FBI gun background checks (NICS)

As Americans have submitted to more FBI gun background checks, Alibaba's Singles Day sales in China have grown with almost identical enthusiasm, producing a correlation that connects American firearms culture to Chinese e-commerce with the arbitrary precision of two trends that share nothing except a calendar. The coefficient is 0.958 across thirteen years, which is strong enough to make you wonder whether Jack Ma and the NRA have more in common than either would care to admit. They do not. The data does not care.

NICS background checks grew from about 14 million in 2009 to over 38 million by 2021, driven by political anxiety cycles (checks spike during election years and after mass shootings), expanded concealed carry permitting, and the pandemic-era surge in first-time gun buyers. Alibaba's Singles Day (November 11) sales grew from about 1 billion dollars to over 85 billion during the same period, powered by China's growing middle class, mobile payment infrastructure, and the gamification of online shopping into a national spectacle. Both metrics are measures of consumer behavior intensifying during the same global economic expansion, in two countries that were simultaneously getting wealthier and spending that wealth in culturally specific ways—guns in America, electronics in China.

Thirteen years of gun checks and Singles Day sales rising together is a study in how the same global economy produces wildly different consumption patterns in different cultures, all of which correlate beautifully and mean nothing to each other. America buys guns, China buys gadgets, and the scatter plot draws a perfect line through both. The shopping cart has no nationality.