FBI gun background checks (NICS)

Major League strikeouts and FBI gun background checks, both climbing. Two American institutions whose annual totals only seem to go up. The pitch and the purchase, on the same upward path for unrelated reasons.

MLB strikeouts per season climbed from about 32,000 in 2005 to over 41,000 by 2022 as bullpens specialised, four-seam velocity rose, and analytics rewrote how counts were managed. FBI NICS background checks grew from about 9 to over 31 million per year in the same window as concealed-carry expansions, post-2020 first-time-buyer surge, and election-cycle demand spikes lifted volume. Two completely unrelated lines sharing a window because the same eighteen years scaled both an analytics-optimised baseball trend and an unrelated firearms-ownership pattern.

Two American counts that mostly know how to go up. Different fields, same kind of compounding.