Americans purchased almost 60 million guns during the pandemic

Academic studies find out that one-fifth of American households bought guns during the coronavirus pandemic.  

US citizens purchased nearly 60 million guns between 2020 and 2022, according to an analysis by The Trace, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that tracks gun violence in the United States, The Hill reported on Friday.  

All the new weapons have fuelled a momentous surge in gun deaths, which reached record highs during the same period. 

“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. 

“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.”

Demand for firearms had been growing throughout the coronavirus outbreak.

California, New York, Washington, Alabama and Ohio were a few states, among others, that were reporting sales growth.

Gun control advocates were concerned that due to the pandemic, many new gun owners were lacking the usual access to training on how to handle and store their weapons.

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered a run on gun shops,  as many Americans thought society might collapse. 

“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 activist said the pro-gun lobby National Rifle Association fanned that fear by tweeting out a video of a woman holding a rifle and pushing firearms as a pandemic safety measure. 

“You might be stockpiling up on food right now to get through this current crisis,” the woman says. “But if you aren’t preparing to defend your property when everything goes wrong, you’re really just stockpiling for somebody else.” 

Some 18 percent of households bought guns between March 2020 and March 2022, according to a NORC survey. 

“Five percent of Americans said they bought a gun for the first time during the pandemic, which is a huge number,” Roman said. “Those buyers were younger, they were more likely to be renters, they were more likely to be women, they were more likely to be people of color.”

US gun violence and racism

Gun violence leaves thousands dead in the US, especially when it comes to blacks compared to whites.

More than 12,800 people in the US have died from gun violence so far this year, which means an average of over 114 deaths per day, according to a non-profit research group.

The latest report by Gun Violence Archive indicates 7,326 people have committed suicide using firearms and 5.505 others have died in homicides, murders, accidental discharges and defensive gun use.

As for minors, 79 children aged up to 11 died in those incidents and 456 aged 12-17, according to the tracker.

The report also says there have been 168 mass shootings so far this year, and that the number of mass shootings has gone up significantly in recent years.

In each of the last three years, there have been more than 600 mass shootings, almost two a day on average.

US President Joe Biden remarked in July last year that a flood of guns was turning American communities into “killing fields” and vowed to reinstate a ban on assault rifles.

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