As you may or may not know, The Truth About Guns (TTAG) is a young ‘un. We went live last month with a post about guns and The Red Lobster chain. Although we’ve published 193 posts in the last 37 days, as the Brits would say, we’re still in short pants. In our now-endless search for bloggable material, TTAG turns to Google, Alltop and all gun blogs great and small. Gunpundit is an excellent source for fresh media meat on the firearm front. I followed their lead to the latest NICS stats. No, not the Network of International Christian Schools or the National Institute for Computational Sciences. The National Instant Criminal Background Check System. According to the FBI, their database of firearms background checks “is all about saving lives and protecting people from harm.” And, by implication, nothing else. Got it? While the feds are required by law to dump the data within 24 hours (for now), they generate some primo stats, man. Feel free to crunch the numbers for yourself (click here). Time-challenged readers can make the jump for TTAG’s bullet points [sick] on this year’s numbers for January and February 2010. Meanwhile, thanks for being there; wherever “there” is.
* The Mariana Islands racked-up the least legal gun sales of any locality monitored by the feds: none
* Here on the mainland, our nation’s capital led the way in gun buying leastlessness: 50 sales
* Of all these American states that aren’t Hawaii (1655) or smaller than a postage stamp (RI at 2586, including one from yours truly), Delaware sits at the bottom of the gun sales league table, just under-pipping Vermont at the post (3025 vs. 3729)
* As our headlines suggests, Kentuckians topped the charts. Ballastic Bluegrassers took home 412,976 guns In the last two months. That’s slightly more than two-and-a-half times the number of firearms than runner up Texas (161,636), and a whole heck of a lot more than the next in line, California (127,319)
* Chicago gun ban? Illinois residents purchased 114,337 guns since the New Year began (with a bang?).
* My math sucks, but I reckon Kentucky gun sales are up a hair over 21 percent compared to the same period last year (412,976 vs. 340,139).
* My math sucks, but I figure Texas gun sales slipped 12.5 percent compared to the same period last year (161,636 vs. 183,027.
