Apparently, the women of America are catching the fever for the defense of life and liberty:
Close to half of all new U.S. gun buyers since the beginning of 2019 have been women, a shift for a market long dominated by men, according to a new study.
The preliminary results from the 2021 National Firearms Survey, designed by Deborah Azrael of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Matthew Miller of Northeastern University, show an estimated 3.5 million women became new gun owners from January 2019 through April of this year. About 4 million men became new gun owners over that period, they found.
This is pretty awesome, but raises the question: since women have historically made up just 10-20% of gun owners, what's driving this new trend?
The Wall Street Journal doesn't come right out and say, but it cites the record number of gun sales in 2020 and mentions Covid, lockdowns, and riots.
Here's a member survey of women's shooting league A Girl & A Gun that discusses reasons for learning about guns:
That's not all. The survey also found that more and more individuals of all ethnic backgrounds were buying weapons.
In addition to its findings on gender, the survey found that new gun buyers were more racially diverse than existing owners who bought more. Among new gun buyers, 55% were white, 21% were Black and 19% were Hispanic. Among new women gun owners, 28% were Black. The 19.6 million existing gun owners who bought more firearms since 2019 were 71% male and 74% white.
The examples cited in the WSJ article were in California, the most anti-gun state in the nation. One of the women cited in the article joined a self-defense training program after being afraid of what crowds of Trump supporters would do, so it's not like these ladies are all MAGA-loving conservatives!
Tell me, does this sound like something the media would portray a suburban mom taking part in?
The instructors, mostly women dressed in black tops and pants, led the group through drills like kicking in the door of a fake house and quickly firing at targets in different rooms.
This all stuff to remember the next time a politician tries to convince you that the Second Amendment is all about protecting the white patriarchy, or that the only people who own and train with guns are chubby neo-Nazis who live in rural Alabama!
