‘Acceleration’ in gun purchases over the last year, study finds

First-time gun owners more than doubled between January 2020 and April 2021, compared to 2019, a survey has found.

The research on firearm purchases in the US, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine and carried out by Professor Matt Miller at Northeastern University, showed that 5m adults have become first-time gun owners during the pandemic, compared to 2.4m in 2019 and 2.9 per cent of all Americans who had not previously owned a gun, purchased one between January 2019 and April 2021.

Around half of all the new gun owners were people of colour and almost half were women. “New gun owners are more likely to be Black and they’re more likely to be female,” it stated in the report.

The increase in homes with firearms means that around 5m children “have been newly exposed to household firearms since 2019,” the study estimated.

“There’s a disproportionate increase in exposure to guns among African-American households,” said Mr Miller to The Guardian. “We know that when a gun enters a home, the increase in the risk of suicide to the owner rises fourfold, and increases the risk to other people in the home, including children.”

The survey explained that little is known about the reasoning behind what provoked the first time purchases of guns in the US, only that the timescale corresponded with the uncertainty of the pandemic.

“Coinciding with the WHO’s declaration of the pandemic in March 2020, there was an acceleration of gun sales superimposed on a more gradual increase that was apparent over the previous 15 years, and that acceleration was fairly dramatic,” said Mr Miller. “There were close to 1.5 million new gun owners in 2020, a substantial increase over 2019.”

Firearm instructor Cliff Gyves, from Tucson, has noticed an increase in those wanting to know how to use their weapons, and understands why people who previously did not own a firearm would consider purchasing one.

“With Covid and lockdowns, and concurrent with that you had protests and riots ... even people that would have never touched a gun before are thinking maybe I want a gun for protection,” Gyves told KGUN9.

Around 42 per cent of US households have at least one gun, according to 2021 Statista figures. Firearms were used in nearly 72 per cent of murders nationwide in 2015. Suicide by firearm accounts for two-thirds of all gun-related deaths in the US, roughly 36,000 people die from shootings in the US per year.

Alaska has the largest percentage of gun ownership in the US, with 61 per cent of people owning a gun, followed by Arkansas and Idaho with 58 per cent and 57 per cent, respectively, according to Injury Prevention research published by medical journal BMJ

“Efforts to reduce firearm injury should consider the recent acceleration in firearm purchasing and the characteristics of new gun owners,” surmised the survey.

The gun survey was conducted with almost 20,000 English-speaking participants, 5900 of which already owned firearms.