Background checks blocked nearly twice as many gun sales in 2020 as in the year before, FBI numbers provided to The Associated Press show. About 42% of those denials were because the would-be buyers had felony convictions on their records.

The number of people stopped from buying guns through the U.S. background check system hit an all-time high of more than 300,000 last year amid a surge of firearm sales, according to new records obtained by the group Everytown for Gun Safety.

Denial data is released by the FBI, but the information collected by Everytown breaks it down by year and includes data from states such as California and Florida, which conduct their own background checks. //

However, let’s also remember that there were almost 40 million NICS checks conducted in 2020. That was almost a third more than in 2019, which wasn’t a bad year for NICS checks by any stretch of the imagination. Now, many of those weren’t for firearm purchases, but a lot of them were.