Gun sales in Missouri on the rise in wake of Michael Brown killing
Uptick in violence expected as public turns to weapons as means of self-protection
At County Guns, just outside Ferguson, Mo., customers have been looking to buy that first handgun or maybe a backup Glock for the car or a Mossberg shotgun for home protection.
“We have sold a boatload of guns in the last few months,” said owner Adam Weinstein.
Other gun shops near Ferguson have reported similar firearm frenzies. By every measure, Missouri’s gun sales have spiked since Aug. 9, when a white policeman shot and killed Michael Brown, a unarmed black teenager, in Ferguson, an incident that touched off continued protests and sporadic violence — and fed fear about personal protection.
Many people turned to guns. FBI firearm background checks in Missouri jumped 16 per cent — by more than 26,000 — in the August-November period compared to the same four-month period in 2013. At the same time, background checks nationwide were flat.
In St. Louis County, where Ferguson is located, concealed weapon permit applications more than doubled in the final six months of 2014 compared to 2013, growing by nearly 1,800. And these statistics only hint at the true size of the surge: Gun sales between private citizens in Missouri don’t require a permit or background check, so they occur in the shadows.
Today, without doubt, there are many more firearms in and around Ferguson. More handguns. More shotguns. More assault-style rifles.
So what will the effect of all these new firearms be?
“I would expect some uptick in gun violence,” said Daniel Webster, professor and director of Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research.
He doesn’t know how soon it will happen. Or how big the increase will be. But he believes the additional gun sales will have tragic repercussions.
Webster has studied gun violence for years. He found that Missouri’s repeal in 2007 of a law requiring a permit for handgun purchases contributed to a 14-per-cent increase in the state’s murder rate, even as the national murder rate fell. Missouri has some of the most relaxed firearm laws in the nation.
“More guns in a fairly unregulated environment make it not hard at all to see how problems can occur at some point later on,” Webster said.
Connecting gun sales to gun violence is difficult. (And controversial, as gun-rights advocates will note.) One of the few studies to look at the topic is a 1991 analysis that found a connection between firearm availability and homicide rates over a 45year period in Detroit.
But already there are signs of increased gun crime in the St. Louis region
St. Louis City finished 2014 with its highest murder rate in five years, with 159 killings. And aggravated assaults involving guns were up 9 per cent from 2013. The city police chief told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that he believed one reason for the increase was what he called the “Ferguson effect,” the belief that criminals were emboldened and police fatigued.
St. Louis County police investigated 30 killings in 2014, compared to 20 in 2013.
Webster said gun crime would still be expected to increase even if most of the increase in gun sales is to lawabiding owners. More guns means more opportunities for them to end up in the wrong hands.