Two days after police say a 40-year-old firearms instructor killed 18 people and wounded more than a dozen others at two separate businesses in Lewiston, Maine, President Joe Biden asked at a campaign fundraiser: “Who the hell needs an assault weapon that can hold, in some cases, up to 100 rounds?” As the president was calling out the easy access to such weapons, daily sales at a Maine gun store were some 500% over expectations, its owner said.
Who could have predicted that the horrific mass shootings in Maine carried out by a man with an assault-style rifle would have prompted a run on local gun stores?
Who could have predicted that the horrific mass shootings in Maine carried out by a man with an assault-style rifle would have prompted a run on local gun stores? At this point, just about anybody could have, if they’ve paid attention since 2020, when gun sales hit an all-time high. According to The Washington Post, store owners said people were rushing in to buy weapons to get what they could in case the federal government eventually bans the sale of some guns or in case they encountered the suspect (who was later found dead of a suspected self-inflicted gunshot wound).
“We’re seeing the fear,” a gun store owner who’d opened his store in defiance of a shelter-in-place order and reported 500% more business told the Post. Some sellers reported an influx of customers who’d never purchased a gun. It may seem counterintuitive, but in the aftermath of mass shootings, when Americans are most likely to be denouncing the easy access to powerful guns, Americans are also most likely to be taking advantage of the easy access to powerful guns, lured in by an industry with a history of profiting from fear.
Panic buying is hardly a new phenomenon. At least as far back as the 1960s, during moments of acute widespread fear, a nervous public has rushed to the gun store.
Nobody knows this calculus of fear and demand better than the gun lobby, which is eager to shepherd potential customers to the sales counter before the news cycle moves on.
Harlon Carter knew this calculus too. The National Rifle Association’s first culture warrior executive, Carter led a coup in 1977 to overthrow the organization’s moderate leadership and install a group of hard-liners eager for political warfare. He had spent the previous decade arguing that government would not protect citizens; that, indeed, it had refused to protect Americans during the urban uprisings of the 1960s and abandoned cities such as Newark, New Jersey, and Detroit, as Black people there raged against economic inequality and police brutality. For allegedly coddling rioters and so-called terrorists, liberal politicians including then-President Lyndon B. Johnson and then-Michigan Gov. George Romney became targets of a white conservative backlash. Carter emerged as the gun rights movement’s most outspoken backlash leader.
At least as far back as the 1960s, during moments of acute widespread fear, a nervous public has rushed to the gun store.
Meanwhile, in landmark cases including Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), Escobedo v. Illinois (1964) and Miranda v. Arizona (1966), the Supreme Court had demonstrated too much sympathy for suspected criminals and not enough for victims. Americans had no choice but to turn to the consumer market for personal safety, Carter argued. The firearms industry, which had increased production, imports and sales several times over during the decade, stood at the ready to arm an anxious population.
The first major spike in gun sales came in 1967-68. Newark and Detroit erupted in 1967, and a hundred more cities would erupt after the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. White suburban communities stockpiled weapons as if they were preparing for war. And the market was ready to meet demand: During just the previous half-dozen years, handgun sales had increased 400%.
After Congress passed the tepid 1968 Gun Control Act, which, among other provisions, limited interstate mail-order sales of firearms, Carter portrayed the new law as a slippery slope toward tyranny by a government unwilling to defend its own citizens and now intent on denying them the right to defend themselves. He rallied the right in defense of unlimited gun rights and even defended cheap handguns, often called “Saturday night specials,” which could be had for as little as $10 and which were as likely to harm the shooter as an intended target. Why would we want to ban them, he wondered, and force the criminal to upgrade his arsenal? Don’t limit citizens' ability to defend themselves, and let the market sort out the riffraff.
Gun homicides peaked in the early 1970s, and cheap handguns were commonly the culprit. Carter argued that any effort to ban them, or any other commonplace consumer firearm, was a fool’s errand. A panicked public wanted guns and would get them, legally or illegally, because they feared the threats they believed were lurking outside their front doors and resented a government that coddled criminals and dismissed anxious “law-abiding citizens.”
We hear those same talking points today. Conservatives defend every new legislative effort to expand gun rights with talking points about not only the right to self-defense, but also the imperative to do so when government can’t or won’t. “There is a need for people to have a weapon to defend themselves in the Lone Star State,” said Texas Gov. Greg Abbott as he signed into law seven bills expanding gun rights, eight months before the shooting deaths of 19 students and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas.
As for the gun shop owner who told the Post, “We’re seeing the fear,” that assessment is eerily evocative of something Carter said in 1975 at a gun-control conference in Los Angeles, where he explained to an audience of activists why gun stores did such cracking business. “It is fear,” he said, “it is a lack of confidence in society.” “We are denied freedom from fear,” he continued, “and fear, most often, makes people go out and buy a gun who would never have done so otherwise.” And why do gun sales spike in particular moments? “Go out and ask the neighborhood gun dealers in this country and they will tell you that after heinous crimes have been committed … there has been an increase in gun sales.”
The man who reinvented the NRA knew that what drives gun purchases isn’t abstract notions of constitutional rights. It’s fear.
The man who reinvented the NRA and turned it into the gun lobby behemoth it is today knew that what drives gun purchases isn’t freedom or abstract notions of constitutional rights. It’s fear. In 1968, it was white fear of Black uprisings; in 1975, it was widespread fear of urban crime. In 2008, it was fear of a Black president and, in 2020, it was a pandemic, a renewed Black freedom movement and a contentious presidential election.
Last week in Maine, it was a mass shooter on the loose with a military-style firearm that enabled quick and efficient murder.
Absent swift, dramatic government action to restore the “confidence in society” that Carter watched evaporate, Americans will again turn to the gun store, always open and always eager to soothe their fears in moments of anxiety. At least until the next nightmare comes to life.