Tallying America’s fascination with AR-15-style rifles

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About every nine seconds in 2020, a rifle was either manufactured in or imported to the United States. It was the equivalent of a new rifle for every 100 U.S. residents. And, remarkably, it was a slower year than normal.

The massacre of 21 people at an elementary school in Texas this week — 19 of them schoolchildren attending class — has again prompted discussion of the country’s fixation on firearms. That means talking about rifles, particularly the AR-15 variants that have so often been used in mass shooting events. The weapon used in Uvalde was an AR-15 variant; so was the one used in Buffalo less than two weeks before. More than 30 people were killed in those two incidents.

As it turns out, a national focus on AR-15-style weapons is perhaps unexpectedly a key driver of sales of the weapons.

For years, weapons manufacturers in the United States produced about 3 million firearms a year, about half of which were rifles. The twin emergence of the recession 15 years ago and the election of President Barack Obama — who pledged to implement new restrictions on gun sales — spurred a surge in demand and, therefore, in both manufacturing and importation.

To a large extent, this demand was stoked specifically by organizations like the National Rifle Association and its self-serving insistence that the Second Amendment was under attack, even when it wasn’t.

In 2020, about 3.6 million rifles were manufactured or imported, with about 100,000 exported out of the country. That includes all rifles, like traditional hunting rifles. It also includes AR-15-style weapons, ones that the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) calls “modern sporting rifles.” A 2019 report from that group tracked the manufacture of such weapons through 2017.

Between 1990 and 2017, about 17.7 million such weapons were manufactured or imported on net, no doubt why the NSSF estimated that more than 16 million “modern sporting rifles” were in circulation by 2018.

You’ll notice that the number of these weapons produced began to increase rapidly after 2005. That’s in large part because the federal assault weapons ban expired. While the NSSF is quick to point out that the AR-15 is not an “assault weapon,” some models of the weapons were barred by the federal law’s provisions. After the law expired in 2004 without being renewed, the market boomed.

Another way to understand firearm sales is to look at federal background-check data. Most gun sales in the United States require a check conducted by the FBI, which produces monthly data on the number of checks conducted. Over the past 20 years, the number of annual checks has surged.

(These aren’t all new-sale checks. In Kentucky, for example, most gun owners have monthly background checks, driving up the number of checks in that state. The graphs below generally separate out Kentucky for that reason.)

But as those checks have surged, the percentage conducted for rifle sales has dropped. In 2000, more than half of background checks were for rifles. Now, less than a quarter are.

As you might expect, then, the number of background checks conducted for rifles each year has remained fairly flat. There are exceptions: There were surges in background checks for rifles in 2012 and 2013 and then again in 2020 and 2021. More on that in a moment.

As the NSSF is quick to point out, these weapons are not fully automatic. But there are fully automatic machine guns in the United States, weapons that need to be registered with the federal government. You may be surprised to learn that there are more than 741,000 machine guns registered in the United States, up from about 457,000 at the end of 2010.

But back to those AR-15s. As you might have gathered, it’s tricky to determine precise numbers on sales and ownership. One guide we have for interest in the weapons is Google. After all, it’s natural for those looking to buy something to go to Google and search for it, data that Google makes available through its Trends tool.

Since 2004, search interest for “buy AR-15” has risen and fallen periodically in the United States, but notice three particular points on the graph: the tallest spike, representing the monthly peak in December 2012 against which every other month is measured. There was another spike in February 2018 and a surge in the middle of 2020.

As indicated on the graph, there are reasons for all of those. That increase in 2020 mirrors the increase in background checks at the same period and stems from an increase in interest in gun ownership at the outset of the pandemic and into the summer’s unrest.

The 2012 and 2018 spikes, though, correlate to mass shooting events at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut and Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida. Both attacks involved the use of AR-15-style weapons and both spurred urgent, energetic calls for new gun regulation. As a result, new gun sales surged — even as the new regulation never manifested.

It seems likely, then, that there will be a similar surge in weapon sales if calls for new restrictions on gun ownership continue or gain traction. That, then, would be expected to once again spur more manufacturing — unless, this time, the new restrictions actually take effect.

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