After mass shootings, Californians respond by acquiring handguns. Study suggests that mass shootings are prompting the introduction of handguns into households that had never had them before, and spurring gun ownership among people — including women and Latinos — who have rarely bought them in the past.

The L.A. Times reports:

A study published this week in Annals of Internal Medicine finds that in the six weeks following the 2012 shootings at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., acquisitions of handguns in California alone ticked 53% higher than usual rates.


And, in the six weeks following the 2015 shootings in San Bernardino, in which 14 were killed and 22 others seriously wounded, handgun purchases in the state increased 41% over normal sales volumes.

In and around the city of San Bernardino, the spurt was especially dramatic: Gun sales there rose by 85% in the six weeks following the rampage by American-born Syed Rizwan Farook and his Pakistani-born wife, Tashfeen Malik.


The additional 53,000 handguns that found their way into California households following the Newtown and San Bernardino assaults represent a tiny fraction of the estimated 30 million firearms privately owned statewide. But the study suggests that mass shootings are prompting the introduction of handguns into households that had never had them before, and spurring gun ownership among people — including women and Latinos — who have rarely bought them in the past.

As mass shootings continue unabated, the additional gun sales they spur have the power, bit by bit, to nudge the nation’s arsenal of privately held weapons — estimated to be 310 million in 2009 — ever higher.

“A large number of smaller spikes could add up to a major addition to the number of guns in a community,” said Stanford University injury-prevention researcher David M. Studdert, the study’s lead author.

The new findings, drawn from gun acquisition records in the Golden State, may well be a conservative gauge of how much mass shootings drive increases in gun sales and ownership. In California, would-be gun buyers must clear many more hurdles than exist in most states, including a 10-day waiting period, a purchase limit of one gun per month and a safety training requirement.

One difficult story for the gun banning crowd.