GUN SALES: CBS Fake News vs. Reality (Hint: Record sales in March)

Not even one month ago, CBS News reported this nugget of fake news:

“Trump slump” for gun sales isn’t reversing

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Gun store owners called it the “Trump slump.” Sales of firearms slowed dramatically after the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016 allayed fears of a Democratic crackdown on gun owners.

That trend has continued in recent weeks even with talk of gun control in Congress and among business leaders following the Feb. 14 massacre of 17 people at a Florida high school.

In the past, gun massacres generally led to an uptick in sales as people worried about the government restricting access. But with Parkland, things are different.

Reality doesn't exactly square with the so-called reporting from CBS.  The recent national and state-level pushes for gun control provided inspiration for Americans to buy a record number of guns in March.

In fact, the 2,767,699 NICS checks from March 2018 stand as the third most of any month, ever.

The FBI launched the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) back in 1998.  Since then, the FBI has completed 285.5M checks successfully.  Granted, not all of those represent firearm sales, the numbers do represent a gauge of firearm-purchase and -permitting activity.

Looking deeper into the FBI’s NICS numbers, about 1.4 million of those March 2018 checks came from firearm sales.  These include 781,000 transactions for handgun purchases and just shy of 541,000 for long guns.

You probably will not read any headlines about record gun purchases in the mainstream media.  After all, according to the narrative, gun sales have collapsed with the election of President Donald J. Trump.

Once more, the mainstream media won’t let facts get in the way of their precious narrative.

Time will tell if April’s numbers prove equally as exciting. But I wouldn’t bet against it.