From the time of COVID-19 hitting American shores, people started buying guns and they haven't really stopped. They might have slowed down here or there, but that's not the same as stopping. The fact that COVID was followed by civil unrest and rampant violent crime probably hasn't exactly dissuaded people from buying firearms.

And we also know that a lot of those guns are being bought by new gun owners.

Historically, gun sales have always been brisk, but a lot of them were reportedly bought by gun people who already had guns. As such, the number of gun owners didn't increase, even as gun sales did.

That changed when people faced the uncertain future of a pandemic. The fact that popular culture made it seem like we were going to lose 90 percent of the population or something, coupled with alarmist public health officials seeming telling us the same thing probably didn't help. 

So it's not surprising we got new gun owners.

And that's actually continued, and according to a new report, it's liberals that are buying a lot of them.

The Wall Street Journal reported this week that more and more liberals are buying guns, calling it a “surprising” trend among a group of voters that typically support restrictions.

For a piece published Thursday, the outlet looked at new gun ownership data and spoke to experts and several Democratic gun owners to understand what’s behind this trend.

“American gun culture has long been dominated by conservative, White men. Now, in a marked change, a burgeoning number of liberals are buying firearms, according to surveys and fast-growing gun groups drawing minorities and progressives,” The Wall Street Journal reported.

...

The Journal noted that Democrats have historically been gun owners, but started trending away from having firearms in the “early 90s” when “increasingly divisive political battles over the role of firearms in American society led the Democratic Party to become an advocate for gun regulation. Republicans became the party of gun rights.”

Now they are “rediscovering guns,” the piece noted, citing statistics showing that Democratic gun ownership is on the rise from record lows.

“Twenty-nine percent of Democrats or those leaning Democrat said they had a gun at home in 2022, up from a four-decade low of 22% in 2010,” the report said, citing a survey conducted by the University of Chicago’s NORC research group. 

According to another set of numbers from the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, of all the Democratic voters who bought guns after 2020, “more than half were first-time owners,” the piece stated.

Personally, I think this is good news.

See, every political party has to appease their base. They have to do this because of the primary system. They have to battle within the party before the move to the general election, which means they first have to cater to the demands of Democratic voters.

If those Democrats become gun owners and, as is the tendency, gun voters, it becomes a lot less palatable to push for gun control. See, I think the above piece gets the order wrong. I don't think Democrats stopped owning guns because their party favored gun control, I think they started favoring gun control because they stopped owning guns.

So if they start owning them again, you're going to see a lot less gun control. Further, what you do see will be a lot less onerous.

Right now, nearly a third of the party owns guns, and if they come to realize that a semi-auto ban won't just impact AR-15s they don't have any interest in owning but their Glock in the nightstand as well, suddenly they might find it a lot more problematic with their base.

The best way to keep gun control from passing is to see it become political suicide to even consider proposing it. No proposals, no gun control.

So yeah, I think this is good news. The trick is to teach those new gun owners about just how gun control will negatively impact them.