The gun industry added 24,763 jobs to the U.S. economy because of the unprecedented surge of gun sales in 2015, according to an estimate by the National Shooting Sports Foundation.

The economic gain from the “wages, revenues, benefits, and taxes” associated with gun industry jobs boosted the economy by nearly $50 billion and expanded the sector’s role in the national economy by roughly 15 percent compared to 2014, says the NSSF estimate.

According to PIX 11, the jobs added in 2015 were “manufacturing and retail jobs for guns, ammunition and related supplies, like hunting gear.” The best states for such jobs were “Texas, with about 21,386, followed by California, Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina and Missouri.”

Breitbart News previously reported that the number of background checks for gun sales began breaking records in 2015 during the month of May.

Records were then broken in June, July, August, all the the way through March 2016, which was the 11th consecutive month of record background checks for gun sales. The streak for record background checks also included Black Friday 2015, which surpassed all previous Black Friday records. A staggering 185,345 background checks were performed on Black Friday alone.

According to FBI figures, a total of 23,141,970 background checks were performed in the U.S. during 2015. That is over 2,000,000 checks higher than the previous record of 21,093,273, set in 2013.

AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.