More guns = more gun crimes in 2020?

The question in the title of this post is prompted by this new NPR article headlined "Did Record Gun Sales Cause A Spike In Gun Crime?  Researchers Say It's Complicated."  Here is an excerpt (with links from original):

"It's a real challenge to try and disentangle the role of any one single potential cause," says Julia Schleimer, with the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis. "It's particularly challenging during the pandemic," with variables such as mass unemployment and closed schools.

Nevertheless, Schleimer and her colleagues are trying to parse out the effect of all those new guns. Their study of the initial boom in purchases — an estimated 2.1 million extra sales from March to May — concluded there was an association between short-term surges in sales and shootings.

But as the year progressed, Schleimer says that statistical relationship faded.  "We know that there's a strong link between more guns and more gun violence," she says, "but during this pandemic and in our analysis here, that link is less clear."  Setting aside the question of sales, though, there does seem to be evidence that guns were more present in daily life last year — especially during crimes.

"All of a sudden, the number of assaults with guns spiked a lot," says Rob Arthur, a data scientist and independent journalist. In a recent article for the Intercept, he pointed to an increase in the ratio of violent crimes that involved guns to those that didn't.  "That suggested to me that there was some kind of substitution going on," Arthur says. "People who were committing assaults had access to guns more in 2020 than they did before. And so they they were essentially getting upgraded to a worse crime, assaulting someone with a gun, whereas before they might have done it without a gun."

It may be a leap, though, to assume those shooters were part of last year's wave of gun buyers. Mandatory background checks bar felons and other disqualified people from buying guns in stores, and past research shows most guns used in crimes are not newly purchased.  But established patterns may not apply to 2020.  Guns were bought by a much broader cross-section of Americans last year, and the firearms industry estimates 40% were first-time buyers.

"Black gun ownership is way up, Asian gun ownership is way up, Hispanic gun ownership is way up," says Cam Edwards, the editor of BearingArms.com. "So we've seen a democratization...  where Americans who never before would have considered exercising that right have now embraced it."

For some, this "democratization" of gun sales is a matter of exercising a civil right. But it's also likely that the broadening of firearm ownership was driven by people who simply decided, during a turbulent year, that they needed a gun.  Whatever the reasons, it means 8 million new guns are now in the possession of people who potentially have less experience handling them.