How mass shootings profit gun makers and fuel America's addiction to guns

Black Friday has become a gun buyer’s bonanza as marked by FBI records of processed background checks, which serve as a rough indicator of gun sales activity. Last year, the FBI processed about 176,000 background checks on Black Friday. This year, checks on Black Friday were up five percent from last year to a record 185,345, according to the New York Times. Background checks do not exactly measure gun sales, since not all people who get checks purchase guns and since once checked, buyers can purchase multiple guns. However, if only one in every ten background checks resulted in a single gun purchase or more, America sold more guns than there were children born on that day.

The other notable news about Black Friday: the mass shooting at Planned Parenthood, where Robert Lewis Dear killed three people and wounded nine others.

It is hard to establish correlation, especially given how much other climate factors over the past year could contribute as well, but the relationship between the Planned Parenthood shootings and gun sales is not coincidental, either. This year saw the biggest June gun sales ever. That month was marked by Dylann Roof’s deadly rampage through Emanuel AME Church, killing nine black Americans in an effort to start a race war. The last daily record for background checks came shortly after the Sandy Hook school shooting in Connecticut. The AP reports:

The previous record for the most background checks in a single day was Dec. 21, 2012, about a week after 20 children and six adults were shot to death in a Connecticut elementary school. The week following the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary saw the processing of 953,613 gun background checks.

After the Colorado shootings, President Barack Obama once again called for stricter limits on the availability of guns.

These numbers are staggering, and reports from gun manufacturers indicate that mass shootings like yesterday’s San Bernardino, California and Savannah, Georgia shootings are not just blips in the market, but regular and predictable sales-driving occurrences for guns.