May saw yet another record-breaking month for background checks. May 2020 is officially the third-busiest month for the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) with 3,091,455 total checks run.
That is also the new record for the month of May, beating May 2019 by nearly three-quarters of a million checks. Every month so far this year has set the record for that specific month in the history of NICS checks.
The FBI NICS office has now processed 15,248,440 total background checks through the first five months of 2020. The previous record for the first five months of the year was 2016, which saw 11,698,006 total checks run from January through May. The current year bested that record by more than 3.5 million checks.
Needless to say, 2020 is on track to be a record-breaking year. The NICS office has already run nearly 54% of the checks it ran in total last year, and we haven’t reached the traditional hunting season, election-season, and holiday sales spikes.
The FBI NICS office processes checks related to sales and transfers but also those related to permits. There were 955,275 NICS checks related to the sale of handguns and 485,131 related to long guns, including semi-automatic rifles and shotguns. That pushes the year-to-date total for handguns to 4,695,474 and to 2,531,666 for long guns.
Read full story: NRA-ILA
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