Some on the left often refer to Florida as the “Gunshine State,” to play off its actual nickname. But Florida is actually lagging most of the country, at least so far during 2022, in the rate of new gun sales.
Last week, the website The Center Square mined data from a few sources – the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, the FBI background-check system, the Small Arms Survey, and the Firearm Industry Trade Association – to determine how each state stacks up in gun sales.
In Florida, 748,659 guns were sold in the first six months of 2022.
That ranked fourth in the nation in total sales – behind Kentucky and Illinois, each of which has sold more than 2 million guns in 2022, as well as Texas, which reported about 856,000.
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Yet in Florida, that came to 3,529 guns sold for every 100,000 people. That was the 16th lowest rate among the states.
Of interest is where people can obtain those guns. The gun-selling capital of Florida is Orlando, which had 92 gun stores.
But that was a small fraction compared to other metrics.
For one thing, Houston had the most gun sellers among each state’s city with the most gun stores. Houston has 308, nearly doubling the runner-up, Phoenix, at 164.
But when it comes to the highest ratio of gun stores relative to the total in each state, Honolulu, Anchorage, and Las Vegas led the pack, as each had 20 percent or more of the total gun sellers in the entire state.
Orlando, in contrast, has just 3 percent of the total in Florida.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Free Press.
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