I was fortunate to be asked to present on “Guns in America” at the annual conference of the Outdoor Writers Association of America yesterday (6 October 2021). I discussed “Gun Culture 2.0 and the Changing Face of Gun Owners in America.”
I was fairly certain that the presentation would not be recorded, so before I left for Jay, Vermont I recorded an abbreviated (15 minute) version of my talk from my basement studio and uploaded it to YouTube.
This module takes up the demographics of gun ownship, the Great Gun Buying Spree of 2020+, and the changing face of American gun owners.
We know from many surveys over a long period of time that the statistically average legal gun owner is a middle-aged, politically conservative, married, white man from a rural area in the South or Mountain West. Basically, the main characters from TV’s “Duck Dynasty.”
But one of the problems with averages is they hide diversity. The average American, after all, has one testicle.
As we see in this module, compared to Gun Culture 1.0, Gun Culture 2.0 is younger and more female, more racially and sexually diverse, more urban and suburban, and more attracted to handguns for self-defense. New and non-traditional buyers in the Great Gun Buying Spree of 2020+ made this abundantly clear and scholarship on gun owners is beginning to catch up.
2020 has passed, and with that we can finally start saying how the whole year stacked up compared to previous years in terms of gun sales (or more appropriately “sales” since its pretty much proxies all the way down when it comes to measuring gun sales). Here I am using the NICS data from the […]
Quick Compare: 2020 vs 2019 NICS Numbers — Trent Steidley
There has been a good deal of speculation and anec-data shared about the great gun buying spree of 2020. It is impossible to deny that something significant happened, but the extent and nature of what happened remains to be understood.
Although it does not tell us everything we want to know, “Pandemics, Protests, and Firearms” by Bree and Matthew Lang (economists at the University of California at Riverside) offers some interesting insights. It is available for download on the SSRN website while it makes its way through the peer review process.
The fact that gun sales have been off the charts in 2020 is not news, but some were still surprised at the July sales numbers. The newsadvocacy organization The Trace has created an interesting data visualization drawing on NICS data as a proxy for gun sales.
I don’t have any commentary to add beyond things I have already said elsewhere on this blog (here and here) and in my chat with Jake Charles from the Duke Center for Firearms Law, but posting this as a resource for others to use.
Screen cap of https://www.thetrace.org/features/gun-sales-estimates/
Note also Professor Trent Steidley’s cautionary notes about interpreting NICS data, here, here, and here.)
I was privileged to be invited recently to contribute to an ongoing series of videos produced by the Duke Center for Firearms Law on COVID-19 and guns.
I was asked to speak about my approach to studying guns, to speculate about why people are buying guns during the COVID-19 pandemic, what misconceptions people have about gun acquisition, and what advice I have for new guns owners.
Watch the YouTube video below:
In his third and final guest post in this series (see his first and second), Trent Steidley takes up the claim that the COVID-19 gun purchasing spree of March 2020 was driven by handgun purchases (a claim I made myself, which helped begin this dialogue).
Was March 2020 the best month for handgun sales ever?
Handguns for sale at Frisco Gun Club, Texas. Photo by David Yamane
By Trent Steidley
NARRATIVE #3: March 2020 was the best month for handgun sales ever.
This is technically correct (and if you watch Futurama you know this is the best kind of correct).
By MOODMAN from giphy.com
In his guest post yesterday, Trent Steidley challenged the simplistic use of data from the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) as a measure of “gun sales.”
Today he critically engages the second of three common narratives emerging from the great gun buying spree of March 2020: that March 2020 saw the most guns sold in a single month in the history of NICS.
Screen cap of https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/pandemic-pushes-u-s-gun-sales-all-time-high-n1176451
By Trent Steidley
This is true, at least for the numbers from NICS sales. But March 2020 is not a large increase considering the effect of population size and in relation to previous spikes.
My recent posts about the great COVID19 gun buying spree of March 2020 (especially handguns) elicited some helpful clarifying and corrective tweets from my colleague Trent Steidley (bio below). I don’t know any sociologist as familiar or adept with National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) data as he is.
I am grateful, therefore, that he has written up his thoughts on using caution and sense with NICS data and gun sale spikes. In three separate posts here, he offers some clarifications and alternative takes for those really trying to understand what happened last month.
Frisco Gun Club, Texas. Photo by David Yamane
By Trent Steidley
You will have heard that March 2020 was a gangbuster month for gun sales. To be sure, two things are certainly true.
One, a lot of people went to gun stores, got background checks, and likely bought guns in March 2020 (and the reason for this is certainly because of COVID19, but whether these are new gun buyers afraid of social unrest or current owners afraid of government actions will take time to tell). Two, the majority of these guns sold were handguns.
But there are some narratives in these news stories that we should be cautious about.
Barack Obama has apparently met his match as the “greatest gun salesman in American history.” On Sunday, an acquaintance from my years wandering around American gun culture messaged me to say that he had not seen a gun buying response like this one in some 15 years in the industry.
I asked him what in particular was different and he said that it was not a fear of being unable to get a particular gun (as under Obama), but a legitimate fear of not being able to defend themselves or their loved ones.
So, under Barack Obama, especially after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, there was a fear that certain guns would be banned. The current pandemic buying spree appears to be driven more by a felt need to have a gun right now, especially among new gun owners who, according to my contact, were numerous.
Photo of outdoor supply store from May 2013
Gun Curious 