On Black Friday, holiday gun buyers broke all years' previous records.
After Thanksgiving, the FBI received 203,086 requests for background checks, according to The New York Times.
The FBI stack of requests tallied the highest ever in a single day, topping last year's Black Friday high of 185,713 requests. And that wasn't even a full accounting of guns purchased, since an FBI background check looks just at one buyer, who may be making multiple gun purchases. Plus, no checks are required for private sales.
But it doesn't have to be this way.
Gun owners can take advantage of police-sponsored gun buy-backs like those in New Haven, Conn., and San Francisco - just to name two cities. There unwanted guns can be turned in for another kind of Christmas present - gift cards.
And, closer to home, Chattanooga's former mayor and now U.S. Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., last week co-sponsored a bill intended to strengthen the background check system. That bill, the Fix NICS bill, was introduced by Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, a week after a shooter in Sutherland Springs, Texas, attacked a Baptist church on Nov. 5, killing 26 and injuring 20 others. The shooter should have been prohibited by law from purchasing or possessing firearms because of a domestic violence conviction in a court-martial while in the U.S. Air Force, but the Air Force failed to record the conviction in a database used by the National Instant Criminal Background Check System to flag prohibited purchases.
Under current law, a federally licensed gun dealer must perform an FBI background check on anyone purchasing a firearm by running the name of that person through NICS, which relies on information provided by state governments and federal agencies. The bill Corker has co-sponsored would require those entities to develop plans within one year to ensure coordination and reporting of relevant records.
In other words, this is a bill that seeks a plan for the government to comply with its existing law.
Well, duh.
An optimist would say it's a start, but the reality is that Corker is just tap-dancing between logic and Second Amendment hard-liners.
"I have long supported improving how our background check system operates, while at the same time ensuring that Second Amendment rights are not infringed upon," he said. "The Fix NICS Act meets that test, and I am proud to be a cosponsor of this important piece of legislation."
But in New Haven - just a hop, skip and jump from Newtown where families recently marked the fifth year since the massacre of 20 schoolchildren and six teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School - police over the weekend put what The New York Times called a "biblical twist" to America's avid gun culture.
Officers staged a no-questions-asked gun buyback in which prison inmate volunteers will transform surrendered weapons into gardening tools for schools so students can plant and harvest vegetables for soup kitchens. Those turning in guns got their own Christmas cheer - gift cards worth $25, $50, $100 and $200, depending on the size of the gun.
Over the past six years, New Haven police have collected nearly 700 guns in buybacks, run at government expense, in which the firearms were broken apart and discarded.
A similar crowd-funded program in San Francisco netted plenty of guns and even a bazooka.
But don't look for a grand gun swords-into-plowshares trade here in the Volunteer and Peach states, despite the fact that more than 20 young men and women were shot to death in Chattanooga this year - most in gang-related incidents and by people they knew, according to The Toll, maintained on the Chattanooga Times Free Press website.
Tennessee and Georgia are two of at least 11 states that have passed National Rifle Association-backed laws that either encourage or require police departments to sell seized or recovered guns, thus putting them right back on the streets. Some of the laws (such as Tennessee's) even ban law enforcement from destroying guns altogether, according to a 2015 CNNMoney analysis of state laws.
In Tennessee, the NRA even gave out the office phone number and email of the state's then-governor, Phil Bredesen, urging NRA members to demand he support a bill that banned the destruction of confiscated weapons. CNN reported that Bredesen signed the bill into law on the same day a mentally ill man ambushed Pentagon police officers with a handgun originally confiscated and sold by the Memphis Police Department.
And that wasn't the only time Tennessee's forced-sale gun law backfired. In Las Vegas, a court security officer was killed and a deputy U.S. marshal was injured when a man stormed into the city's courthouse with a shotgun previously sold by a Memphis, Tenn.-area sheriff's office, CNN reported.
On average, 93 Americans are killed with guns every day. And each year, police officers seize tens of thousands of rifles, shotguns, machine guns and other firearms from criminals across the country.
Research shows a 1 percent reduction in gun ownership in a community correlates to a .9 percent reduction in gun deaths, according to GunByGun, the San Francisco-based nonprofit organization that helped fund the San Francisco buyback. GunByGun was founded in 2013 by a tech entrepreneur who lost his father to gun violence at the age of 10.
"We believe in common-sense solutions that prevent guns from falling into the wrong hands. We're not here to debate about the 2nd Amendment; we're here to take meaningful action towards preventing gun violence," according to the group's website.
Here, here.