February 2020 NICS Checks for Firearm Sales are at High Levels; Low Prices

By Dean Weingarten

U.S.A. –-(Ammoland.com)- The National Instant background Check System (NICS) checks for February 2020, have broken all the previous records for the month, with 2,776,380 checks. This signifies very little because more than half of the NICS checks are for carry permits and carry permit rechecks.

Illinois and Kentucky perform hundreds of thousands of permit rechecks every month, skewing the system, which renders the total number useless for estimating gun sales.

Instead of total NICS checks, we now calculate a much closer approximation of total gun sales, consisting of NICS checks done for handguns + checks for long guns + checks for other guns + 2.5 x checks done for multiple sales on the 4473 form.

Handguns + Longuns + Others + 2.5xMulti = 1,244,177 firearm sales recorded in NICS in February of 2020.

Last year, in 2019, the numbers were handguns (601,381), Longuns (355,744), Other (43,426) and Multiple x 2.5 (59,705) total gun sales of 1,060,255.

February 2020 sales were up 17% from last year.

February 2020 sales are slightly higher than the number in 2018 (1,228,888).

The February 2020 numbers are less than 14% below the all-time record set in February of 2016, of 1,413,828, which was extraordinarily high …Read the Rest

Source:: AmmoLand