National News
The FBI conducted 856,000 gun background checks this past month
June 24, 2015 posted by Steve Brownstein
Every three seconds last month, the FBI conducted a background check on someone buying a handgun, rifle or other weapon. That's actually down a bit. During the recent peak, in December 2012 when the holiday shopping season overlapped with fears that new restrictions would be put in place after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary, background checks were conducted nearly once a second.
Not all of these background checks were new gun sales, but it serves as a decent proxy for the number of guns people are adding to their collections in a given month. The numbers are hard to contemplate in the abstract: What does 800,000 weapons look like?
South Carolina had over 12,000 background checks on weapons last month. The month prior, in April, the figures were about the same. One of the background checks that month, it seems, may have been for the weapon Dylann Roof used on Wednesday night.
