March NICS Numbers Show Continuing Slide
How’s the firearms industry faring in these wild financial times? There’s one metric that we can use as a rough guide to sales numbers in the United States: the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). According to the NICS numbers for March, sales are not as strong for the month as they were the past few years at the same time—but retailers are still selling a pile of guns.
Sales numbers @ TFB:
What Does NICS Do?
NICS is a federal database inquiry system run by the FBI that indicates whether the applicant has a criminal record. It is used in many firearms sales as well as for other firearms-related transactions, such as applications for a concealed carry license, depending on which state you’re in. Some states have their own background check system.
As such, NICS numbers are an imperfect measuring stick because states that don’t use the program might see a boost in sales, and a NICS query doesn’t mean a sale happened or that multiple sales didn’t happen. It also has no way of gauging private sales. It is still better than no yardstick at all, and the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) has its own formula to run the FBI’s numbers through. They claim their variation on the FBI’s numbers is closer to the real number of NICS sales.
March 2025 Sales
According to the NSSF, the NICS numbers for March indicated 1,386,724 gun sales. That’s a slide from the 2024 numbers and the lowest NICS number for March since 2017. But it wasn’t much of a slide, only about 3 percent, hardly the stuff of doom and gloom.
Furthermore, this is the 68th straight month of NICS applications topping the one million mark. Americans are still buying guns, and lots of them. However, it does seem that the mega-boom of the COVID and post-COVID years is on the decline, which is to be expected. The big question now is: What happens when tariffs kick in, driving up the cost of imported firearms?
