Black Friday breaks records for gun industry

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This Christmas, will a new Smith & Wesson be under your tree?

The National Instant Criminal Background Check System reported that on Nov. 27, Black Friday, it processed 185,345 background checks on people seeking to purchase a gun, making it the busiest day for background checks in the NICS's 22-year history.

For the entire Nov. 26-29, 2015 four-day Black Friday period, 368,774 checks were completed, a 9.9 percent increase over the 335,555 checks conducted over the corresponding 2014 4-day period.

The NICS, created by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and local and state law enforcement agencies, is a national system that checks available records on people who may be disqualified from receiving firearms.

Bill Brassard, senior director of communications for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, stresses that these statistics do not represent the number of firearms sold, because varying state laws and purchase scenarios make a one-to-one correlation difficult to assume. “A person could pass a background check and buy two guns, or none,” said Brassard.

The NICS statistics jive with what local gun retailers are also experiencing this holiday shopping season. “We opened this morning at 9:30 and a half hour later, there were customers four deep at the counter, and it didn’t stop until 2 p.m.,” said Andrew Chernoff, owner of Coliseum Gun Traders in Uniondale. “People don’t feel safe in their own house anymore — that’s part of it. The other part is our government is not showing us they have any idea of how to get a handle on these situations,” said Chernoff, referring to the recent mass shooting in San Bernardino and elsewhere. “People who never thought they wanted a shotgun are now thinking ‘this is a good idea,’” he said.

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