Gun purchases accelerated in the US from 2020 to 2021, study reveals

Gun purchases accelerated in the US during 2020-2021 compared to 2019, with more than 5 million adults becoming first-time gun owners between January 2020 and April 2021 compared to 2.4 million adults in 2019, a study on new gun ownership reveals.

The survey, conducted by Professor Matt Miller at Northeastern University and published today in the Annals of Internal Medicine, shows that between January 2019 and April this year, around 7.5m people, or 2.9% of all US adults who had not previously owned guns, purchased them.

Most, or about 5.4 million people, brought the weapons into homes that had not previously had them.

According to the study, the total number of gun purchases rose from 13.8m to 16.6m between 2019 and 2020. Of those, approximately half of all new gun owners were female and nearly half were people of color.

What concerns researchers is not that gun sales increased during the pandemic, but that more households now have firearms, potentially exposing more families to the risk of having guns in the home.

How much of the increase can be attributed to the pandemic is unclear, since background checks upon which most gun studies are extrapolated does not record reasons for sales.

But about 5.4 million of 7.5 million new gun owners over the past two years had previously lived in homes without guns. According to the study, that increase collectively exposes another 11m people in those homes to the risk of household firearms.