When gun sales reached record-high levels during the pandemic, alarmist gun-grabbers pushed the narrative that this unprecedented proliferation in lawful gun ownership was somehow responsible for a subsequent spike in homicides and other crime.
The hypothesis that increased gun sales caused a corresponding increase in violent crime was later debunked. A 2021 study by anti-gun researchers, no less, “found no relationship between state-level excess purchasing and non-domestic firearm violence” and concluded that “the magnitude of the increase in purchasing was not associated with the magnitude of the increase in firearm violence.” In late 2021, The Trace, Michael Bloomberg’s pro-gun control “newsroom,” cited the study but nonetheless stuck to the first-blame-all-guns line, asserting that the “research we do have, though, shows that immediate booms in access to firearms almost always lead to corresponding spikes in violence.”