Signs are everywhere as to the mood of everyday Americans when it comes to guns.
Ammo and guns are flying off store shelves at literally record-making rates.
It’s so bad that the National Instant Check System, the FBI-administered government agency tasked with handling the gun purchaser background checks, suffered volume-related outages on Black Friday.
Imagine if your constitutional right to read a book or express yourself… Or your right to go to the church of your choosing… Or your right to vote… was subject to intermittent “outages”?
If you’re alive and breathing, you should be incensed.
BREWER, Maine (Bangor Daily News) — Sometime early on Black Friday, the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System, or NICS, went down and stopped all gun sales, Bangor-area gun dealers said.
High call volumes caused “intermittent outages” in the system, an FBI spokesman confirmed Friday afternoon.
“It means we can’t sell no damn guns,” Rick Lozier, a manager at Van Raymond Outfitters in Brewer, said at about 1:15 p.m.
“NICS is down, which means nobody is selling guns right now, on Black Friday,” said Ralph McLeod, owner of Buyers Guns in Holden.
Those who want to purchase a gun in the U.S. must fill out and sign FBI paperwork. The gun dealer then calls NICS to see if the buyer is barred by federal law from possessing firearms.
“The message is they are going to be down for a few hours,” McLeod said at about noon Friday.