Gun Sales Top 27 Million: Every State Ranked

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Sep 4, 9:25AM EDT

Follow 24/7 Wall St. on Google

This post may contain links from our sponsors and affiliates, and Flywheel Publishing may receive compensation for actions taken through them.

Gun Sales Top 27 Million: Every State Ranked — © AFP Contributor / AFP via Getty Images

The Federal Bureau of Investigation tracks gun sales and publishes a list of how many are handled as part of its National Instant Criminal Background Check System. Each month, the figures are reported by state. Nearly everyone put through this system qualifies as a buyer. People who are excluded usually have criminal records. Of the more than 400,540,500 checks that have been done since November 1998, there have only been 4 million denials. Therefore, the data is the best proxy for U.S. gun sales available.

Sales have risen most years since 1999 (the first year checks were made for all 12 months). In that year, sales numbered 9,183,123. Last year the figure reached 39,695,315, up from 28,369,750 in 2019. The huge rise has been attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic. Also, growing civil unrest may have prompted people to buy guns for personal and family protection, many social scientists have posited, although this remains a matter of debate. Another theory is that chaos brought on by the pandemic was a major cause. A UC Davis School of Medicine study about fear of violence reports: “The coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated persistent structural, economic, and social inequities in the conditions that contribute to violence and its consequences.”

The New York Times points out that pandemic gun sales are largely over. While people who already own guns have been buying more, there is a new group of buyers. “New preliminary data from Northeastern University and the Harvard Injury Control Research Center show that about a fifth of all Americans who bought guns last year were first-time gun owners.” More of these buyers are people of color and women.

NPR commented on another trend: “Most often, the first-timers are purchasing a semiautomatic handgun, outpacing the second-most-purchased firearm, shotguns, by 2 to 1, according to NSSF [National Shooting Sports Foundation].”
[nativounit]
Gun sales through the first eight months of this year totaled 27,841,219, compared to 26,756,487 in the same period last year. This makes it the largest first eight months of the year figure since sales were first recorded in 1998.

The state with the most gun sales through the first eight months was Illinois at 7,134,095. The state has only 4% of the population but accounted for 26% of gun sales for the period. In second place, Kentucky had 2,395,658 sales in the first eight months of 2021. That is over 8% of the guns sold nationwide, even though the state has only 1.3% of the U.S. population.

Here are the states and territories ranked by gun sales through August:

Illinois: 7,134,045
Kentucky: 2,359,658
Indiana: 1,363,127
Texas: 1,342,221
Florida: 1,180,925
California: 1,007,251
Pennsylvania: 966,950
Utah: 829,624
Michigan: 677,525
Tennessee: 659,169
Alabama: 647,523
Minnesota: 644,447
Ohio: 588,140
Georgia: 574,331
North Carolina: 550,432
Wisconsin: 519,645
Washington: 491,867
Virginia: 443,429
Colorado: 432,423
Missouri: 430,098
Arizona: 398,289
South Carolina: 335,589
New York: 313,077
Oregon: 309,043
Oklahoma: 277,119
Louisiana: 267,015
Mississippi: 211,870
Connecticut: 198,404
Arkansas: 193,661
Iowa: 192,252
Maryland: 189,066
Idaho: 187,020
Massachusetts: 184,223
New Jersey: 167,241
Kansas: 153,687
West Virginia: 148,903
New Mexico: 134,043
Nevada: 133,544
Montana: 106,711
New Hampshire: 105,513
Maine: 83,198
South Dakota: 71,157
Nebraska: 62,329
Alaska: 62,133
Wyoming: 56,778
North Dakota: 53,930
Delaware: 47,883
Puerto Rico: 47,349
Vermont: 34,990
Rhode Island: 27,587
Hawaii: 11,433
District of Columbia: 7,954
Guam: 2,957
Virgin Islands: 1,462
Mariana Islands: 198

Click here to read about U.S. gun sales reaching 400 million.
[wallst_email_signup]

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.