How the 2024 Election Changed Who Wants a Gun

In the first weeks of January 2025, Michael Anestis and his team at Rutgers University’s New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center were watching something unexpected unfold. The same adults they’d surveyed just before the November election were reporting changed intentions around firearms. Not the usual suspects, either – the demographics were shifting in ways that challenge decades of assumptions about who owns guns and why.

The researchers had timed it carefully: 1,530 adults surveyed in the two weeks before election day, then the same group questioned again in early January. This before-and-after snapshot revealed patterns that hadn’t shown up in previous election cycles. Some groups were more likely to say they wanted to buy a gun, carry one outside the home, or store firearms where they could grab them quickly. And crucially, they attributed these urges directly to the election results themselves.

Black adults stood out in the data. Among those intending to purchase firearms after the election, 21.7% identified as Black, roughly double their representation (9.6%) among those not planning to buy. The statistical analysis went further, showing that identifying as Black was associated with increased urges to carry firearms in direct response to the election outcome. It’s a shift that echoes something from 2020, when firearm purchasing patterns changed dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic and racial justice protests – though this time, respondents explicitly linked their intentions to the political environment.

Political ideology mattered too. Perhaps unsurprisingly.

Liberal beliefs were associated with both greater urges to carry firearms and higher odds of storing them more accessibly because of the election results. For each step towards more liberal beliefs on the survey scale, individuals were 2.11 times more likely to have made their firearms quicker to access following Trump’s victory. The pattern suggests people who might feel threatened by the incoming administration’s policies were responding by changing how they think about guns.

“These findings highlight that communities that feel directly threatened by the policies and actions of the second Trump administration are reporting a greater drive to purchase firearms, carry them outside their home, and store them in a way that allows quick access,” says Anestis, the study’s lead author. The urges, he notes, are a direct result of the presidential election itself.

Here’s where it gets complicated, though – possibly worrying. The drive for self-protection makes sense on an individual level (humans have been arming themselves against perceived threats for millennia), but firearm carrying and unsecure storage both increase risks for suicide and unintentional injury. Anestis puts it plainly: “Although those beliefs are rooted in a drive for safety, firearm acquisition, carrying, and unsecure storage are all associated with the risk for suicide and unintentional injury, so I fear that the current environment is actually increasing the risk of harm.”

The research captured only 26 actual firearm purchases during the study period – too few to analyse statistically, but the demographics are suggestive. Among those who did buy guns between the surveys, 20% were Black (versus 12.1% in the full sample), 30.7% were Hispanic (versus 17.9%), and half were women. Intriguingly, about a third of post-election purchasers had indicated before the election that they weren’t planning to acquire firearms in the coming year, and among these individuals, a third identified as highly liberal.

On the other side of the political spectrum, interesting patterns emerged too. Those perceiving less threat to democracy and viewing crime as a bigger national problem reported decreased urges to carry firearms following the election. It seems individuals who see the Trump administration as invested in community safety felt less need to be armed outside their homes.

The findings raise questions about how gun violence prevention efforts might need to adapt. If liberal and minoritised communities, historically less associated with gun ownership, are indeed shifting their perspectives on firearms in response to feeling threatened by federal policies, that changes the risk landscape. More firearms in more hands means more potential for the kinds of tragedies that secure storage and reduced carrying help prevent, regardless of who’s holding the gun or why.

“Ultimately, it seems that groups less typically associated with firearm ownership – Black adults and those with liberal political beliefs, for instance – are feeling unsafe in the current environment and trying to find ways to protect themselves and their loved ones,” Anestis says. Whether that search for safety ends up creating more risk than it mitigates remains an open question, one that’s likely to become clearer as the current administration’s policies take shape and Americans continue responding to them.

Study link: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40621-026-00654-9