Americans respond to epidemic of gun violence by buying more guns

To understand why the United States is caught in a vicious circle of violence, it helps to look at a number of “only in America” statistics and explain the easy, legal way to get a gun in the country that accounts for less than five per cent of the world’s population and 46 per cent of global civilian gun ownership.

First, a little-known but startling statistic: There are around 78,000 federally licensed gun dealers in the country. That is more than all McDonald’s, Burger King, Subway and Wendy’s locations combined, according to a recent count by Every Town for Gun Safety, an advocacy network founded a decade ago by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Since the beginning of the year, those dealers sold an estimated average of 42,000 guns a day and the rush for guns shows no signs of abating. That number is extrapolated from the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) which was created in the wake of an unsuccessful 1981 attempt to assassinate then-President Ronald Reagan. His press secretary, James Brady, was permanently disabled by a gunshot wound in the attack.

Brady died in 1974. His wife, Sarah, founded the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence which keeps track of firearms sales on the basis of NICS Firearms Transaction Records, a short form prospective gun buyers need to complete to buy a firearm. The form is emailed by the dealer to the FBI which responds within minutes, reflecting the “instant” in NICS.

The Brady campaign filters out categories on the forms that are not directly related to sales and its estimates tend to be more conservative than those of other groups that equate NICS checks with sales. But there is consensus that over the years, the number of firearms in civilian hands has grown relentlessly and now far exceeds the population of 333.2 million.

While the American arsenal grew by millions in the first six months of the year, the death toll from firearms ran around 125 a day, roughly the average over the past few years. There were more suicides than murders. Mass shootings, defined by the Gun Violence Archive as at least four people killed or wounded, totalled 333 halfway through the year.

Worth noting: The astonishing numbers estimated on the basis of NICS minimise the huge size of the arsenal. A private citizen selling a firearm to another private citizen does not need to file a transaction record. How many such private deals are made is not known, which is why groups advocating for better controls have been calling for “universal background checks” for decades.

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Polls show overwhelming public support for such checks but a string of attempts to translate that into law has failed over the years thanks largely to vigorous and well-funded efforts by lobbyists for the gun industry, most prominently the National Rifle Association (NRA). It portrays itself as the key defender of the right to own guns enshrined in the Second Amendment of the US constitution.

To the uncountable number of privately-sold weapons, add a relatively new phenomenon –“ghost guns.” These are firearms assembled from kits sold online and have, in the words of Every Town for Gun Safety, become “a weapon of choice for violent criminals, including white supremacists.” Unlike guns produced by manufacturers, ghost guns carry no serial numbers and thus cannot be traced.

Ghost guns were a niche product for do-it-yourself enthusiasts for years but sales took off around 2009 when California state law banned the sale of semi-automatic rifles, like the AR-15. Since then, sales have risen steadily and several ghost guns have been linked to mass shootings, including one at Santa Monica College which killed six students.

By 2019, there were so many in circulation that authorities reported having recovered around 10,000 following shooting incidents around the country. In Washington, plagued by a series of carjackings by armed teenagers in the past few months, ghost guns were used in many of the incidents.

With so many guns in circulation, legally bought or home-made, who makes up the client base for more?

Recent research indicates that the demographic of gun ownership has been changing, a development experts link to the outbreak of the Covid pandemic and the uncertainties it injected into daily life. The National Shooting Sports Federation, the firearms industry’s trade association, found that gun ownership among Black Americans jumped 56 per cent from 2019 to 2020, the first full year of the pandemic.

According to a recent preliminary study by Harvard University, a 14 per cent increase in gun purchases by women brought female gun ownership in the country to 42 per cent.

This is no longer the stereotypical demographic then presidential candidate Barack Obama apparently had in mind when, on the campaign trail in 2008, he referred to jobless working-class Americans in industrial towns as bitter people who “cling to guns and religion.”

The majority of gun owners are still white men but now, statistics indicate, of diverse backgrounds. Your friendly neighbourhood office commuter is just as likely to carry a gun as your car mechanic. You wouldn’t know because it would be tucked out of sight.

All 50 states allow citizens over 21 to carry a concealed handgun. In 27 states, no permit for “concealed carry” is required. In others, obtaining a permit is obligatory and can be difficult. Allowing citizens to carry their guns concealed without a permit has been a top priority of the firearms industry. Its leaders argue that there should be no bureaucratic hurdles to the constitutional right to guns.

One side-effect of greater numbers of women arming up is the growth of a fashion industry which designs clothes that make it easy to hide their guns and stay fashionable. Last year’s NRA convention featured a “concealed carry fashion show” where models displayed guns tucked into their underwear.

One website for the fashionable gunwoman shows a model wearing a floor-length evening dress over a gun held in an ankle holster. Another site offers a loose blouse with a large decorative front knot covering a gun. Purses with special compartments are also in demand.

Mass shootings have been almost exclusively the preserve of men and overall, men are more trigger-happy than women. But this may be changing if a recent shooting in the Texas city of El Paso serves as an indicator.

In mid-June, Phoebe Copas, a visitor from Kentucky, booked an Uber ride to take her to a casino in the city. El Paso adjoins the Mexican city of Ciudad Juarez and the two are divided by the Rio Grande. When Copas saw a road sign to one of the border crossing points to Mexico, she told police, she thought she was being kidnapped.

Whereupon she took a gun out of her handbag and shot the Uber driver in the back of the head. The driver died. The shooter faces murder charges.

(Disclaimer: The views of the writer do not represent the views of WION or ZMCL. Nor does WION or ZMCL endorse the views of the writer.)   
 

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