by Lena Howland KOAA News 5
COLORADO SPRINGS, CO – The FBI says gun sales are up across the country and are on track to break a new record, but gun shop owners say that’s not necessarily the case across Colorado.
Although gun sales are not quite near the state record yet, concealed carry permits are reaching new heights. Nearly doubling in the past year alone, more people are aiming to get these permits now than they have in three years.
“I actually had a gun unfortunately stolen from my house,” Wade Antener, a gun owner in Colorado Springs said.
It’s situations like these that may explain why concealed carry permits have doubled in the past year.
“They came in and said ‘my neighbor’s house got broken into or this vagrant threatened me, or I came home and found all of these people living in my backyard,’ it’s just story after story,” Paul Paradis, owner of Paradise Sales said.
Paradis says one out of every five handgun sales he’s made this year was for that exact reason.
“There’s been a number of petty thefts and robberies here in the West side and other parts of the city, there’s a huge number of vagrants that live off the community at large and it’s made a lot of people nervous,” he said.
Based off of data from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, the number of concealed carry permits issued so far this year, 40,000, has nearly doubled since this time last year.
Quite a different story from six years ago, when those numbers were about four times lower than they were today, at 11,000.
“I think it’s an excellent thing that people are exercising their Second Amendment rights,” Antener said.
Nationwide, the FBI says background checks conducted for gun sales have reached an all-time high. But here in Colorado, gun shop owners like Paradis say they’ve only seen a slight increase.
“It hasn’t been major, it’s not like the panic that there was a few years back,” he said.
At this time three years ago, gun sales were on track to break the state record at 250,000 approved background checks. That’s about 40,000 less than what Colorado is at right now. As of July, the state approved 208,000 background checks.
“They’re probably less when we had that large panic before the last election and then they’ve dropped off dramatically and then they’ve slowly built back up,” Paradis said.
With Election Day looming, he says he does expect these numbers to rise considerably.
Still, it’s not clear if Colorado will reach the state record of 390,000 approved background checks which was made back in 2013.
Source: KOAA News 5. See more at KOAA.com.
