While August 2018 U.S. Firearms Sales Tick Up, Sales Remain Sluggish For The Year

By Ammoland

GREENVILLE, SC, USA & HALIFAX, NS, CANADA – -(AmmoLand.com)- Small Arms Analytics & Forecasting (SAAF) estimates August 2018 firearms sales at 1,001,981 units, a year-over-year decline of 6.3% from August 2017. Likely single-unit handgun sales (529,087) fell year-over-year by 5.6% and single-unit long-gun sales (399,884) fell year-over-year by 8.8%.

All other likely firearms sales (73,010) increased year-over-year by 3.3%. This includes so-called “multiple” sales where the allocation between handguns and long-guns cannot be determined from the data record.

Small Arms Analytics & Forecasting’s firearms unit sales estimates are based on raw data taken from the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), adjusted for checks likely to be unrelated to end-user sales. The FBI’s raw numbers (for August, some 2,026,309, the highest August number on record) cannot be taken at face-value as very large numbers of background checks are unrelated to end-user sales. For example, in August the state of Kentucky conducted about 394,000 so-called permit checks alone whereas end-user checks at firearms retailers likely amounted to just over 16,000 checks.

Small Arms Analytics & Forecasting Chief Economist Jurgen Brauer comments that “as expected, likely firearms sales increased from July …Read the Rest

Source:: AmmoLand