There is a cycle we go through every time there is a high-profile mass shooting: The public calls for gun control, the media covers it, and gun enthusiasts — worried that they won’t be able to buy guns anymore — stock up on more guns.
It happened after the Sandy Hook shooting, after the San Bernardino shooting, and after the Orlando nightclub shooting.
But it doesn’t seem to be happening with the Parkland shooting.
The FBI just updated its data on gun background checks, which is widely seen as the best proxy of how many guns are being sold in the US. It’s the first update since the Florida shooting.
We’re seeing a small spike in background checks for handguns and long guns — but it’s the same spike we see every year from January to February. In other words, the February 14 massacre at Parkland did not seem to give gun sales a noticeable nudge.
(It’s important to note that a single background check doesn’t correlate to a single sale because about 40 percent of gun sales are made without a background check. But the relative change in background checks for handguns, long guns, and multiple gun sales is a good indication of when more guns are being sold.)
Our best guess as to what’s happening: Gun enthusiasts don’t feel the Republican-controlled White House and Congress will do anything to prevent them from buying the guns they want. We have evidence to show that gun purchasing trends tend to shift with the political climate.
When Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, background checks skyrocketed and increased steadily throughout his term — especially after the Sandy Hook shooting and the subsequent gun debate. Many people in the US feared the Obama administration would push through stringent gun control laws when Democrats took control of Congress. From 2007 to 2014, background checks almost doubled.
The first high-profile shooting during the Trump administration was the Las Vegas massacre in October 2017, which killed 58 people and was the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history. Yet that didn’t make gun sales spike. In fact, this “Trump slump” in gun sales just continued.
And there wasn’t a spike after the Florida shooting either, despite the massive amount of attention on the gun control debate. This might be in part because the shooting happened halfway through the month. And gun sale trends could change if President Donald Trump makes another surprising comment about gun control or commits to a policy push on the issue, as he seemed to do in a recent White House roundtable.
Feinstein's reaction when Trump says she should add assault weapons ban to Manchin-Toomey pic.twitter.com/7dlKxwa1KO
— Ryan Struyk (@ryanstruyk) February 28, 2018
Background check data in March should give us a much better idea of how the Parkland shooting and the subsequent gun control debate affects the number of guns in American hands. But for now it doesn’t look like gun enthusiasts are scared of Trump signing any bills that limit their ability to buy guns.
The focus often turns to “assault” rifles, but handgun sales also spike after mass shootings — and they kill a lot more people
After mass shootings in which the shooter uses military-style assault rifles, the conversation often focuses on banning or limiting assault rifle purchases. In fact, during President Trump’s roundtable on gun control, he hinted he might agree with an assault weapon ban. (He later flipped his position.)
In addition, Dick’s Sporting Goods announced it would stop selling assault-style rifles and high-capacity magazines in stores, and Walmart announced it would remove products “resembling assault-style rifles, including nonlethal airsoft guns and toys,” from its website.
But this doesn’t mean that gun enthusiasts only focus on buying more assault rifles. In fact, there’s often a bigger uptick in handgun background checks after mass shootings.
And FBI data shows that handguns are used in the large majority of murders involving guns.
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In addition, people who have recently bought handguns have an increased risk of suicide, which accounts for about two in three gun deaths in the US.
The uptick in gun purchases is the unfortunate cost of devoting any attention to gun control
This gun debate is arguably the first time since Sandy Hook that policymakers are seriously considering gun control policy. It’s the first time since Sandy Hook that public attention on gun control has persisted for such a long time.
But it also means that gun rights activists have started to ramp up the rhetoric on how liberals supposedly want to take away people’s guns and infringe on the Second Amendment. There has been no spike in gun sales so far — but if gun enthusiasts believe the political climate is ripe for new gun control policies, it might cause them to stock up on guns.
That response has become the predictable cost of actually talking about gun control.
