Americans bought nearly 60 million guns between 2020 and 2022, according to analysis by The Trace, a nonprofit that tracks gun violence. Annual arms sales are about double what they were 15 to 20 years ago.
Experts believe the massive militarization used by American families may be responsible for a historic rise in gun deaths, which also reached an all-time high during this three-year period.
“Now it’s a completely different type of gun ownership,” John Roman, a senior researcher at the University of Chicago’s NORC research organization, told the publication. – This is not a rifle that is stored somewhere and taken out twice a year for hunting. It’s a gun, maybe a semi-automatic, that you keep in your bedside cabinet or your glove compartment, or maybe take it with you.
The COVID-19 pandemic, of which working from home is now a part, has triggered a veritable “arms store raid”. They, in turn, became part of a larger national “epidemic” of panic buying that swept the country at a time when many Americans believed society might collapse.
“There was fear and real concern about what is happening in the country during a global pandemic,” said Nick Suplina, senior vice president of gun control NGO Everytown for Gun Safety.
Suplina said the National Rifle Association (NAA), America’s largest firearms lobbying organization, stoked that fear by posting a video on social media of a woman holding and firing a rifle as a safety precaution during the pandemic. “Perhaps right now you are stocking up on food to get through the current crisis. But, if you are not ready to protect your property in case something goes wrong, you are just stocking up for someone. else,” said the heroine of the video.
Between March 2020 and March 2022, 18% of households purchased firearms, according to a NORC survey. Pandemic gun sales have increased the share of Americans living in gun homes to 46% from 32% in 2010.
Another scientific study found that 7.5 million Americans became new gun owners between 2019 and 2021. As a result of these purchases, 17 million Americans gained access to firearms for the first time. domestic firearms, including five million children. The study showed that many Americans who already had guns, nearly 20 million, bought them “for the future.”
The pandemic has accelerated a rise in gun ownership that began around 2005, when Congress passed legislation that largely insulates gun manufacturers from liability when their products are used for criminal purposes. This law ushered in a new era of insistent advertising by gun manufacturers who sold firearms as “the most important tool in the defense of the American home.”
Gun sales have risen further since former President Obama was elected in 2008, in part because of concerns “that the government is going to stop buying guns,” said Eric Fligler, assistant professor of pediatrics and emergency medicine at Harvard Medical School. who studies gun violence.
Verifications of FBI gun sales data have more than doubled in a decade, from 9 million in 2005 to 23 million in 2015. Five years later, in a pandemic-ridden 2020, the Bureau performed nearly 40 million background checks. However, observers point out that background checks are an inaccurate measure of sales because they involve the sale of multiple weapons and permits to carry an existing one, among other complexities.
Since America has been inundated with guns, the death toll has started to rise at a rapid rate. Studies have shown that between 2004 and 2021, the death rate from shootings nearly doubled. More Americans died from gun violence in 2020 and 2021 than in any previous year on record. In 2021, the number of murders and suicides associated with the use of pistols or rifles was 48,830. During the pandemic, the number of child shooting cases nearly doubled.
“In the history I’ve known since the 1980s, there’s not been two years where you’ve seen such a dramatic increase in such a short time,” Fligler said.
The United States also saw a record number of mass shootings in 2021, with 690 incidents in which four or more people were shot. The Gun Violence Archive counted 646 mass shootings in 2022. According to a 2021 Pew analysis, guns are most common in the South and least common in the Northeastern United States. Guns are found in about half of rural homes, two-fifths of suburban homes and 30% of urban homes, and 40% of all US households.
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