More than two years of record-setting gun sales across the United States followed Tuesday's mass shooting at a Texas elementary school, which killed 19 children and two adults.
A man is at a gun store.
In 2020, firearm sales hit an all-time record of 22.8 million, a 64% jump from the previous year, followed by a gradual decline to 19.9 million (or 1.66 million per month) in 2021, and an average of 1.5 million.
In the first four months of the year, Small Arms Analytics and Forecasting estimated 5.9 million firearms were sold in the U.S., down from 7.7 million in the first four months of the year, but still higher than in the year before.
According to surveys of retailers conducted by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, about 13 million Americans bought a gun for the first time in 2020.
In March 2020, after Donald Trump declared a national emergency over Covid-19, firearm sales spiked, according to researchers from the Wellesley College.
The researchers said that an additional 1.4 million firearms were sold in the month following Floyd's death.
There were 8.8 million. The average number of firearms produced in the U.S. over the course of a year. There are 6.9 million pistols, 3.4 million rifles, 774,132 revolvers and 752,954 shotguns. Around 20 million modern sporting rifles and other similar guns were either produced or imported into the U.S. from 1990 to 2018, according to the group.
According to an analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data published in the New England Journal of Medicine, firearms deaths replaced motor vehicle accidents as the leading cause of death for Americans ages 1 to 19 in 2020. The number of active shooter incidents reported by the FBI increased from 30 in the first year of the epidemic to 40 in the second year and 61 in the third year. The psychological and financial stresses of the coronaviruses may have caused an increase in violence. The authors of the New England Journal of Medicine said that the jump in firearms deaths is related to the Dickey Amendment, a 1996 legislative provision that restricted federal funding for research into gun violence.
Less than two weeks after a shooting at a Buffalo supermarket killed 10, a shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde killed two people. President Joe Biden urged legislators to pass common-sense gun laws and defy the gun lobby after the Uvalde attack. The accused shooter had no known mental health record, but Texas Gov. Greg Abbott blamed the shooting on mental illness. Beto O'Rourke accused Abbott of sharing responsibility for the shooting at the press conference. Abbott said that people should lay aside their personal agendas.
Consumers worry about the possibility of tighter gun restrictions, which leads to spikes in gun sales. Gun sales increased by 3 million in the months after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, which killed 20 children, and spurred calls for gun reform.
According to polling, a slim majority of Americans support stricter gun laws. According to an April 2021 survey, the public is divided along partisan lines on nearly every question regarding gun control, with 81% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents believing gun laws should be stricter, compared to 20% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents. A majority of Democrats and just 20% of Republicans believe that stricter gun control will result in fewer mass shootings.
As gun violence became the most common problem in America, Congress cut funding for research.
The US bought almost 20 million guns last year.
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