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For decades, the image of gun ownership in America was white, rural and Republican. Well, that has been changing, according to gun clubs, trainers, Second Amendment advocates and researchers. They say more liberals, people of color and LGBTQ people have been buying guns for years, especially since last year's election. NPR's Frank Langfitt spoke with some of them to find out why. His story was based on more than 30 interviews. And a warning, it includes the sound of gunfire.
FRANK LANGFITT, BYLINE: Charles grew up in Brooklyn, New York, in the middle of housing projects. This was back in the '70s. His mother, deeply religious, forbid guns of any kind.
CHARLES: So I couldn't even play with a water gun. And I remember vividly summertime when my friends would have water gun fights, and I couldn't participate.
LANGFITT: Charles, who's Black, now works as a doctor in Maryland. He comes to this shooting range to practice every week with his new gun.
CHARLES: This is a Smith & Wesson .380. And then my next gun will be the Glock, and I already have a shotgun.
LANGFITT: Charles said he decided to buy a gun after the Trump administration did things that scared him - the arrest of a foreign student who criticized her university's policy on Israel, the handcuffing of a U.S. senator. Charles worries ordinary citizens like him could eventually be targeted.
CHARLES: What I'm talking about is protecting myself from a situation where there may be some kind of chaotic civil unrest and the streets become something we don't recognize.
LANGFITT: And that civil unrest that you expect would be triggered by the president or the administration through rhetoric?
CHARLES: He has it all. He can dispatch citizens or the government. It doesn't matter. He could do both. And I'm not saying that that's what's going to happen. What I'm saying is none of this is out of the question any longer.
LANGFITT: Charles and some others interviewed for this story asked to be identified only by their first names. They fear retaliation from the Trump administration. Charles has a 19-year-old daughter named Charley. She's on the taller side and joins her dad for gun training each week.
CHARLEY: I need to practice my headshots. Because of my height, it does make it harder.
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LANGFITT: Charley says she fears for her safety because of her race and gender. The day after the election, a man drove onto her college campus and hurled racial slurs at Black students.
CHARLEY: Some people - they hate us so much that they really try to make it known how much we're not wanted here.
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LANGFITT: You mean Black people.
CHARLEY: Yes. Especially Black people, women, and also, I feel like who's targeted now is just liberals because of Trump's second term.
LANGFITT: White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson dismissed NPR's reporting for this story as, quote, "disingenuous and biased" and a reason why the network no longer receives federal funding. President Trump has blamed what he calls the radical left for political violence. He cited his near assassination last year and the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: It's long past time for all Americans and the media to confront the fact that violence and murder are the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree day after day, year after year, in the most hateful and despicable way possible. For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world's worst mass murderers and criminals.
LANGFITT: Many liberals who spoke to NPR say it's the president who demonizes others, whether it be undocumented immigrants...
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TRUMP: They're poisoning the blood of our country. That's what they've done.
LANGFITT: ...Or political opponents.
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TRUMP: We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxist, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections and will do anything possible - they'll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.
DAVID PHILLIPS: I'm David Phillips, and I'm on the training team for The Liberal Gun Club.
LANGFITT: The Liberal Gun Club has chapters in more than 30 states. It provides a haven for liberals to train and learn about guns.
PHILLIPS: Since the second inauguration of Trump, we have seen an incredible increase in interest in training with firearms. The concern is about the supporters of the right wing who feel that they have been given permission to run roughshod, at least, if not commit outright violence against people they don't like.
LANGFITT: Phillips says club membership has grown by two-thirds since November, from 2,700 members to 4,500. Requests for training have quintupled. Gun clubs with similar membership say they've been seeing the same thing.
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TOM NGUYEN: Hey folks. As everyone knows, there's been a huge surge in fear and panic since the election, and we've been booked out to September for individuals wanting to take our Pistol 101 class.
HOPE: We have seen an increase of membership across our chapters of around 40%.
THOMAS BOYER: I've never seen a surge like this before.
LANGFITT: That was Tom Nguyen, who runs the LA Progressive Shooters gun club, speaking just a few weeks after Trump's inauguration, followed by a woman named Hope, who helps lead the Socialist Rifle Association, and Thomas Boyer, with the San Francisco chapter of the Pink Pistols. Their motto? Armed gays don't get bashed. Even traditional Second Amendment groups acknowledge more liberals are seeking gun training out of fear. Taylor Rhodes works with the National Association for Gun Rights.
TAYLOR RHODES: It's definitely common knowledge at this point. I think we saw a little bit of it, you know, right after the first Trump inauguration.
LANGFITT: There's no way to measure just how many people are buying guns because the political environment scares them. But the phrase, how do I buy a gun, spiked a number of times in the last year, according to Google Trends. The spikes came around the time of Trump's election, his inauguration, the first immigration enforcement blitz in January and the day when Trump held a military parade in Washington, D.C. David Yamane is a professor of sociology at Wake Forest University. He says the nation's volatile politics have been driving more liberals and minorities to buy guns for some time.
DAVID YAMANE: We definitely saw something similar happening in the COVID year of 2020, where we rolled straight from the pandemic into the summer of the George Floyd murder protests and then rolling straight from there into a contested presidential election. And there we do have some data. We do know that in that year, that new gun owners were disproportionately African American. They were disproportionately female.
LANGFITT: Gun ownership among liberals has been on the rise long before Trump's reelection. In 2022, a University of Chicago study found that 29% of Democrats or Democrat-leaning people nationwide had a gun at home. That's seven percentage points higher than a dozen years earlier. Like the vast majority of gun owners, those who spoke to NPR said they would only use the weapons for self-protection and would not engage with law enforcement. MJ is a member of a liberal self-defense group in the Midwest.
MJ: All the language that we use is absolutely not about rallying together to arm and go assault anyone at all - absolutely not. If anyone even talks like that, I or someone else would probably boot them out of the group.
LANGFITT: Bill Sack is with the Second Amendment Foundation, which challenges gun control legislation. He says he's glad to see more liberals exercising their rights to self-defense, but he has a caveat.
BILL SACK: Is it a good thing that people are scared? No, of course not.
LANGFITT: Every new gun owner NPR interviewed for this story said they thought it was highly unlikely they would have to defend themselves because of civil unrest. But they also said, if they ever had to, they'd regret not having a gun.
Frank Langfitt, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF MATT LARGE'S "THE NAECKBRAKER") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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