In the four years since Barack Obama was first elected president, an estimated 67 million firearms have been purchased in the United States. That's more than were sold in almost seven years before his first election, reports the Kansas City Star. December saw a record-shattering number of requests for criminal background checks on prospective gun buyers. “Since Obama was re-elected,” said Gary Jessup of UT Arms in Kansas City, Ks., “it's been off the chart.”
While the FBI said checks do not represent the actual number of firearms sold, experts say the background check requests do provide the best measure of firearms sales in the United States. Based on those numbers, 2012 was a record-setting year for gun sales in the country with more than 19 million background checks conducted. The checks are required whenever someone seeks to make a firearm purchase from a licensed firearms dealer. Because some transactions can involve multiple weapons and because some people are denied as a result of the check, the FBI said a “one-to-one correlation” between checks and sales cannot be made. Since the checks were implemented there have been 987,578 denials. Most of those rejections were triggered by prior felony convictions or misdemeanor domestic violence.