I don’t think the pandemic fueled gun sales. It was the violence surge initiated by BLM/Antifa that has led to this.
America did not have a surge in murders until after the George Floyd death on May 25 and accompanying protest movement. Prior to that, crime was stable.
“There is a breakdown in trust and a breakdown in a shared, common reality,” said Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at the University of Maryland who writes about political violence. “There is also all this social change, and social change is scary.”
…Sales did not change much under former President Donald J. Trump, but they exploded in 2020, up by 64 percent from the previous year. The single highest month last year was in June, as protests swept across the country after the murder of George Floyd.
…But while research has shown that higher gun prevalence is associated with a higher rate of gun deaths — including suicide — the question of whether a sudden surge in gun sales prompts a corresponding rise in gun violence does not have a clear answer…
Violent gun death rates in the state dropped by about half from 1989 to 2019, said David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, compared to a 13 percent drop for the nation.
Gary Kleck, a professor of criminology at Florida State University, said laws were often less effective than gun control advocates say. He said controls that targeted high-risk individuals, like mentally ill people, seemed to work better than those that sought to prevent young people from buying guns. Mass shootings, he said, were the least likely type of violence that laws would be effective against.
I suspect gun deaths dropped in California for reasons of changing demographics (fewer young people) and tougher sentences for criminals (three strikes law).
