Just three years ago, Virginia notched more than 268,000 gun transactions in one calendar year—an average of 735 sales each day. In 2011, however, the total number of sales passed 300,000. And kept climbing.
Last year, 321,166 firearms transactions took place in Virginia—an average of roughly 880 daily sales. The record sales year was clinched with a single-month sales record of 41,957 firearms in December. Nationally, the FBI conducted more than 1.5 million background checks for firearm purchases in December.
According to numbers from the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, Virginia received nearly 2.4 million applications for firearms between 1999 and 2009. Virginia also rejected 28,120 applications during the same decade; of those applicants, 7,591 were later arrested—a number that represents 27 percent of denied applicants.