The impact of the coronavirus pandemic on interest in owning a firearm in the American public

ABSTRACT

News outlets ran stories suggesting that firearm purchases in the United States might have increased during the onset of the Coronavirus pandemic. Such claims were made because gun stores were deemed essential businesses at the onset of the pandemic. However, there is no scientific evidence to validate this claim. We tested whether intentions to own a firearm actually increased at an unprecedented rate, by comparing the rate of increase in firearm checks (a conservative estimate of intentions to obtain a firearm) at the onset of the pandemic with the same time period in previous years as well as with significant events in recent American history. We defined the month of February as the onset of the Coronavirus pandemic in the United States because this was the month in which (a) the pandemic caught wider national attention, (b) the first official presidential address relevant to the Coronavirus was made, and (c) the CDC initiated its first measures to stop the spread of the virus. Understanding why (inclination toward) firearm ownership increases during times of national crises can help researchers and gun policy makers better understand the psychological needs driving firearm ownership, and potentially improve gun regulations and gun policies for the future.

KEYWORDS:

• Firearms
• Coronavirus
• gun violence
• threat

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. This calculation includes the comparison with the Virginia Institute of Technology mass shooting excluding D.C. Further, since all results for the comparisons with previous U.S. elections remained significant (for which the political makeshift of each state was accounted for) we included results from the model without any covariates.

2. To illustrate, the next highest ratio was 1.28.

3. This choice was also made because it was impossible to transform the heavily skewed values of raw cases and deaths since they included 0 in some instances, and due to the fact that the cumulative number of cases and deaths for each month included the number of the previous month.