Gun sales in New York more than doubled during the month of June compared to last year, according to FBI data collected by the New York Post.
More than 52,000 background checks were conducted for people seeking to buy firearms in the Empire State, according to the data, which is a 121% spike from June 2019.
More than 31,000 of those background checks were for people looking to buy rifles.
“When the original COVID scare started in the beginning of March and people thought they might get laid off, at that point, we saw a huge surge. We sold out of almost everything we had in the store,” Cliff Pfleger, who owns a gun shop on Long Island, told the Post. “We had lines continuously, even though we didn’t have things to sell.”
Most of the people who visited Pfleger’s shop were first-time firearm purchasers, Pfleger said.
This is a trend gun stores across the country have been experiencing over the past several months.
“It’s been insane,” Jay Wallace, who owns Adventure Outdoors in Smyrna, Georgia, said last month, adding that his ammunition sales are up more than five times the usual numbers. “This is like a Rod Serling ‘Twilight Zone’ episode.”
The coronavirus pandemic has directly contributed to this spike in gun sales, and recent riots have only accelerated it.
Three million more guns than usual have been purchased over the past few months, according to a study by the Brookings Institution.
And as efforts to defund police departments become mainstream, residents are becoming concerned that things will get worse before they get better.
And in some cities, such as New York, that fear is reasonable.
Already, there have been more than 400 shootings during the first half of the year for the first time since 2016.
In June alone, the city saw 205 shootings, the bloodiest the city has experienced in 24 years.
