Women Comprise Major Segment of New Gun Buyers: Researcher
Garen Wintemute, who directs the University of California Firearm Violence Research Center, says the demographics of gun purchasers has been steadily broadening to include previously “underrepresented” groups.
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Women now make up a significant segment of new gun purchasers in the U.S., says a leading gun researcher.
Citing 2020 figures showing that 47 percent of all new gun owners were female in 2020-2021 (a slight decline from 50 percent in 2019), Garen Wintemute, who directs the University of California Firearm Violence Research Center, said that the demographics of gun purchasing has been steadily broadening to include previously “underrepresented” groups.
“The traditional population of gun owners are white, non-Hispanic men,” Dr. Wintemute said in an interview with SciOnline.
“But for several years, the demographic profile of gun owners in the United States has been broadening as women and members of underrepresented groups started purchasing firearms,”
Most of the rise in gun purchasing has been driven by concerns about personal protection, added Dr. Wintemute, who is also an emergency medicine physician at the University of California Davis Medical Center.
“People buy guns more for protection than for all other reasons put together. The second-biggest reason is use in sport hunting and target shooting and so on.”
Dr. Garen Wintemute
Dr. Wintemute said the increase in firearms purchases was a key reason for the rise of gun violence in the U.S.
“We’ve known for a long time is that, on balance, the more access there is to firearms in a society, the more firearm violence there is likely to be,” Dr. Wintemute said, but he added that since the pandemic “many other things were contributing to increases in violence.”
An estimated 13 million “excess purchases” of firearms– were recorded during 2020 and 2021, Dr. Wintemute said.
The figure was “above what it would have been predicted by the experience of the preceding four or five years,” he noted. “We’ve never seen anything like it.”
The complete interview, including a video, is available here.
