While brick-and-mortar retailers saw 11% declines over Black Friday weekend, gun purchases on Black Friday were the second highest in recorded history with 175,000 background checks conducted.
December 21, 2012, seven days after Adam Lanza went on a shooting rampage in Newtown, Connecticut, remains the leader with 177,000 checks completed.
Politically capitalizing on the tragedy, Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden and Barack Obama setup a buying spree with calls to ban firearms and ammunition.
At the time, Pelosi pushed for stronger gun control laws stating, “There’s a small window of time here to get something done.”
The politicians’ intent to pass new legislation triggered a national buying spree that lasted nearly two years causing ammunition shortages in the most popular calibers.
This holiday season, with Republicans to control both houses of congress in 2015, there is no political instigator for firearms popularity.
Earlier in the year, publications from Newsweek to the Huffington Post ran stories on the decline of gun sales in 2014 and the public’s lack of interest in firearms.
Their speculation was incorrect as it turns out that gun shoppers, like most shoppers, were simply waiting for the best deals and ideal times to buy.
However, one San Francisco columnist, Mark Morford, chalks up the increased gun sales to “scared white guys” who are deciding to pack heat in the wake of Ferguson.
Morford even went so far to profile the current gun buyer:
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You’re a scared white person, almost certainly male. You do not live in a major city, or near a university or intellectual hub of any note, nor have you ever traveled very far from your home town, much less out of state or anywhere further than, say, Mexico. Once. And that was enough.
You do not read complicated books. You do not like new or weird things. You watch lots of TV, mostly Fox News, which rejoices in showing you endless images of angry foreigners and minorities in pain: tear gas explosions, fights in the streets, looting, this time involving sad, small-town black people in Ferguson, all of them protesting the acquittal of that murderous white cop.
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Morford, a Yoga teacher who doubles as a freelance writer and columnist will likely have to fabricate another excuse for gun popularity in 2015.
