Walk into your local gun shop and you’re likely to be greeted by some of the hardest working salesmen and women in America. On Black Friday alone Gun dealers flooded the FBI with background check requests for prospective hand gun and long gun buyers, smashing the previous record by more than 30%. Deputy Assistant FBI Director Jerry Pender said the checks, required by federal law, surged to nearly 130,000 during the day, far surpassing the previous high of 97,848 on Black Friday of 2008. The actual number of firearms sold is likely much higher because multiple firearms can be included in a transaction by a single buyer. The FBI does not track actual gun sales.

Gun buyers are more diverse than ever. This however is not the kind of diversity the anti-gun left is happy about. Young professionals, people starting families and women, in greater numbers than ever, are purchasing guns. Dennis Henigan, acting president of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, said he was “skeptical” of the Black Friday gun surge.

Refusing to accept the reality of the trend, he said “I think there may be no real significance at all.” This of course is the same Brady Center that that in the face of gun violence, has focused it’s efforts on restricting law abiding citizens’ access to guns, rather than campaigning for tougher penalties against criminals who use guns in crimes.

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People walking the streets armed with guns must be dangerous, right? The Brady Campaign and the Violence Policy Center keep claiming that even those individuals who have legally obtained permits to carry concealed handguns are extremely dangerous. With millions of Americans already having been issued such permits from the various states, this is an important issue.

The gun control organizations have frequently made these claims in the press. The Associated Press articles by Erik Schelzig and by Jim Abrams have given extensive, uncritical coverage. Members of the gun control organizations have made these claims unchallenged on such places as Fox News and on the Huffington Post. But the gun control advocates inaccurately describe many shooting cases, choosing to ignore that the majority of incidents involve people properly defending themselves.

Over the past three years, the number of active permit holders in the United States has gone from about 5 million to more than 6.2 million today. The numbers issued by the state regulatory agencies show time after time that these permit holders abide by the law.

Take Florida, which currently has the most concealed handgun permit holders in the country and is one of the two most populous states with right-to-carry laws. Between Oct. 1, 1987, and May 31 this year, permits had been issued to 1.8 million people. On average, the permits had been held for quite a long time, well over 10 years. For all those individuals across the more than 22 years of legal carry, there were only 167 cases where the permit was revoked for a firearms related violation, or about 0.01 percent of permit holders. While the state doesn’t provide a precise breakdown of the reason for those revocations, the vast majority were apparently for people who accidentally carried their concealed handgun into a gun-free zone, such as an airport or school.

Throughout the past 30 months, beginning January 2008, only three additional permit holders have had their permit revoked for a firearms-related violation. With more than 739,000 active permit holders, that is an annual revocation rate of 0.00017 percent.

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