Gun sales rise at rapid-fire rate

Gun purchases from Findlay dealers have skyrocketed in the 12 months since the pandemic struck. The run has been so intense for so long that dealers have had trouble keeping up with demand. "We're cleaned out of most of our guns and our ammunition is very skimpy. Normally our racks are full and right now, we've probably got, I would say, 30% of what we normally carry," said Neal Kathrens, assistant manager of Buffalo Trading Co. "Everything we've got is on display. We don't have any backup stock." TNT Firearms also saw an "extremely" huge increase in sales over the past year. Only now are sales slowing down, and that's because "we don't have the inventory to sell," said Amy Weber, co-owner of TNT Firearms. But the demand is still strong: "It's nonstop phone calls on ammunition," she said. So TNT places orders for people, but they have a long wait. Suppliers "are telling us it will be at least a year before we're going to be stocked back up," Weber said. The run on guns in Findlay and around the nation is driven by fear. "Everybody is stocking up because they're afraid they're going to get their guns taken away from them," Kathrens said. "They're afraid people are going to start breaking into houses and doing crazy things, so everybody's arming themselves to the teeth." Weber cited multiple factors fanning the fear. "This industry is run by politicians and if people get scared. So you have the COVID, then you had the riots and then you had an election year," Weber said. "And then the Democrats have got in office, so then this industry stays busy when the Democrats are in office. But the problem is, they just can't keep up. And now because there's so many gun owners." Weber and Kathrens are on target, said Robert J. Spitzer, distinguished professor at State University of New York. Spitzer, who has authored five books on gun policy, including "The Politics of Gun Control," said the pandemic brought a deep sense of insecurity and uncertainty nationwide. "For some Americans, when they feel insecure, their impulse is to get a gun because they find it comforting for some reason," Spitzer said. "Not most Americans, obviously, but that kind of sets the stage, I think, for part of the uptick in gun sales." The government's uncertainty last year in how to deal with the pandemic further fueled the sense of insecurity, he said, which further fueled gun buying. The rise in the Black Lives Matter movement further scared some people. "While the overwhelming majority of the demonstrations were nonviolent, there were some that were violent, where there was property destruction. There had been a couple of shootings at a couple of demonstrations," Spitzer said. Some political leaders manipulated those incidents for political points. "The degree to which those demonstrations were violent, I think, was deliberately played up by some political leaders," he said. "It was a political appeal by some, to alarm people to make them feel like the country was coming apart or on the verge of civil war, none of which was objectively true." The frenzy involved people who have "a very pessimistic view of the future, who think that we're on the verge of civil war, the collapse of society and all that. That's all messaging that has been enforced and amplified by gun rights people, especially the NRA," he said. "They have been feeding their members a steady diet of 'Society's on the verge of collapse' for close to 30 years, that the government people are going to come pounding on your door in the middle of the night to take your guns. ... That the government is the enemy. The government is the gun grabbers. For years and years, people have been listening to a steady diet of this coming from a small number of gun rights people and from groups like the NRA." "So that fear has been heightened and then you have these disturbances you had in the Black Lives Matter movement," Spitzer said. "It does throw race into the mix, and I think all of that stuff just comes together to help spur gun sales." The average gun owner owns more guns than ever. In the 1960s, a gun owner had 2.5 guns on average. In recent years, that number has grown to over eight guns on average per gun owner, he said. "Some of the gun sales we have seen in recent months have been first-time gun buyers," Spitzer said. "But a lot of the gun spurts we see are gun owners who are buying more guns." The impulse to buy a gun in hopes of protecting oneself is understandable. But studies again and again have found that guns frequently do not deliver on that promise, he said. "A gun owned by a civilian is a lot more likely to be used for a suicide, accidentally discharged, hurting somebody or even killing somebody, or likely to be stolen, because when there's a proliferation of guns in a geographic area, gun thefts tend to rise," Spitzer said. "A gun may be used with a good intention but accidentally wind up killing somebody in a moment of misjudgment. The cumulative effect is much more likely to be negative than positive." "There are guns that are used for self-defense successfully, but the documented cases in that category are pretty small," he said. Wilin: 419-427-8413