This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
A gun is a popular gift, as Ralphie from "A Christmas Story" can attest. But sales really take off when you combine that regular holiday shopping with some scary terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino and a presidential call for greater gun control.
In 2015, background checks for firearms purchases and concealed-carry permits hit a high nationally, and December was by far the busiest month, with 3.3 million checks.
Utah saw a similar spike last year but it wasn't record breaking. Not counting background checks for concealed-carry permits, which don't directly correlate with sales, Utah saw roughly 19,200 checks in December, the highest monthly total since December 2012. That mostly counts sales of guns by licensed gun dealers and firearms reclaimed from pawnshops.
For the year, Utah had 105,200 checks, third highest since the government started requiring background checks in 1998, behind 2012 and 2013.
While an imprecise measure of gun sales, this is the best federal data available. It doesn't track when someone buys more than one gun at a time and it doesn't include instances when a background check hasn't been required, such as when a private collector or gun owner makes a sale. President Barack Obama announced an executive order last week that will seek to expand the number of background checks by closing what he refers to as "the gun show loophole," where some collectors and dealers haven't previously met the federal definition.
How much will that raise the number of background checks in 2016? That's far from clear. It depends on how the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives enforces the new definition and just how many such sales happen in a year, said Larry Tyler, who tracks firearm checks for the state Bureau of Criminal Identification. The vast majority of people pass background checks. The failure rate in Utah usually bounces between 2 percent and 3 percent a year, often because the potential buyer is disqualified because of a past criminal conviction.
What the data now show is that guns, particularly handguns, have become a more popular Christmas gift in recent years. The day with the single highest number of background checks was "Black Friday," and December is always busier than any other month. But the spikes in December 2015 and back in December 2012 had much more to do with the news than a kid's dream of a Red Ryder BB gun.
"We saw business really increase after the San Bernardino shooting," said Stuart Wallin, owner of Get Some Guns & Ammo, a Murray-based company with four locations. "Most of those were people who wanted handguns and they wanted a handgun because they wanted to protect themselves."
He said that was different than the spike in December 2012, which was in reaction to the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut and Obama's subsequent call for restrictions on assault-style weapons and high-capacity magazines. The president had also just been re-elected.
Wallin said he sold a whole lot more assault-style weapons, such as the AR-15 at the time, the very guns the president was concerned about, fueling consumer fear that the government would restrict their sale.
Nationwide, handgun checks surpassed those for long guns — essentially rifles and shotgun — in 2014, an indication that personal safety rather than hunting was by then driving most gun sales. In sportsman-friendly Utah, that switch hasn't taken place just yet, though handgun sales have been on the rise, according to background-check data.
In 2015, Utah saw 49,200 checks specifically for long guns and 41,700 for handguns, the closest split since background checks were implemented.
Wallin said Obama's new executive orders are so limited in nature that they'll have no effect on the bulk of the gun trade. And he hasn't seen many people buying guns in reaction to the president's call for expanded background checks. Still, he sees some Obama effect on the rising number of gun sales.
National analysts back that up.
"President Obama has actually been the best salesman for firearms," Brian W. Ruttenbur, an analyst with BB&T Capital Markets, a financial services firm, told The New York Times.
But Wallin said the rise in handgun sales cannot be explained away solely by people worried that the president will ram through new gun restrictions. He said many of his customers see a world where they may need to protect themselves at a school, a mall or their workplace.