More African Americans purchasing firearms

An increasing number of African Americans, particularly women, are buying guns for protection, according to the FBI.

In July, 2,404,335 background checks on gun purchasers were made in the US, according to the FBI. The background checks for guns have eclipsed 1 million each month for nearly three straight years.

The background check "is often used as a proxy for sales", wrote Douglas McIntyre, editor in chief of the 24/7 Wall St website, in an analysis.

He said that gun sales began to peak in the US when the COVID-19 pandemic started and continued to surge well into 2021.

"During the period of the increase, the number of first-time gun buyers jumped. Sales also rose among women and minorities. First-time buyers have been about 20 percent of new gun sales nationwide," he said, adding that gun sales spike when there are mass shootings, in election years or after high-profile crimes.

Among the first-time buyers have been African Americans, whose gun purchases jumped 56 percent in 2020, according to data collected by the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), a trade association.

On May 25, 2020, George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis after a white police officer knelt on his neck for almost 10 minutes. His death touched off a series of nationwide protests and civil unrest that continued into 2021.

"We’ve seen a trend of more African Americans choosing to express their Second Amendment rights to own a firearm, especially for personal protection. Purchasing a firearm is one step to protecting your family, but it also means safely storing your gun away from children, so they don’t hurt themselves," said Philip Smith, president and founder of the National African American Gun Association.

The organization was established by Smith in 2015 to "expose, educate and motivate" as many African Americans to purchase a firearm for self-defense and to take training on proper gun use.

In a September 2021 report, NSSF estimated that more than 3.2 million people bought a gun for the first-time during the first half of the year.

Joe Bartozzi, NSSF president and CEO, said 40 percent of those sales came from first-time gun buyers.

More than 90 percent of retailers reported an increase in black men buying guns. Nearly 87 percent of the sellers said the same about black women, the report said.

Nearly 84 percent of retailers reported a rise in Hispanic male customers, and more than 87 percent reported the same about Hispanic female clients.

For Asian American men and women, that figure was more than 76.5 percent and 82 percent, respectively.

There was a time that Chinese on the West Coast weren’t permitted to possess guns in the US, as California passed a law in 1923 denying non-citizens the right to have concealable firearms, The Guardian reported. That included Chinese immigrants, a majority of whom were barred from being naturalized citizens by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which remained in effect until 1943.

The Asian Pacific American Gun Owners Association, formed last March during a surge in anti-Asian hate crimes, publishes educational materials on gun safety and use, in several Asian languages.

Chris Cheng, a board member, told the Guardian that civil unrest in the US and scapegoating of Asians over the past couple of years have led many of them to purchase firearms.

"You see all this eroding trust in our public institutions and our criminal justice system," Cheng said.

"This (NSSF) survey shows that there is a continuing demand signal for firearms from the American public. We witnessed each month background check figures associated with a gun sale that are second only to those we saw in last year’s record-breaking totals," Bartozzi said.

An estimated 2.9 percent of American adults became first-time gun owners from January 2019 to April 2021. Most of them, or 5.4 million people, had lived in homes without guns, according to a study on firearms purchasing pattern during the pandemic.

Half of new gun-owners were female, 20 percent of them were African Americans, and 20 percent were Hispanic. Most of the other gun buyers who were not first-time gun owners were male and white. White males still made up the majority of current gun owners in the US, the study found.

"New gun owners in 2019 resembled new gun owners in 2020, suggesting that demographic shifts in new gun ownership preceded the COVID-19 pandemic," wrote researchers of the study, which included scholars from Harvard and Northeastern universities.

Therefore, "to whatever extent" the firearm purchases were affected by events such as the civil unrest following George Floyd’s murder in the spring of 2020 or the storming of the US Capitol on Jan 6, 2021, the demographics of gun owners in 2019 had already shifted from the predominantly older white males to include more women, minorities and younger people, the researchers said.