Women make up roughly half of new US gun buyers since 2019: report

By Michael Hernandez

WASHINGTON (AA) - Nearly half of all new gun buyers are women in what marks a major shift for the traditionally heavily male-dominated market, new data published on Thursday appears to indicate.

Preliminary results from the 2021 National Firearms Survey obtained and published by the Wall Street Journal newspaper show women make up 3.5 million firearms purchases from January 2019 through April 2021, compared to men who make up 4 million purchases during that time period.

Other surveys conducted in decades past have put the number of female gun owners at a much more modest 10-20%, according to the Journal.

The survey polled over 19,000 adults, and is one of the most nationally representative, Deborah Azrael of the Harvard T.H. Chan School, one of two researchers behind the study, told the newspaper.

Researchers attributed the spike in gun sales among women to a number of factors, including the COVID-19 pandemic, and social justice protests that sometimes turned violent in the wake of George Floyd's murder at the hands of Minneapolis police.

Cutting across gender lines, researchers found that 55% of new gun owners were white, 21% were Black and 19% were Latino. But among women, 28% were Black.

The overwhelming majority of the 19.6 million gun owners who purchased additional firearms since 2019 were overwhelmingly male and white -- 71% and 74% respectively.