Gun sales have rocketed to record-breaking numbers during the coronavirus pandemic, with handgun sales up 91% and rifle sales up 73% in March.
Coronavirus Panic Causes Huge Gun Sale Spike
Huge numbers of Americans have sought protection for themselves and their families as they fear social unrest and potential rioting caused by the coronavirus pandemic, resulting in a massive spike in gun sales to around 83% more than average. Industry officials said the start of the increase could be traced to the implementation of the lockdowns organised by the federal and state governments.
According to Small Arms Analytics and Forecasting, 2,583,328 guns were sold, with handguns are seemingly the hottest sale items, seeing a jump of 91% in sales during March, and amounting to 1,534,000 of the total.
“As anticipated by the general media and within-industry reports, firearms sales boomed in March 2020 largely due to the COVID-19 health crisis,” SAAF Chief Economist Jurgen Brauer said.
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The FBI have also had to produce a record number of background checks. In February, records were broken when the FBI had to complete 2,802,467 checks, then they were broken again in March, with a total of 3,740,688 checks – the most seen in any month ever. This year alone, there have already been 9,245,857 background checks, most of which related directly to the sale of firearms. Even though we are only just entering the second quarter of the year, that’s already higher than the total background checks for guns in America for every single year from 1988 to 2005.
“Crazier Than I Have Ever Seen It In 13 Years!”
Earlier this week, Governor Phil Murphy of New Jersey was forced to roll back an exclusion of gun stores from being classed as “essential” businesses during the coronavirus pandemic. At a press conference last week before the reversal, Murphy claimed that not only does he respect the Second Amendment, but that he had “gotten not one complaint from anybody that they were trying to buy a gun and they couldn’t.”
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Yet Justin Anderson, the marketing director of Hyatt Guns of Charlotte, NC, said that the business had seen queues of people outside their door for the past week.
“Our daily business literally quadrupled, and we had three record days in a row,” Anderson said.
“Self-defense guns, including AR-15s and shotguns, and ammo are the hot commodities,” he continued, adding that “it’s been crazier than I have ever seen it in 13 years in this business!”
Clearly, Governor Murphy doesn’t know what he’s talking about at all, and the statistics prove it.