A Year in American Gun Ownership
NRA - ILA | Published on 1/28/2022
This is the season of holiday festivities, family gatherings, and retrospectives. We don’t operate on seasons, though. Gun owners didn’t wait for a holiday to air their grievances; they took every opportunity to let their legislators and the ATF know where they stood on infringement. Americans exercised their 2nd Amendment rights every day. This isn’t hyperbole – we leave that to the experts – but statements based on data and reality.
Nearly 36 million law-abiding Americans gifted themselves a NICS background check in the first 11 months of 2021. We’re probably not going to break the record for most NICS checks in a year that we set last year (with 39,695,315 checks) but we’ll likely get close. This year is already the second-busiest year ever for the NICS office…and has been for several months. Through the first 11 months of this year, there have been 7,007,556 permit checks and 15,881,092 checks related to firearm sales (exclusive of pawn shops, rentals, and private sales).