Fears of violent crime and armed right-wing extremists have caused gun sales to shoot up among Democrats across the United States, according to a new report.
After dropping during the 1990s, gun ownership among Democrats is on the rise, and gun groups composed of liberals and progressives are surging, the Wall Street Journal noted Thursday.
A 2023 survey by the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions in Baltimore found that more than half of the Democrats who bought guns since 2020 were first-time buyers, compared with less than one quarter of Republicans.
And a 2022 survey by NORC at the University of Chicago found that 29% of people who were registered Democrats or leaned Democratic said they had a gun at home, up from 22% in 2020.
“It’s a group of people who five years ago would never have considered buying a gun,” Jennifer Hubbert, an anthropology professor at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, told the Journal.
Hubbert, who last year received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to research liberal gun owners, said she found gay and transgender gun owners were worried about hate crimes, while Jewish people feared potential attacks by pro-Palestinian groups or individuals.
Black gun owners said they were concerned about crime and mistrust of police in some areas.
Gun sales in the U.S. totaled 15.9 million last year, the fourth-highest on record, and are expected to exceed that this year, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, an industry group.
Lifelong Democrat and gun-control advocate Michael Ciemnoczolowski of Iowa City, Iowa, said he purchased a firearm for the first time this past summer, paying $600 for a Springfield 1911 handgun.
Ciemnoczolowski, a 43-year-old liquor store clerk, told the Journal he acted to ensure his “personal safety,” citing concerns about street crime and domestic politics that have “grown increasingly acrimonious.”
Randy Miyan told the Journal that he founded Liberal Gun Owners, which has 5,000 members, for people who don’t feel comfortable joining the conservative National Rifle Association or using message boards like AR15.com.
“We have to have harbors and havens,” Miyan said.
Tom Nguyen, 54, of Los Angeles, said he founded L.A. Progressive Shooters as a Facebook group in 2020 in response to social unrest, the COVID-19 pandemic and the election that year.
“People were hungering for a space that was not this hyper-aggressive, male-dominated, toxic gun world,” he said.
A certified firearms instructor, Nguyen offers beginner group classes that are booked through next year, according to the Journal.
One student, Alejandra Mendez, 32, who’s married to a woman, said she took lessons from Nguyen after moving to a new neighborhood in 2019 because she was worried about antigay violence and crime in general.
The healthcare worker now owns three handguns and an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, and called it hypocritical for progressives to support the constitutional right to free speech but not the right to own firearms.
“I don’t understand that rhetoric of ‘protect my right’ and not protect the rights of other people,” Mendez said.
During the Sept. 10 presidential debate, Democratic nominee and Vice President Kamala Harris surprised many viewers by saying that both she and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, were gun owners.
Harris, a former prosecutor, doubled down on that remark during a Thursday campaign event with Oprah Winfrey, laughingly saying, “If somebody breaks into my house, they’re getting shot.”
“I probably should not have said that. My staff will deal with that later,” Harris added.
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