North Carolina counties see an uptick in gun permits during month of protest

North Carolina has seen increases in gun permits issued by county sheriff departments prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic and protests spurred by George Floyd’s death.

Lee County Sheriff Tracy Carter in a Facebook post Wednesday morning, encouraged people to be prepared for everything from natural disasters to civil unrest and COVID-19. He warned residents not to be “soft targets.”

“Most of you are aware that I’m a big advocate of the 2nd Amendment,” Carter wrote in the post. “If you feel threatened in your home, you should be able to defend yourself and your loved ones from that threat.”

Alanna Miller, a volunteer leader with Students Demand Action at Duke University, said Carter’s Facebook post has a “racialized element,” that’s written as if he expects protests to be violent.

“I definitely think that’s racially motivated,” she said. “It’s an inappropriate thing for a sheriff to be sharing.” Students Demand Action seeks to end gun violence and tighten gun control laws.

The Lee County Sheriff’s Office issued 837 pistol permits in June 2020, an increase of nearly 900% from June 2019. In May, the county issued 439 permits.

“There are a lot of people purchasing firearms for the first time and learning to use your firearm properly is important,” Carter wrote on Facebook.

In the post, he cited the Lee County Wildlife Club and Deep River Sporting Clays as places where firearm safety classes are offered, and included links to the Lee County Sheriff’s Office website and North Carolina’s Firearms Laws and Permits, among others.

Other counties also seeing uptick in gun sales

In North Carolina, persons looking to purchase a handgun must have a concealed carry or pistol purchase permit. Both can be obtained through sheriff offices in a person’s county of residence.

Larger guns, like rifles and shotguns, can be purchased with a state I.D. and after a background check through the FBI at federally licensed firearm dealers.

Other counties are also seeing upticks in gun sales. The Orange County Sheriff’s Office received 395 permit applications last month; in June 2019, it got 86 applications. Durham County had an increase of 445% in pistol permit applications from June 2019 to June 2020. Durham also received 399 concealed carry permit applications in June, more than double from the same month last year.

Durham and Orange saw fewer applicants in May than in June this year, a month of continuous protests for racial justice after the death of Floyd, a Black man, who was killed when a police officer knelt on his neck for almost nine minutes in Minneapolis on May 25.

Wake County had 2,909 permit applications in May 2020 compared to 784 in May 2019.

In March, high demand for permits caused the Wake County Sheriff’s Office to reduce Pistol Purchase Permits Office hours due to health and safety concerns related to COVID-19, The News & Observer reported. The sheriff’s office stopped accepting new applications from March 21 to April 30.

‘Moments of uncertainty’

The jump in handgun permit applications this year was driven in part by the coronavirus.

“People tend to buy fire arms in moments of uncertainty,” said David Yamane, a sociology professor at Wake Forest University who studies gun culture. “The uncertainty associated with the COVID pandemic had people looking for ways to get themselves physical security or psychological security.”

The coronavirus pandemic caused such a spike in gun sales that was followed by another, he said.

“Last month’s spike can largely be attributed to the social unrest around the rioting that took place around the Black Lives Matter protests,” he said. “It’s a related but separate phenomenon.”

Yamane said he never touched or fired a gun until he was older than 40. He became interested in guns 10 years ago, where living in the South “it seems more people had guns than didn’t.”

He wrote a blog post last year called, ”How a Card Carrying Liberal Professor Became a Card Carrying Liberal Armed American.”

There’s a strong belief that many people buying guns during these spikes are new gun owners, he said. More than 300 million fire arms are owned by U.S. civilians, and “on any given day, most are not involved in a negative outcome,” Yamane said.

Miller, the Students Demand Action leader, said the guns in homes increase the likelihood of suicide — representing a heightened danger when so many people struggling through the coronavirus pandemic. Gun owners should keep them securely stored, locked, unloaded and separate from ammunition, she said.

“Certainly, we do not need unsecured guns that ignite intimate partner violence, suicides, or unintentional shootings,” Miller said.

This story was originally published July 3, 2020 at 5:00 AM.