Amtrak ridership

As Amtrak ridership has fluctuated, FBI gun background checks have moved in the opposite direction with a correlation so negative it suggests that Americans who ride trains do not buy guns and Americans who buy guns do not ride trains. The coefficient is -0.934 across nine years, during which these two activities have traced each other's mirror image with the precision of trends that represent two very different Americas that share the same ZIP codes but apparently not the same hobbies.

Amtrak ridership peaked at about 32 million in 2019, collapsed to 12 million in 2020, and was recovering through 2023. FBI background checks surged from about 23 million in 2015 to over 38 million in 2020, driven by pandemic anxiety, social unrest, and election-year fears, then declined somewhat as conditions stabilized. The inverse pattern is largely a pandemic artifact: when people stopped traveling (Amtrak down), they started buying guns (NICS up), and as travel resumed, gun sales moderated. The pandemic compressed opposing behaviors into the same timeline—shelter-in-place drove gun purchases up and train ridership down, then the recovery reversed both. Without 2020, the correlation would be considerably weaker.

Nine years of trains and guns moving in opposite directions is a story that the pandemic wrote in particularly dramatic ink. Americans stopped moving and started arming, then started moving again and slowed the arming. The correlation is less a structural relationship and more a portrait of a single disruption expressing itself through two very different consumer behaviors. The train departs, the background check clears, and 2020 remains the explanation for everything.