Firearm sales at Montgomery County dealers were unusually high last month. Business owners say they think it was due to fears over the potential for disorder and civil unrest, along with a growing need people have felt to protect their home during the coronavirus pandemic.
At Engage Armament in Rockville, gun sales were up 175% last month, owner Andrew Raymond said on Thursday.
On a day last month in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic when images of National Guard members in Baltimore showed up on TV, customers flocked to Raymond’s gun store on Gude Drive in Rockville to buy firearms.
Raymond said there were false rumors floating around that troops were there to declare martial law.
“And it turned out they were there for medical assistance,” he said. “But at the time, this had just happened an hour ago. … It was scary. I got scared seeing all this stuff. So I empathize with all these people.”
Sales haven’t been quite as high in April so far, Raymond said, but business has still been steady.
At Atlantic Guns, which has locations in Silver Spring and Rockville, sales were higher than normal in March, owner Steve Schneider said last week.
“March is a fairly average month. It’s still the end of the winter, so people can’t get out and shoot. But it has been much busier this March,” he said.
All of the buyers last month, Raymond said, were first-time gun owners who wanted shotguns for home defense.
“A gun is a good thing to have in that regard. We have fire extinguishers in our home. We have smoke detectors for a house fire. It’s a good thing to have in case something does happen,” he said.
The only other time sales have been this high at Raymond’s store, he said, was after the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in which a gunman killed 26 people, including 20 children.
A plea by then-President Barack Obama for stronger gun control measures, Raymond said, caused a panic among customers worried about their ability to buy guns in the future.
“At first, nothing happened, and then Obama gave a speech where he said he was gonna ban assault weapons, … Basically, the next day, things went crazy,” he said.
In that case, Raymond said, the customers included a mix of first-time and current gun owners.
Most of the guns people bought, Schneider said, are home defense-type weapons, rather than used for sport. Fears over the potential for a breakdown of social order seemed to be a factor, he said.
News about the possibility that some localities, such as Baltimore, would release prisoners due to the pandemic created fear in the community and the need for self-defense, Schneider said.
“I think what it is is that people are concerned that perhaps they need to be able to protect themselves in case there is some civil unrest brought about by the COVID-19 crisis,” he said.
Schneider said he remembers a spike in guns sales during periods when elected officials proposed stricter gun control measures, but the type of panic wasn’t the same.
“With this one, there’s more the issue of self-protection, where some of the past increases in sales were because of pending legislation where people were saying, ‘I better buy it now because I might not be able to buy it in the future,’” he said.
The FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System, or NICS, reported that there were more than 29,000 background checks recorded in March for Maryland, nearly double February’s total.
The March total of background checks was unusually high, too. It was about 65% higher than any month in Maryland for the last five years.
Although Gov. Larry Hogan last month passed an executive order that closed all non-essential businesses, he deemed gun stores and shooting ranges to be essential.
This month, a group of 58 Democratic state lawmakers in the House of Delegates wrote to Hogan, urging him to close gun stores during the pandemic.
“Marylanders are home, tensions are high, every Marylander is eager to save lives; however, gun stores remain open, creating fear for our most vulnerable citizens,” the letter stated.
House Republicans also wrote a letter to Hogan, urging him to keep gun stores open.
Laurie Halverson, a Potomac Republican who ran unsuccessfully for a state delegate seat in 2018, said Thursday night that she agreed with Hogan’s decision to keep firearm dealers open.
“It’s important for people to be able to defend themselves and go out and buy a gun when there’s a fear that something could happen,” she said.
Halverson said she thinks the rush to the gun stores paralleled the trend of people rushing to grocery stores to buy food and toilet paper.
She noted that guns are essential for people who depend on hunting for their food.
“I know at least one person who cannot afford to buy his own meat and he goes out and he hunts for the venison that he eats, so it’s a necessity for him if he wants to eat meat to go out and go hunting,” she said.
Dan Schere can be reached at daniel.schere@moco360.media
