Despite strong gun sales, NRA membership apparently shrank in 2020

2020 was a gangbusters year for gun sales with a likely 20 million total gun sales. And the gun industry has been willing to say this is a strong sign of future support for gun rights going forward. An August press release from the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) even inferred that at least 5

Quick Compare: 2020 vs 2019 NICS Numbers

2020 has passed, and with that we can finally start saying how the whole year stacked up compared to previous years in terms of gun sales (or more appropriately “sales” since its pretty much proxies all the way down when it comes to measuring gun sales). Here I am using the NICS data from the

Are all gun sales data the same?

If one wants to know “how many guns were sold?” in X year or Y month, there is only one source that is commonly accepted at this point, the FBI National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). However, the raw data from the NICS comes with many caveats. The biggest are 1) each background check