Black Friday -- The Gun Buying Holiday

Plus talking the data behind police reform with Ganesha Martin -- Bureau Chief for Constitutional Policing at the Minneapolis Police Department.

The FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (helpfully given the acronym NICS rather than NICBCS) is home to one of the FBI’s best publicly available data collection and reporting systems. As the FBI describes it:

When a person tries to buy a firearm, the seller, known as a Federal Firearms Licensee (FFL), contacts NICS electronically or by phone. The prospective buyer fills out the ATF form, and the FFL relays that information to the NICS. The NICS staff performs a background check on the buyer. That background check verifies the buyer does not have a criminal record or isn’t otherwise ineligible to purchase or own a firearm.

It’s not an exact accounting of every gun sale, but it’s decently close. Private sales that do not get a background check are not included, and just because a person fills out a form for a background check does not mean that they passed or went through with purchasing a firearm.

It works as a pretty good stand-in for firearm sales nationally and by state though.

The best part of the dataset is that it is updated monthly and allows for breakdowns by type of weapon, type of background check requested, state, day, month, and year. You do have to be careful with this dataset though because it includes concealed carry checks (categories permit and permit re-check) and states handle those checks differently (good description of that problem here).

In Kentucky, for example, the state began running monthly checks on all concealed carry permit holders in 2006 just to be sure they could still carry a firearm. “Permit rechecks” for those months in Kentucky, therefore, don’t reflect actual background check requests. This issue is also problematic in Illinois as seen in the graph of permit and permit re-checks run through NICS each month highlighting the peak of the issue in March 2021.

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This Week On The Jeff-alytics Podcast

New this week to the podcast: A fascinating chat with Ganesha Martin. Ganesha was the director of Baltimore’s Office of Criminal Justice, a Vice President at Mark43, and is now the Bureau Chief for Constitutional Policing at the Minneapolis Police Department. We talk about the lessons learned from her professional experience and the tall tasks she faces in working to implement police reform in Minneapolis.

Check it out: Spotify, Apple, Amazon, iHeart, YouTube.

Listen to recent episodes: Susan Parker on NIBRS, Larry Krasner on data & prosecutors, Whitney Westerfield on data & legislators, Anna Harvey on jail data.

Back to guns!

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Below are the number of background checks rolling over 12 months since 2000 after removing the permit check, permit recheck, and admin categories. This graph shows the big surge over the last 15 years with an enormous jump during COVID that has been subsiding over the last few years. This can serve as a good approximation of gun sales nationally.

Background check requests were down 7 percent in November 2025 relative to November 2024 and have fallen in 12 of the last 14 months. You can also use the FBI’s data to break down by day over that span which shows just how much gun sales surge at various times and how the timing of that surge has changed over time.

You cannot remove permit and permit re-checks from this dataset, so the totals can be a little wonky. I removed the data for the last two weeks of March 2021 which was super weird to account for this issue.

The biggest day of the year for gun sales — using background checks as a proxy — used to be a Christmas thing. The top day occurred between December 20 and December 23 each year from 1999 to 2007. Gun sales have become more of a Black Friday thing though over the last 15 years or so years.

The data by day through November 2025 is frustratingly not available as of publication time even though background checks by month is updated through November. November 2025 had the most background check requests of any month in 2025 suggesting Black Friday was once again a major driver of gun sales this year. I’ll update the 2025 data in the below charts when it’s finally available.

The top day for gun sales occurred on Black Friday every year between 2008 and 2024 with the exceptions of 2010 (second highest), 2012 (third highest after Christmas week), 2020 (second highest), and 2021 (seventh highest thanks to the March 2021 Illinois/Kentucky shenanigans).

The surge in 2020 came in March and was almost certainly triggered by a panicky response to the onset of COVID. The 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st of March in 2020 ranked 1st, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th in 2020 with Black Friday ranking 2nd highest in terms of background checks.

The below table shows the day with the most background checks each year and where Black Friday ranked in terms of that year. As you can see, people began to favor Black Friday for buying their guns in 2008 — though it was already a popular day for background checks before that.

For another way of seeing the surge during Black Friday, I grabbed the number of background checks for each day in the week before and after Black Friday since 1999. Unsurprisingly, there’s a drop on the day before Black Friday — colloquially known as Thanksgiving — followed by a surge on Black Friday.

The FBI’s NICS collection is a good way of visualizing this trend in an easy to use data collection. Firearm sales surged after the pandemic but have been falling ever since with fewer firearm sales over the last 12 months than at any point since COVID. How long this decline will continue is anyone’s guess.