So much of today’s political landscape is shaped by polls. Cable news is obsessed with them. Polls are the pulse of campaigns. If they’re down in the polls, political candidates talk about their own internal polling to dispute the narrative. Sometimes they are right. But what really shapes political landscapes are demographic changes. And, with gun ownership, we have a shift that must be troubling gun-control groups and the politicians they support.
Now, more than half of American voters say that they or someone in their household owns a gun, according to a poll by NBC News. This is the highest level of gun ownership this poll has found since it began in 1999. “After progressives drove up firearm ownership with policies that are soft on violent crime, they can’t figure out why their gun-control ideas fail to pass,” said The Wall Street Journal when it cited this poll.
Indeed, according to this survey, the share of voters with a firearm in the household is 52%. This is up from 46% in 2019 and 42% in 2013. Households with a gun in them now include 66% of Republicans, 45% of independents and 41% of Democrats.
Perhaps even more surprising is the fact that the number of registered Democrats who are buying guns is going up faster than the number of Republicans. In 2019, 64% of Republican voters said there was a gun in their home, compared with 33% of Democrats. In the years since, 2% more Republican voters say there is a gun in their home, but for Democrats it has gone up 8%. In fact, since the 2020 election, some 22.3 million Americans exercised their Second Amendment rights by purchasing firearms for the very first time, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF). Might these new gun owners become pro-freedom voters, even though many of them no doubt have supported anti-Second Amendment candidates in the past?
Impatient Customers
“During the George Floyd riots and COVID pandemic, we saw an increase in first-time gun buyers,” said Danielle Jaymes, General Manager at PWG Range in Poway, Calif., a retail and shooting facility. “We did thousands of background checks and easily saw over a 50% increase in sales.”
Of those first-time gun purchasers, Jaymes estimated roughly half had zero experience with firearms and knew almost nothing about gun laws and regulations.
“We were able to judge this by how upset they would get that they could not take home their firearm the same day; they’d get upset about the requirements to purchase a firearm and to run a background check in California,” she said. “Some even tried to bribe the staff to get them to give them the gun that day instead of waiting the 10 days California requires.”
Poway, population 48,800, is located in northern San Diego County. The city and surrounding area are represented in the U.S. House of Representatives by Rep. Darrell Issa (R). But don’t let that fool you. San Diego County itself is comprised of approximately 60% registered Democrats and their candidates are not typically friendly to this constitutionally protected right.
In the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton won San Diego County by nearly 20%. In 2020, Joe Biden and his message of ever-more restrictions on the Second Amendment took the county by 22.7% more votes than Donald Trump.
So then, why so many gun sales to first timers?
“They did tell us why they were buying guns and a couple of the reasons were the [Summer 2020] riots and they were scared that the cops wouldn’t get there in time if they needed them,” said Jaymes. “Many wanted to protect their family from the uncertainty of what was happening with the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Meanwhile, the way gun-control groups tend to stereotype gun owners just doesn’t hold up. The NSSF’s research found that the surge in new gun owners included a 90% increase in gun retailers reporting a “general increase” of black customers, including an 87% increase among black women.
The NSSF data parallels what Jaymes saw and continues to see at the PWG Range.
“We saw a huge increase in minorities buying firearms [starting in 2020] and we still see this today,” she said. “Based on prior years, we saw women buying guns increase by 45%, a 56% increase from Asian Americans. Purchases by blacks jumped by about 50%.”
Demand for firearms training has been so profound that, like many NRA-certified trainers, Frank Melloni, president of Renaissance Firearms Instruction (and a contributor to this magazine), created a new training option. His “New Gun Owner 101: Train & Try” course is designed to accommodate more students per range day. His range is located in western Long Island, N.Y.
“This location mainly serves students from Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and Nassau County, an area that is historically Democrat controlled,” said Melloni. “I’d say we saw about a 50% increase in students at this location.”
Melloni’s new course allowed him to increase his standard class size of 16 or so students up to more than 80 a day. He filled at least two of those courses a month during 2020 and 2021, in addition to his company’s usual courses.
“The most-common reason given for taking our classes the last four years has been self-defense,” said Melloni. “Many cited the civil unrest that the nation has seen over this time period, while many offer their concerns about government overreach. If I had to sum up the most-common theme over the past few years in a word, it would be ‘preparedness.’”
Obviously, simply buying a firearm is not necessarily going to change someone’s political philosophy, but it certainly could impact close races.
