San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
GUN BUYING SPIKED DURING PANDEMIC AND IT’S STILL UP
Social scientists say no one reason, cite breakdown in trust
It was another week with another mass shooting. Democrats and Republicans argued over the causes. President Joe Biden said enough.
But beneath the timeworn political cycle on guns in the United States, the country’s appetite for firearms has only been increasing, with more being bought by more Americans than ever before.
While gun sales have been climbing for decades — they often spike in election years and after high-profile crimes — Americans have been on an unusual, prolonged buying spree fueled by the coronavirus pandemic, the protests last summer and the fears they both stoked.
In March 2020, federal background checks, a rough proxy for purchases, topped 1 million in a week for the first time since the government began tracking them in 1998. And the buying continued until a week this spring broke the record with 1.2 million background checks.
“There was a surge in purchasing unlike anything we’ve ever seen,” said Garen J. Wintemute, a gun researcher at the University of California Davis. “Usually it slows down. But this just kept going.”
Not only were people who already had guns buying more, but people who had never owned one were buying them too.
In all, the data found that 39 percent of U.S. households own guns. That is up from 32 percent in 2016, according to the General Social Survey, a public opinion poll conducted by a research center at the University of Chicago.
Now the gun debate is once again taking center stage, this time at a moment of hardening political division and deepening distrust.
There is no single reason for the surge, but social scientists point to many potential drivers.
“There is a breakdown in trust and a breakdown in a shared, common reality,” said Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at the University of Maryland who writes about political violence. “There is also all this social change, and social change is scary.”
New preliminary data from Northeastern University and the Harvard Injury Control Research Center show that about 6.5 percent of U.S. adults bought guns in 2020, or about 17 million people. That was up from 5.3 percent in 2019. While about onefifth of gun buyers last year were first-time buyers, the share was about the same in 2019, suggesting that the trend did not start with the pandemic. As for gun owners overall in 2021, 63 percent were male, 73 percent were White, 10 percent were Black and 12 percent were Hispanic.