Whether it was a new winter coat for yourself, a makeup kit for your best friend, or a video game for your little brother, you probably scored some pretty sweet deals last week at Black Friday. Meanwhile, nearly 200,000 Americans had a different goal in mind when they went out shopping last weekend—purchasing a gun. According to the Associated Press, on November 27 the FBI processed 185,345 background checks—the most ever in a single day since they started doing the checks in 1998.
The record was broken on the same day that a shooting occurred at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, CO, that left three dead and nine others wounded. The previous single-day sales record was set on December 21, 2012, in the wake of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Sandy Hook, Connecticut.
A common sentiment among Americans seems to be that if the government won’t take action to tighten gun control laws—and it seems like no number of horrific gun-related tragedies, which seem to occur every day, will push them to do so—they’ll have to take matters of protecting themselves into their own hands.
The new sales record does not even include purchases made at gun shows or between private owners, which for some reason don’t require background checks—So the total could actually be a lot more. Believe it or not, there’s actually about 40 million more guns in the United States than there are people.
The problem of mass shootings in the United States is an ever-growing one, and it seems to have gotten to the point that the public has become numb to these sorts of tragedies. So why does it seem like more and more Americans believe that more guns are the answer?