Consumers in the market for purchasing firearms are among the millions of people swarming the stores on Black Friday to get the best deals for Christmas gifts.
According to
The Washington Post, of the 10 days on which the FBI has conducted the
highest volume of background checks since 1998, two were the last two Black Fridays.
The trend of Christmas gun-giving appears to have taken off in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting in 2012. That year, the media documented a spike on social media of
people displaying their new weapons on Christmas morning, and the data shows it was
a record year for sales.
December 2012 also marked an all-time high for gun background checks, though December sales figures are usually higher than at other times of the year.
The number of background check requests on
Black Friday last year, however, was more than twice that of any other day in 2013, one of the record years for checks as Congress considered new restrictions on gun sales.
The government, meanwhile, has struggled to process the applications within the required legal time frame of three days, leading to 186,000 people being permitted to buy weapons without any sort of background check, the Post reported.
In Missouri, in particular, where widespread violence was sparked when an unarmed black teenager was shot and killed in Ferguson, gun sales spiked in the month after the shooting, particularly among new gun buyers, the Post reported.
Sales in Missouri in September and October, however, returned to average levels and the data is not yet available for November. But one report indicated that
gun sales had been surging in recent weeks in anticipation of the grand jury's decision as to whether to indict the officer who shot Michael Brown.
"We can expect to see an increase [in all gun sales] in November anyway, of course. The holidays are coming," the Post said.
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