American gun culture has long been dominated by conservative, white men. In a marked change, a burgeoning number of liberals are buying firearms, according to surveys and fast-growing gun groups drawing minorities and progressives. “It’s a group of people who five years ago would never have considered buying a gun,” says Jennifer Hubbert, an anthropology professor at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore., who has researched liberal gun owners, the Wall Street Journal reports. Historically, gun ownership among Democrats was not uncommon, especially in rural areas where hunting was more prevalent. However, from the early 1990s, there was a significant decline in gun ownership among Democrats. This shift occurred as political debates intensified over firearms' place in society, prompting the Democratic Party to champion gun control measures. The Republican Party embraced gun rights. Now there is a growing interest in firearms among Democrats.
Researchers, gun merchants and owners attribute the shift to factors including rising concerns about personal safety and a volatile political climate: GOP presidential candidate and former President Trump warning of “potential death and destruction” if he is charged with crimes, Democrats warning of the potential end of democracy, and two assassination plots against Trump. Twenty-nine percent of Democrats or those leaning Democrat said they had a gun at home in 2022, up from a four-decade low of 22% in 2010, according to a long-running survey by NORC at the University of Chicago. In 2022, 55% of Republicans had a gun in their home, up 3 percentage points since 2010. In a nationally representative 2023 survey by the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, about 11% of respondents had purchased a gun since 2020. Among Democratic gun buyers since 2020, more than half were first-time owners, compared with less than a quarter of Republicans, according to researchers who analyzed the data.