In March last year, federal background checks topped one million a week for the first time since the government started tracking that data in 1998 ....
A week this Spring broke 1.2 million background checks.
"There was a surge in purchasing unlike anything we’ve ever seen," said University of California gun researcher Dr. Garen J. Wintemute. "Usually it slows down. But this just kept going," the academic told the publication. Gun store owners have seen a different type of clientele walk into their stores over the last year.
Thomas Harris, a former law enforcement officer who works at the gun counter at Sportsman's Warehouse in Roanoke, Virginia, said that around March last year, the customers he would speak with began to include more white-collar workers, such as people from insurance firms and software companies.
The former officer said many of the buyers were not conservative and most had never handled a gun ......
"Outside of seeing something on TV or in a movie, they knew nothing about them," said Harris, adding that many did not know how to load a gun or what a caliber was. Many purchased the guns to be kept at home. "They were saying: 'We're going to be locking down. We're constrained to our homes. We want to keep safe.'"
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(OP comment/observation inserted: what this means is that more irresponsible, untrained, gun owners now have firearms in their possession that may eventually end-up, in all likelihood, in the hands of bad guys. IMHO. But hey, that's their Right and we should all be 110% for it by gosh!)
New preliminary data from Northeastern University and the Harvard Injury Control Research Center says that one-fifth of Americans who bought guns last year were first-time purchasers. Half of new owners were women, one-fifth were black, and another fifth were Hispanic.
Overall, 39 percent of American households now own guns, up from 32 percent back in 2016, according to the General Social Survey conducted by a research center at the University of Chicago.
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(OP comment inserted: so if one fifth of all gun sales in 2020 were first time buyers ... and there have been two widely publicized numbers, 5 million and 8.5 million, in terms of new gun sales to first time buyers in 2020 ... then that would mean either 25 million or 42.5 million guns were sold in the U.S. in 2020 alone ... that cannot be correct, can it? Is it?)
Many experts remain divided as to why this spike has continued, and why it came to be in the first place. "There is a breakdown in trust and a breakdown in a shared, common reality," said Lilliana Mason, a political scientist and writer on political violence at the University of Maryland. "There is also all this social change, and social change is scary."
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Florida State University professor of criminology Gary Kleck said that laws that gun control advocates are fighting for are often less effective than they say. Kleck said that laws targeting high-risk individuals, rather than the American population as a whole, would be more effective.
"Mass shooters in many cases are willing to die, working on a plan for weeks and months," said Kleck. "That's the last person a law is going to stop. Gun control works with more casually motivated violence."
