US Firearm Background Checks (FBI NICS)

The FBI's National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) monthly firearm background-check counts for every U.S. state and territory, back to the system's launch in November 1998 - one of the most-watched high-frequency proxies for U.S. retail firearm demand and consumer sentiment. Parsed directly from the FBI's official monthly PDF (U.S. public domain), reconciled row-by-row against the published grand totals, and delivered as one tidy Parquet panel: 50 states + DC + Guam, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and the Northern Mariana Islands, ~330 months per state. Note the FBI's own caveat: a background check is not a one-to-one firearm sale.

What's included

• Official FBI NICS counts - U.S. public domain, fully redistributable (parsed from the FBI PDF, not a 3rd-party CSV)
• Monthly, every U.S. state + DC + 4 territories, November 1998 to present
• The headline retail firearm-demand / consumer-sentiment proxy used across economics & finance
• Row-by-row reconciled to the FBI's printed grand totals; self-refreshing monthly
• One row per state x month; joins cleanly to macro / retail / sentiment series
• Source: FBI National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) - public domain

Schema

Sample & preview

Every purchase ships as Apache Parquet with a data dictionary and the full QC report. A free sample (first rows + schema) is downloadable here - confirm fit before you buy. Source: NICS (redistributable open data; attribution passes through - see our Licence).

import pandas as pd
df = pd.read_parquet("us-firearm-background-checks_sample.parquet")
df.info()   # typed columns, gap-aware, ready to join