From the time the COVID-19 pandemic emergency was declared in March 2020 through the end of last year, Americans purchased more than 60 million guns, according to data from The Trace.
“Demand for firearms has spiked after events like mass shootings and elections,” said the organization, which focuses on investigating gun violence. “But no spike compares to the surge which began with the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S. in March 2020,” it said.
This wave of gun purchases “that exposed more than 15 million Americans to firearms in the home for the first time,” said The Hill, citing academic studies. Per NORC research released last March, one-fifth of U.S. households purchased guns during the pandemic and yearly gun sales have doubled compared to 15 or 20 years ago.
This February alone, Americans bought an estimated 1.38 million guns, according to FBI data cited by The Trace. Texas topped the list of states where guns were purchased with 107,689 adjusted sales.
“It’s a totally different type of gun ownership now,” said John Roman, a senior fellow in the Economics, Justice and Society Group at NORC, a research organization based at the University of Chicago, according to The Hill. “It’s not a rifle stored away somewhere that you take out twice a year to go hunting. It’s a handgun, probably a semiautomatic handgun, that you keep in your bedside table or in your glove compartment, or that you maybe carry around with you.”
In March 2020, shortly after the pandemic emergency declaration was issued, the National Rifle Association tweeted: “Americans are flocking to gun stores because they know the only reliable self-defense during a crisis.”
The Hill said that the pandemic “triggered a run on gun shops, part of a larger national spasm of panic-buying that gripped the country at a moment when many Americans thought society might collapse,” amid lockdown orders and a rising death toll from the virus.
“There was fear, and real concern, about what happens to the country during a global pandemic,” said Nick Suplina, senior vice president of law and policy at Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun-control nonprofit, the outlet said.
After vaccines for COVID-19 were made available, cases and deaths began to decrease. In February, U.S. President Joe Biden announced that he plans to end the pandemic national emergency May 11.
As more households in the U.S. have acquired guns, firearm-related deaths have been on the rise. According to Giffords, an organization dedicated to saving lives from gun violence, gun deaths reached their highest level in at least 40 years in 2021 with 48,830 deaths.
“Nearly every American will know at least one victim of gun violence in their lifetime,” said the organization. In the past decade alone, 1 million Americans have been shot and gun violence rates are rising across the nation.
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