The coronavirus pandemic, along with the regular protests and riots in American cities, fueled a buying binge of guns across the nation. The uncertainty of 2020 spurred unprecedented gun sales in the United States, including a wave of new gun owners, especially among minorities and women. This from theblaze.com.
Last year ended up being the highest gun sale year since the current record-keeping system went into effect, according to USA Today. Gun sales skyrocketed 40% in 2020 compared to 2019, with a record 39,695,315 background checks conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The gun buying surge has continued into 2021 in a major way. In January, which is when Joe Biden was inaugurated as president, U.S. gun sales soared 60% to 4,137,480, the largest single month since figures started to be recorded in 1998.
“There was a surge in purchasing unlike anything we’ve ever seen,” Dr. Garen J. Wintemute, a gun researcher at the University of California at Davis, said. “Usually it slows down. But this just kept going.”
But the gun spending spree isn’t reserved for only gun enthusiasts who are stocking up in fear of a Democratic president who has already proclaimed that he will sign an executive order on gun control, which would roll back Second Amendment rights. Plus, Democrats previously introduced a bill to create a mandatory and publicly accessible registry listing the names of gun owners, how many guns they have, and where they keep their firearms.
“Not only were people who already had guns buying more, but people who had never owned one were buying them too,” the New York Times reported. “New preliminary data from Northeastern University and the Harvard Injury Control Research Center show that about a fifth of all Americans who bought guns last year were first-time gun owners.”
The research found that new gun owners were less likely to be the typical demographic of white males: Half were women, one-fifth were black, and one-fifth were Hispanic.
Stephen Gutowski, founder of The Reload, a publication on America’s firearms policy, told NPR, “I think it’s actually a – part of a larger trend. We’ve seen this going on for over a decade now. Gun owners have become more suburban. They’ve become less white and less male and younger over that time period. And what you saw last year was just an acceleration of that.”
The General Social Survey, a public opinion poll conducted by a research center at the University of Chicago, found that 39% of American households own guns, up from 32% in 2016.
Charlton Heston, who was president of the National Rifle Association from 1998 to 2003, spoke at the group’s national gathering in Charlotte NC in May 2002. At that time the actor described gun owners as patriots and said owning a gun was “something that gives the most common man the most uncommon of freedoms.”
As the crowd cheered, Heston then raised a replica of a Revolutionary War-era flintlock rifle and delivered a warning in his thundering baritone to anyone who would try to take his guns away: “From my cold, dead hands!”
It was with those words that Heston dramatized the belief that an individual’s right to own guns is enshrined in the Second Amendment. The amendment declares that a “well-regulated Militia” is necessary for the security of a free state,” and that “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Gun rights supporters say the Founding Fathers created the amendment so that citizens could protect their homes from tyrannical governments abroad and at home.
