This sort of cultural shift has been a long time coming. Once a cultural shift like this takes place, a political shift soon follows. Over the past 27 months, women have been buying guns at a greater rate than ever before. This period of time includes the Democratic presidential primary run-up and the pandemic. This information has been provided by a new study by researchers from Harvard and Northeastern. All of the gun control talk that has been pushed by the Biden administration has done nothing to slow the purchase of firearms.
The Wall Street Journal has more: “Close to half of all new U.S. gun buyers since the beginning of 2019 have been women, a shift for a market long dominated by men, according to a new study.
The preliminary results from the 2021 National Firearms Survey, designed by Deborah Azrael of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Matthew Miller of Northeastern University, show an estimated 3.5 million women became new gun owners from January 2019 through April of this year. About 4 million men became new gun owners over that period, they found.
For decades, other surveys have found that around 10% to 20% of American gun owners were women.” The shift is not shocking to us, though. We have watched gun control advocates try and fail to recruit women to their ranks for some time now.
The shift is not shocking to us, though. We have watched gun control advocates try and fail to recruit women to their ranks for some time now. Shannon Watts is responsible for founding “Moms Demand Action”, one of the many organizations that tried to play on the concept of maternal instinct to recruit women. It wasn’t long before the organization was folded into Michael Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety.
Since 2017, they have been very well funded. None of these wannabe activists have been able to stem the tide of gun sales, though. Gun purchases are still quite popular and they are only going to continue to grow. Per the Wall Street Journal:
“The number of federal background checks for gun purchases hit an all-time high in 2020 of 21 million, according to an analysis of federal data by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, an industry trade group.
Researchers and gun store owners attributed the jump to fears driven by the Covid-19 pandemic and the protests, sometimes accompanied by violence, that followed the police killing of George Floyd, as well as the divisive atmosphere around the 2020 presidential election.”
These factors may have helped but the trends that caused this rise in sales have already been in place for some time now. 40 million NICS firearm background checks in 2020 and this is a number that has been on the rise every year since 2009. It should not shock anyone to see this rise coincide with the Barack Obama presidency.
The only time that there was a decline in these numbers was during 2017 and 2018. Perhaps Americans felt safer as a whole when Donald Trump was president? It’s a fair assumption to make. The jump that took place from 2019 to 2020 can probably be attributed to the riots. Lest you think this is all “white fragility” at play, the study shows that the gun ownership ranks have become more diverse:
“In addition to its findings on gender, the survey found that new gun buyers were more racially diverse than existing owners who bought more. Among new gun buyers, 55% were white, 21% were Black and 19% were Hispanic. Among new women gun owners, 28% were Black. The 19.6 million existing gun owners who bought more firearms since 2019 were 71% male and 74% white.”
Biden and his team have to think all of this through. They need to get with the times and realize that a gun control agenda is not going to get them all that far. Wake up and smell the java, Biden.
