The hunting season rush probably helps push early-season sales numbers. Photo: Zac K. To paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of the firearms industry’s decline have been greatly exaggerated. While some months do see firearms sales lower than their heights during the COVID spending mania, the NICS numbers for September show that we are still seeing strong action, with more than a million guns sold again. Spending big bucks @ TFB:The Rising Cost of Ammo, or, Some Things Never Change The Rimfire Report: Is Match Grade .22LR Worth the Cost? STIMULATE YOURSELF: TFB's Guide To Stimulus Check Spending BUY BUY BUY BUY BUY NICS tells the taleNICS stands for National Instant Criminal Background Check System, an FBI database that licensed gun dealers must use to determine whether or not a potential purchaser is legally barred from buying a gun. Obviously, if you know how many NICS checks happen in a month, you have a very rough idea how many guns were sold in that month—but it’s not quite that simple. Private sales between individuals obviously don’t rely on the NICS database, and in some jurisdictions, authorities require NICS queries for a concealed carry permit or other checks. Or a NICS query could cover multiple firearm purchases. Some jurisdictions use other systems instead of NICS. So, using the FBI’s NICS numbers to definitely state how many guns were sold is kind of like playing Whose Line Is It Anyway? … as Drew Carey used to say, “where the points are made up and the rules don’t matter.”With that in mind, the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) takes those FBI numbers and compares it to their own member businesses’ statistics, and gives us an adjusted figure. This should be more accurate. Although the numbers are slightly lower than last September, there are still lots of guns being sold in the U.S.A. Photo: Zac K. September’s NICS numbersThe NSSF-adjusted numbers for September 2026 show firearms sales numbers of 1,152,077. That’s a slide from September, 2025, when the NSSF number was 1,179,424 gun sales; but still, the NSSF numbers are well over a million firearms sold. And when you compare all of the third-quarter sales of 2026, the NSSF’s number of 3,329,270 gun sales is a 2.5 increase over 2025, when that number was 3,249,497. People are buying suppressors, a lot of suppressors, these days. [Zac K.] In September, according to the NSSF numbers, Texas had the most NICS queries, followed by Florida, California, Pennsylvania and Virginia. Texas also led the country in NFA checks, followed by Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. In case you had any doubt as to the prevalence of suppressor sales, the NSSF says September 2026 had 149,614 NFA checks, more than double the number of September 2025, which saw 65,273 NFA checks. Suppressors are driving those figures, now that there’s no punitive tax associated with their sale.