlash over Hillary Clinton’s gun policies and concerns over personal safety.
Further showing Clinton’s policies affected the sales in guns is that sales have started to decline since Donald Trump was elected president.
To date, the FBI has processed over 220 million background check requests since they began doing it in 1998 because of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act. That means over the last 18 years, roughly 13% of all gun purchases requiring background checks took place in 2016.
