Gun Sales Spike on Black Friday; FBI Concerned About Background Check Backlog

Black Friday, aside from the trampling and general mayhem, generally brings with it a big spike in sales. Well, guns sales spiked today too, according to information released by the FBI.

However, the FBI is concerned about this spike in sales for one very important reason: background checks. There are over 144,000 background checks that need to be processed after sales today; the problem is that a lot of them aren’t completed and so won’t be processed right away.

Normally, the FBI says, a few hundred checks fail every day through the National Instant Criminal Background Check System because of incomplete information. But they’re estimating that around 3000 checks won’t be completed today because of the high volume to process.

And how big is the load? An FBI spokesman said, “We are averaging three checks per second.” And they’re basically just asking employees to take on more hours to process them all on time.

[image via screengrab]

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Follow Josh Feldman on Twitter: @feldmaniac

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