“Because I believe all the statistics that say that the more guns we have, the more gun deaths we have.”

Trust in Guns During Crises Is a Triumph of Marketing

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A nearly empty display shelf for ammunition at a gun store in Idaho on March 14. [AP Photo/Lisa Marie Pane]

Caroline Light is a Harvard professor whose field of study includes “America’s love affair with armed self-defense,” as she put it in the subtitle of her latest book. Reading the extensive reports this week of a surge in gun buying around the country, she was not surprised.

“Firearms are increasingly marketed as the most rational solution to our sense of fear and insecurity,” she told me. “And this epidemic, to me, seems like the perfect storm for convincing a whole variety of different consumers, who may or may not have been gun consumers in the past, to look at guns as a way to make themselves feel more secure.”

Guns, in fact, do not make people safer, according to the research. And for most of its history, the American firearm industry did not emphasize self-defense in its pitches to customers. As recently as the mid-1990s, even with Americans still shaken by a historic spike in violent crime, survey results showed that most people who owned guns owned them for recreation — things like hunting deer, or shooting clays. By 2015, when the survey was updated, crime was down dramatically. Yet two thirds of gun owners cited “protection from people” as a primary motivation for having a firearm.

“That was a massive triumph of advertising by the manufacturers,” says Light. The National Rifle Association has echoed those appeals to anxiety in its own messaging. Light is careful to note that the gun industry and the gun lobby did not create the underlying conditions that have left Americans balkanized and jittery — i.e., the way the social safety net “was pretty much destroyed and obliterated by the end of the 20th century.” But they did aggressively exploit them. “The gun industry was very much a powerful player in taking advantage of these circumstances and shifts in our economic and political systems,” she says. “There’s so much money to be made in making the population fearful of its individual security.”

Now we are living through an unprecedented public health crisis that’s given Americans many genuine reasons to be afraid. To judge from the lines out the door at many of the nation’s gun stores, firearms manufacturers are cashing in nicely. Light, who was raised by gun owners in Virginia, doesn’t own one herself. “But I do think about other people, who at this moment right now of unprecedented turmoil are turning to guns, and I can kind of see it.”

While she empathizes with those individual decisions, Light worries about their collective toll: “Because I believe all the statistics that say that the more guns we have, the more gun deaths we have.”

Senators to feds: Gun-buying surge could allow prohibited purchasers to slip through the cracks. Via a letter to the FBI director and acting ATF director obtained by Newsweek, 16 Democratic lawmakers are pressing for measures to ensure that firearms aren’t sold to people banned from owning them due to background check loopholes and an overtaxed vetting system. Though licensed dealers can legally sell guns to buyers whose checks take longer than three business days to resolve (a transaction known as a default proceed), the senators say the bureaus should advise gun dealers not to complete any sales until the purchaser is cleared while the pandemic is raging. They’re also requesting data on how many guns have been sold with background checks still pending during the first weeks of the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S. ICYMI: The FBI conducted 3.7 million gun background checks in March, a new single-month record.

NEW from THE TRACE: Gun store closures put states in “uncharted” legal territory. Stay-at-home orders have forced thousands of businesses to close, but extending that to the firearm industry has proven contentious. Gun rights advocates have challenged gun store closures in several states, and their lawsuits raise a mountain of thorny legal issues that courts have seldom debated. “We’re in uncharted legal territory,” said one of the gun law scholars Brian Freskos interviewed. “There are some doctrinal guideposts, but not a whole lot of precedent that is directly on point.” This just in: The NRA is suing New York over its decision to subject gun stores to the state’s infection-abatement policies, adding to the group’s existing suit against California. “We will aggressively defend the state against yet another legal assault by the NRA,” said New York Attorney General Letitia James.

Some gun dealers are defying orders to cease operations. There are five states still ordering gun stores to stay closed. But the Trace has spotted several examples of sellers in at least three of them — New Mexico, Massachusetts, and Washington — who are refusing to comply. “I don’t know anything about what the governor has said,” one recalcitrant owner told The Seattle Times.

A panicked purchase — then an accidental shooting. A 35-year-old Michigan man admitted to accidentally shooting himself in the leg after reportedly buying a gun in anticipation of pandemic-related chaos. Don’t miss: As coronavirus fears buoyed gun sales among first-time buyers, Trace reporter, gun-owner, and former vet Alain Stephens prepared this primer on safe firearm handling.

Anti-violence advocates offer phone counseling to kids scarred by shootings. The TraRon Center, which offers trauma support to families in Washington D.C., currently can’t host people at its community center due to social distancing. Instead, it’s arranging video chats with neighborhood young people. “Crime is still happening around them,” the group’s founder told WUSA9. “They’re trying to deal with this new norm, and they just need somebody to talk to.”

DATA POINT

An estimated 1,534,000 handguns were sold in the U.S. last month, compared to 836,000 long guns, the most lopsided ratio since the federal gun background check system launched in 1998. As The Trace has reported, the firearms industry was for a long time dominated by rifles and shotguns used for hunting or sport shooting, until manufacturers began aggressively marketing handguns for self-defense. —Small Arms Analytics