For decades, the term “Black Friday” has conjured up distinct images: turkey-stuffed consumers awake at insanely early hours of the morning, bursting into big-box stores to fight over flat-screen TVs.
But in a muzzle flash, it seems, a new image may be replacing that stereotype. It involves a trigger and, possibly, a scope.
On Friday, the FBI received 203,086 requests for instant gun background checks, according to USA Today — nearly a 10 percent increase from the year before and a new record for background checks in a single day.
That’s not an anomaly. According to the FBI, the previous two records for background checks were also set on the day after the federal holiday in which Americans give thanks for the year’s blessings.
The FBI didn’t provide any analysis behind the spike, but the biggest shopping day of the year may come at a moment of worry for people who fear someone from the government may knock on their door someday and confiscate their guns.
On Wednesday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions directed the FBI and ATF to look at potential problems in the National Instant Criminal Background Check system (NICS).
Sessions wants the agencies to fix problems with how the military and other federal entities report convictions that could keep someone from having a gun.
The database “is critically important to protecting the American public from firearms related violence,” Sessions wrote in his memo. “It is, however, only as reliable and robust as the information that federal, state, local and tribal government entities make available to it.”
The directive comes after the Air Force conceded it had never submitted the domestic-abuse conviction of Devin P. Kelley to the NICS database. Kelley purchased a Ruger AR-556 rifle with a 30-round magazine and used it to mow down a church full of parishioners in Sutherland Springs, Tex., earlier this month. It was the largest mass shooting in Texas history.
And a month before that, a man using a “bump stock” to make his rifles fire at a much faster rate killed 58 people and injured hundreds more in Las Vegas. The Las Vegas sheriff said Stephen Paddock fired more than 1,100 rounds, according to the Associated Press. Investigators found 4,000 unused rounds in his hotel suite.
