Donald Trump’s fake fear is having a real effect on NC gun sales

Firearm sales surged when the pandemic forced a shutdown in March. Now sales are rising again as President Trump warns of U.S. cities being overrun by looting mobs while police are left helpless to respond for lack of funding and respect.

Trump’s appeal to fear is a desperate fiction peddled by a trailing candidate who wants to shift the subject from his abject failure to respond to the pandemic. But it’s having an effect that’s as real as a bullet.

North Carolina sheriffs’ departments are swamped with requests for handgun permits. Wake County alone has received 20,304 permit applications through July of this year, up from 6,107 for the same period last year. Gun shops – their inventory cut by pandemic-related slowdowns among gun manufacturers – are running out of handguns. Anxious people are buying shotguns and rifles instead.

First-time buyers

Larry Hyatt, the owner of Hyatt Guns in Charlotte, told the Editorial Board, “We have so many new gun buyers. One thing I’m hearing over and over is, ‘We don’t have a gun in the house, now we feel like we need one.’ ”

Hyatt hasn’t seen demand like this since the days after the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. Buyers then were trying to get ahead of what they thought would be draconian new federal gun laws. “This time,” Hyatt said, “it’s not out of fear of legislation. It’s out of fear itself.”

This is another bad turn in a terrible year. More guns won’t make people safer. It will put them at greater risk of an accidental shooting, a child finding a gun, a suicide or a family fight ending in gunfire. And the risk is especially great for new gun owners unfamiliar with how to handle or store a gun.

Trump should be discouraging people from putting themselves and their loved ones at risk. Instead, he’s defending a 17-year-old with an military-style rifle who went to Kenosha, Wis., to defend property against vandalism by protesters. He ended up shooting three people, killing two. He faces multiple homicide charges.

Shannon Klug is a Charlotte volunteer with Moms Demand Action, a gun-control group, but she is also a retired Air Force colonel and a gun owner. She wishes more civilians would treat firearms as seriously as the military does.

“It’s not a far jump to understand why people feel the need to protect themselves” with a gun, she said. ”But you really have to know what you’re doing with it.”

Instead she sees recklessness. Referring to the Kenosha shooter, she said, “He was underage. I don’t think a child should have access to an assault weapon.” She added, “Open carry in a protest situation is dangerous.”

Most Americans and North Carolinians would agree. And they would support other modest new controls on guns.

Americans shouldn’t be afraid of Trump’s bogeymen. They should be afraid of so many guns. Outbreaks of vandalism amid city protests is a far less serious threat than the daily toll of gunfire and the terrible scourge of mass shootings.

Rise above fear

Instead of abandoning his responsibility to ensure domestic tranquility, Trump should be emulating the president who lifted the nation out of the Great Depression. Franklin Roosevelt said the nation should reject “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

The best response to the state of Trump’s America – a land disrupted by his bungling response to the pandemic and divided by his exploitation of racial and political differences – isn’t to go to a gun store. It’s to go to the polls and convert retreat into advance.

This story was originally published September 3, 2020 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Donald Trump’s fake fear is having a real effect on NC gun sales."