AR-15s, Shopping Carts and Gun Ownership in America

Update: December 2015 and 2015 the year broke records which rendered my 2.3M projection for December short. 3.3M NICS  checks were completed for December 2015 bring the yearly totally 23M. Both numbers are records. I will update my projected  December data at some point. - RMF

Last week's cover for the "New Yorker" shows a happy, clean cut, young couple picking up their AR-15 (?) with their milk and hand grenades in their shopping cart at a local super mart.  2.2M NICS FBI  firearm checks were completed in Novermber 2015. After the December totals come in, it looks like we will have over 23M NICS checks for 2015, an all time annual record. Ironically, the day of the San Bernardino shooting (12/2), the NYT announced we broke a record for single day guns sales on the last Black Friday. If we don't already, we probably now have more firearms in America than cars. This would make sense because more people now die from firearms than car accidents in America.  I made a quick projection of the 221M NICS gun checks in America for the last 17 years. Between 2013 - 2015, 29% of all gun checks for the last 17 years will have been processed. I projected December 2015 at 2.3M.:

 (21093273 + 20968547 + (19827376 + 2300000)) / (222363898 - 892840)

2013 + 2014 + projected(2015)  / (eighteen year total  - first incomplete year)

[1] 0.2898311

For the three years 2013 - 2015, there will be (projected) 64,189,196 (~64M) NICS FBI gun checks processed. If all of those checks were approved, that three year total would be equivalent to 20% of our 315M population.  More data on NICS Operations can be found here

This is a (table) matrix from the data found here.  December 2015 data projected. Click to enlarge tables and charts.