FBI gun background checks (NICS)

There is something deeply humbling about discovering that Americans purchase board games at precisely the same rate they conduct background checks for firearms, as though the nation has collectively decided that every gun purchase requires a corresponding investment in Catan or Ticket to Ride. One might have expected these two datasets to move in opposite directions, perhaps with some cosmic irony built in, but instead they have simply decided to hold hands and skip down the timeline together like the world's most unsettling couple. It turns out the universe does not traffic in irony at all, only in bewildering synchronicity.

The most likely explanation is almost certainly the most boring one: both reflect underlying economic confidence and discretionary spending patterns among roughly the same demographic over the same fourteen-year period. When Americans feel prosperous enough to buy guns, they also feel prosperous enough to buy Gloomhaven, which costs roughly the same amount and makes about as much sense to the average person who finds themselves owning either one. Between 2010 and 2023, the US board game market grew from approximately 700 million dollars to 2.5 billion dollars—a number that feels genuinely large until you realise it is roughly equivalent to what Americans spend annually on pizza toppings—and this growth tracks almost eerily with increases in background check volume, both rising through the 2010s recession recovery, both weathering the pandemic bump, both following the shape of a nation slowly, cautiously learning to spend money again.

What we have here is less a prediction about human nature and more a reminder that nearly everything Americans do moves together in great, tidal waves of synchronisation, driven by confidence, circumstance, and whether the local multiplex is showing anything worth watching. The board game surge and the background check surge are almost certainly not speaking to each other, but rather to the same parent variable: a slowly recovering economy and a nation with disposable income. Perhaps that should comfort us, or perhaps it should deepen the mystery.