U.S. Gun Sales Hit a Record High Since Obama’s Re-Election

To the nation’s gun lobby and gun rights advocates, the Obama administration is public enemy No. 1.

Yet the president has proven to be a boon for gun sales.

In the four years since Barack Obama was first elected president in November 2008, an estimated 67 million firearms have been purchased in the United States. That’s more than were sold in almost seven years before his first election.

Now come concerns that Obama will push through stricter gun laws — although in four years he’s yet to push for them.

With Obama starting a second term in office — and anti-gun fervor stoked by shooting massacres in Aurora, Colo., and Newtown, Conn. — an unprecedented surge in the sales of firearms has taken off.

December 2012 saw a record-shattering number of requests for criminal background checks on prospective gun buyers — more than 116,000 of those from Kansas and Missouri alone.

“Since Obama was re-elected,” said Gary Jessup of UT Arms in Kansas City, Kan., “it’s been off the chart.”

Nationwide, more than 2.7 million of those checks were recorded for December, according to statistics kept by the FBI. Since late 1998 when federal law began mandating such checks for prospective gun buyers, the only other month that exceeded the 2 million mark was November 2012 — when Obama won a second term.

While the FBI said such checks do not represent the actual number of firearms sold, experts say the background check requests do provide the best measure of firearms sales in the United States.

Based on those numbers, 2012 was a record-setting year for gun sales in the country with more than 19 million background checks conducted.