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First there was toilet paper. Then there was hand sanitizer. Now there’s a run on guns. US gun sales surged in recent months as Americans grappled with unprecedented coronavirus lockdowns and massive protests against police brutality, a new report says. The FBI ran about 5.4 million background checks for gun purchases from April to June, …
First there was toilet paper. Then there was hand sanitizer. Now there’s a run on guns.
US gun sales surged in recent months as Americans grappled with unprecedented coronavirus lockdowns and massive protests against police brutality, a new report says.
The FBI ran about 5.4 million background checks for gun purchases from April to June, almost double the 2.8 million processed in the same period last year, according to data the Wall Street Journal published Tuesday.
In June alone, the number surged 136 percent year-over-year nationwide, tripled in Georgia and more than doubled in New York, Illinois, Oklahoma and Minnesota, the paper reported, citing figures from the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a trade group.
The spike coincided with the coronavirus pandemic — which has killed more than 135,000 Americans and sparked the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression — and the sometimes chaotic demonstrations that followed a white cop’s killing of George Floyd, a black man, in Minneapolis.
“I don’t want to ever shoot anybody ever,” Craig Geske, who was recently waiting to get a gun permit in Minneapolis, told the Journal. “But if I had to duck and shoot back in self-defense, at least I’d have a chance.”
Dealers say new buyers are responsible for an estimated 40 percent of the recent sales, according to the Journal. And handguns — often used for personal protection — are selling almost twice as often as rifles or shotguns, the paper reported.
“With the pandemic, it’s driven more by fear for personal safety; it’s people who haven’t been interested in the past,” Jacquelyn Clark of Lakewood, Colorado’s of Bristlecone Shooting, Training and Retail Center told the Journal.
