Black Friday breaks FBI record for number of gun background checks in a day

The FBI conducted two background checks per second on Black Friday

The record was last broken after the Sandy Hook school shooting in Connecticut in 2012 (Getty Images)

Black Friday is best known for breaking sales records.

But this year, the day marked a new record for the FBI - on the number of firearms background checks processed in a day.

A record 185,345 background checks were processed by the FBI on November 27, or the equivalent of two per seond. That's 5 per cent higher than the number of checks performed on Black Friday in 2014.

This isn't a measure of how many people actually went out and bought a gun on Black Friday, but it is used to gauge intent in the firearms industry.

The record was last broken after the Sandy Hook school shooting in Connecticut in 2012, when 20 children and six adults were shot to death. The week after the tragedy almost a million people registered for background checks with the FBI in order to get a licence to carry a gun.

Black Friday marked another shooting in the US after a gunman killed three and wounded nine at a Planned Parenthood office in Colorado.

The checks were introduced in 1998 as part of the Brady Hangun Violence Prevention Act.