New buyers drive gun sales surge
Fears of rising crime, shifting politics spark wave of first-timers
Gun sales are spiking in Connecticut and around the nation, a buying spree driven by fears of rising crime, a political shift in Washington and the social upheaval brought on by the pandemic.
“People are jumping at the opportunity to buy more guns,” said Rob Pizzi Jr., owner of Central Connecticut Arms in Portland, one of the state’s largest gun shops.
Preliminary numbers provided by the Connecticut State Police show 169,113 gun sale authorizations in 2020, up from 126,458 in 2019 — an increase more than 33%. So far this year, sales are continuing to increase as the state has received 94,534 authorizations, which must be filled out before the sale or transfer of any firearm.
First-time gun buyers are a big part of the surge: The state has issued 31,170 new gun permits from Jan. 1 through early July, according to the preliminary data. That’s more than double the number of permits processed in all of 2019.
That’s true across the country as well: A survey of firearms retailers conducted by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, an industry group based in Newtown, found that 40% of customers from January through April 2020 were firsttime gun buyers. And 40% of those new buyers were female.
“The fastest-growing demographic of new gun owners are women,” said Holly Sullivan, president of the Connecticut Citizens Defense League, a nonprofit group that advocates on behalf of gun owners. “By and large, the biggest growth is among women, and that’s consistent nationally and here in the state.”
“This is where people like me start getting concerned about where we are heading,” Dr. Ajay Kumar, chief clinical officer at Hartford HealthCare, said Thursday. “This is a time for us to be proud of where we are on the vaccination side but at the same time to be cautious, especially for those who are not vaccinated.”
Lamont has said he has no plans to restore Connecticut’s mask mandate or implement other new restrictions. And experts say the state’s high rate of vaccination should protect it against the type of full-on surge occurring elsewhere.
And yet as Connecticut’s numbers increase, some residents can’t help but think: Here we go again.
‘A more cautious place’
Jaime Green, a freelance writer from New Britain, was about to take her 2-year-old son to the supermarket Tuesday when she began to have second thoughts. She knew COVID-19 cases were rising in the area, and with her son not eligible for vaccination she decided not to take any risks.
“It just doesn’t seem worth taking an unvaccinated kid into public places where I can’t control who’s wearing a mask and who’s vaccinated,” she said. “I feel like we’re moving into a more cautious place.”
Many Connecticut residents have continued to live this summer without much concern for COVID19, eating indoors in restaurants and congregating in large groups regardless of the delta variant. But others, including some vaccinated people like Green, have pulled back in the face of increased risk.
Tyler Morrissey, a UConn MBA student who lives in South Windsor, said after months of caution he had begun to ease up this summer, occasionally running into a drugstore or grocery store without a mask. As the delta variant has taken hold and Connecticut’s numbers have risen, however, that has changed.
“Now I’m starting to rethink that, where even if I’m just running in real quick I should wear a mask,” he said.
Morrissey said he, like many Connecticut residents, is sometimes frustrated by the lack of clarity about what precautions are and aren’t necessary. The World Health Organization recommends masks indoors even for vaccinated people but the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention doesn’t. Some local municipalities, including Los Angeles County and several towns on Cape Cod, have begun requiring masks in public, while other places merely recommend them.
In Connecticut, vaccinated people are not required to wear masks in most settings, though many health officials say they continue to do so anyway.
Katie Harris, a Chester native and mother of three young children, said this muddled messaging, and lack of enforcement of existing rules, can be particularly complicated for parents of unvaccinated kids.
“I feel like kids are kind of the forgotten ones in all of this,” Harris said. “I go to Costco and I see families and all of their kids are without masks, and it blows my mind. I don’t understand how there’s not some sort of guidance or guidelines on kids wearing masks.”
Michael Love, a software developer who lives with his wife and two kids in Wilton, said the emergence of the delta variant has caused him to hold off on indoor dining and to scale down some vacation plans that included indoor activities.
Still, he said, he feels much more comfortable than he did last year, when no one had been vaccinated and the country still didn’t quite know which interventions worked best against COVID-19.
“It’s disappointing, but we’re still better off than we were. I still feel more relaxed than I was a year ago. I don’t have to worry about my elderly parents getting [COVID] anymore,” Love said. “So it’s 80% of what I hoped the summer would be, even if it’s not 100%.”
Kumar, from Hartford HealthCare, said he hasn’t dramatically changed his behavior as a result of the delta variant — in part because he never stopped taking precautions in the first place.
“Personally, I do wear a mask when I’m in a setting unfamiliar to me. I do continue to take precautions with social distancing and washing and all those things,” he said. “I have not gotten relaxed on that.”
‘Cautious optimism’
But even as COVID-19 cases rise in Connecticut and elsewhere, experts say vaccinated people shouldn’t panic.
“I’m still maintaining cautious optimism,” Dr. David Banach, an epidemiologist at UConn Health, said Wednesday. “It does seem like the primary impact of the delta variant is on non-fully vaccinated individuals. There are breakthrough cases occurring in the community, but they seem less severe.”
In the United Kingdom, where the delta variant has been dominant for weeks, COVID-19 cases have increased sharply but hospitalizations have not. So far, the same has been true in Connecticut, where the rise in hospitalizations has been slow, marginal and concentrated among unvaccinated people.
Dr. Jim Cardon, chief clinical integration officer at Hartford HealthCare, said he sympathizes with Connecticut residents who had been ready to put the pandemic behind them but that they shouldn’t lose sight of the state’s progress.
“I think that for a while we may still have this three steps forward, one step back kind of stuff,” Cardon said. “It’s disappointing that we can’t make it go away and shut the door on this, but at the same time, although we’re seeing an increase in positivity, our hospitalizations are remaining relatively flat.”
As for unvaccinated people, the message from health officials has been clear and consistent: get vaccinated.
“It’s not a surprise that we have this little bump in the road,” Dr. Deidre Gifford, acting state commissioner of public health, said Wednesday. “But we’re very lucky that we have three highly effective vaccines, and that is the way that we’re going to get to the end of the pandemic: for almost everyone to get vaccinated.”