Poll: Fearing unrest, Texans buying guns

As protests continue across the country, and President Donald Trump warns of rampant lawlessness should former Vice President Joe Biden win the election, gun owners are stocking up.

In Texas, fear has been a motivation for first-time gun owners, according to a poll released Sunday by the Dallas Morning News and the University of Texas at Tyler.

Just over a third of Texans polled say they own at least one gun. Some 17 percent of gun owners bought a gun within the past 90 days, and of those, more than half were first-time buyers.

The pace picked up substantially in August.

Most of the people who bought their first gun this summer bought it in the past two weeks. Of the people who bought a gun in the past 14 days, 84 percent were buying for the first time.

Almost half of the 1,150 Texas voters surveyed expect that the pandemic will lead to civil unrest. About a third own at least one gun.

“I think there is a general panic and unrest,” said poll respondent Tony Ashcraft, owner of a gun center in Pearland.

Demand by first-time gun buyers began to spike in March, said Ashcraft, who said that in six years selling guns, he’s never seen as many first-time buyers as in the past six months.

“There’s no one flavor of humanity that comes in. A big panic is panic in everybody’s mind. Everybody is worried,” he said.

The survey results bear that out.

First-time gun buyers favor Biden over Trump, in fact.

The FBI has done over 1.5 million background checks for Texas gun buyers this year — more than in all of 2019, and with four months left in 2020.

Bruce Jones of New Braunfels, a former school administrator, was one of the poll respondents who bought his first gun this year.

After serving more than 20 years in the Army, Jones said he is comfortable using a weapon, but he never felt he needed one until he moved from New Jersey to Texas this year.

He decided to buy a gun five months ago after seeing a man take out a gun and point it at a driver who cut him off on the highway.

“I purchased because everybody else has got one,” Jones said. “In case somebody tried to break into my house or injure my family, I’ve got to be able to protect myself.”

Since 1998, the FBI has recorded the highest number of background checks per day and per week in 2020. Eight of the top 10 weeks in the past 22 years were in 2020. Gun dealers surveyed by the National Shooting Sports Foundation estimated that 40 percent of their sales have been to first-time gun buyers this year.

For those surveyed, fear of the presidential election’s outcome was not a notable concern.

But Ashcraft saw purchases skyrocket in March, when the pandemic began, with another spike in June when racial tensions increased across the country. Since George Floyd’s death at the hands of police in Minnesota at the end of May, there have been protests across the country calling for a racial reckoning -some of which grew violent.

There were a record-breaking 4 million firearm background checks nationwide in June as the protests picked up.

As a Black man, Jones said there are extra complications to owning a gun. He said he keeps his weapon at home, and he would be afraid to be pulled over by a police officer while he has his gun in the car.

“It’s scary out here,” Jones said.

Ashcraft cautioned against buying a firearm out of panic, because buying is just the first step in being a responsible gun owner.