It looks like Fox News is confirming that gun sales have increased dramatically. Reporter Nick Giampia interviewed gun store owner Jay Wallace about the recent surge where Wallace made the claim that they are selling more than 15 rifles per hour. Wallace was also quoted as saying sales have “really kicked up”.

Fox also reports in a separate article that sales among the LGBT community is also on the rise. Given the recent blow to the LGBT community I am really glad to see more people becoming interested in firearms. Fox also spoke with a national gun club with strong roots in the LGBT community, The Pink Pistols, who saw its membership more than double in one day.

TFB also checked with some of our sources in the industry and found that many distributors are running as much as a week behind in fulfilling dealer orders. We spoke with several large firearm retailer websites that have indicated that their order volume is between 3 and 7 times over the normal volume, with more than one expressing that they saw sales patterns very similar to this in 2008, 2012, and in 2015. One dealer even reported selling 7,000 AR-15s per day since Sunday, a massive increase over normal sales patterns.

The last several panics that have hit our industry hurt a lot of shooters both new and old financially and made getting out to the range a rather expensive prospect. Shooting in competition or even getting the ammo needed for testing firearms for TFB became almost impossible.

Could this be the start of a panic? I sure hope not but several of our industry sources think it may be.

Phil Note: Of course nobody can be sure we’re on the brink of another panic buying frenzy. One thing to keep in mind is every time we have a tragedy of the type seen in Orlando gun sales go up for s short time. Like Patrick I hope it doesn’t come to that again. At this point it doesn’t seem warranted.Only time will tell.