THE ANDERSON FILES

Is gun machismo destabilizing the U.S. with paranoia and murder?

BY DAVE ANDERSON

The pandemic inspired a gunbuying surge. Americans purchased approximately 60 million guns between 2020 and 2022, according to The Trace, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that tracks gun violence. Gun deaths reached historic highs during this period.

This is a distinctive type of gun ownership, according to John Roman, a senior fellow at NORC, a research organization based at the University of Chicago.

Roman told The Hill, “It’s not a rifle stored away somewhere that you take out twice a year to go hunting. It’s a handgun, probably a semiauto- matic handgun, that you keep in your bedside table or in your glove compartment, or that you maybe carry around with you.”

“Five percent of Americans said they bought a gun for the first time during the pandemic, which is a huge number,” Roman said. Those buyers were younger and more likely to be renters, women and people of color.

Just 3% of American adults own half of the nation’s firearms, according to a 2016 Harvard-Northeastern survey.

Results from the 2021 National Firearms Study, published in the Annals of Medicine, found that 7.5 million Americans became new gun owners between 2019 and 2021. But many Americans who already owned guns, nearly 20 million, bought more.

A string of incidents has alarmed the nation. In one week, a 16-yearold kid in Kansas City, Missouri, was shot after going to the wrong address to pick up his brothers, a 20-year-old woman in New York state was killed after pulling into the wrong driveway and an 18-year-old high school cheerleader in Texas was shot after getting into the wrong car.

This has scared people who have jobs where door-knocking at a

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The Kansas City shooting has raised questions about racism. Andrew Lester, an 84-year-old white man, twice shot Ralph Yarl, a Black kid, after the teenager rang his doorbell. He said he was “scared to death.”

The shooter’s grandson, Klint Ludwig, said he’d had a close relationship with Lester but in the last several years they have “lost touch.”

He said his grandfather has “become staunchly right-wing, further down the right-wing rabbit hole as far as doing the election-denying conspiracy stuff and COVID conspiracies and disinformation, fully buying into the Fox News, OAN kind of line.”

He said his grandfather has been immersed in “a 24-hour news cycle of fear and paranoia.”

Right-wing politicians, the gun lobby and the gun industry’s marketeers are constantly stoking this