What happens when everyone decides they need a gun?

“Threat!”

In a flash, 50 people pull replica handguns and raise them above shoulder height, careful not to point the mock weapons at the heads of those sitting in front of them.

It’s a Saturday morning on the South Side of Chicago, and the heat is rising in the classroom as firearms instructor Mike Brown leads students through gun-handling drills. They hold the model guns aloft until he yells, “Chest!,” which is their cue to draw the weapons back to their bodies. He drills them over and over, so pointing the gun feels like pure instinct, a reflex each time they hear him shout, “Threat!”

A few hours earlier, just before 8 am, the students began lining up with coffee cups and water bottles outside of Brown’s storefront office, where they’ve committed to spending 16 hours of their weekend learning about gun safety. 

It’s a diverse group: Over half are women and the majority are Black, but there are white and Hispanic students, too. Some are as young as 18, and a handful are older, but most of them are 20- and 30-somethings. Several are new to firearms or are planning to get their first gun soon. Everyone is there for a common reason: to complete Illinois’s required training to get a concealed carry license, which will allow them to bring their guns in public. 

Brown teaches these classes most weekends. For the past few years, he says, they’ve been packed.

That’s partly because Brown, a charismatic 43-year-old with a large social media following, offers something different from the dry legalese you might expect from a firearms safety course. His class is more like standup comedy meets group therapy meets self-defense seminar, taught by a drill sergeant. 

But there’s another reason why Brown’s classes are full, week after week.

The beginning of the 2020s marked a significant shift in America’s relationship with guns and gun violence. The Covid-19 lockdowns, combined with nationwide protests and a police reckoning following the killing of George Floyd, worsened an ongoing breakdown of trust in institutions and society. 

In 2020, violent crime increased across the United States, with the homicide rate rising faster than at any time in more than 100 years. Guns became the leading cause of death for children and teens, rising 50 percent over two years. In 2021, a year that began with more political unrest and a violent insurrection, more Americans died of gun-related injuries than in any year on record. The rise in gun deaths was a major factor in Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s decision this summer to declare gun violence a public health crisis.

Amid the violence, millions of Americans made a potentially life-altering decision: They decided it was time to buy their first gun.

One in 20 American adults bought a gun for the first time between March 2020 and March 2022, according to survey data from independent research organization NORC at the University of Chicago.

Previously, American gun sales were driven by a small number of people: overwhelmingly white men adding to their existing gun collections. 

The people who bought their first guns during the pandemic were different. 

NORC’s study found that 69 percent were people of color. According to a separate study by researchers at Northeastern and Harvard Universities, 20 percent of new gun buyers between 2019 and 2021 were Black and 20 percent were Hispanic. Half were women — a massive shift given that, between 1980–2014, only 9 to 14 percent of women owned guns. 

Listen to the students in Brown’s class and to others who became gun owners during this period and a clear picture emerges of what drove so many people to get their first gun. As crime soared and trust in the police faltered, a grim kind of logic took hold: If everyone else is going to have a gun, then I need to have one, too. 

“Everybody’s got guns, so it’s only right to have one,” says Leslie Bullard Jr., 31. “I’ve got to make sure my family and my kids are safe.”

Like so many Americans, Brown’s students watched guns proliferate in their community and country in real time. Brown is clear-eyed about why they come to him for training.

“They don’t want to die,” he says. “They’re scared of the violence.”

That fear — and the decisions Americans made because of it — speaks to an important new reality around the nation’s relationship with guns: Prior to the pandemic, the US already had more privately owned firearms than civilians in the other top 25 gun-owning countries combined. It was hard to imagine that the country’s internal arms race could escalate any further. 

But it has. 

Millions more guns, both legal and not, flooded into the country during the pandemic. Recent Supreme Court decisions made meaningful regulation all but impossible. No one is completely immune from the risks of this new era of gun violence, not even the former president of the United States.

And though homicide and violent crime have dropped from their pandemic spike, guns are not like iPhones. They don’t outlive their purpose after a few years, and they’re extremely difficult to get rid of safely. They can be deadly for generations to come. 

The rise in the number of new gun-owning households “really changes all kinds of policy and political calculations,” says John Roman, author of the NORC survey. Beyond the safety risks of owning a gun are the deeper implications for society: for policing, crime, medical services, and public health. 

“We’re definitely not in the same place we were in 2019,” says Roman.

We are living through an inflection point in America’s long love affair with guns. “People were given the message that they were on their own. The government was not functional,” says Patrick Sharkey, a sociology professor at Princeton University who studies urban inequality, public policy, and violence. 

“That feeling when institutions break down, I think, played a role in contributing to the major surge of gun sales and the rise in violence. When you feel like no one is in charge, that’s a recipe for violence to emerge.” 

By different measures, other cities might be thought of as the nation’s old gun heartland: Billings, Montana, a predominantly white city in the state with the highest average rate of household firearm ownership; or Houston, Texas, a large southern city in the state with the highest estimated number of gun sales.

But as the greater Chicago area — home to more than half of Illinois’s population — faced increasing violence during the pandemic, it became emblematic of the changing realities around American gun ownership. Rising interest in guns took place in a racially diverse city, long known as a Democratic stronghold, in a state with some of the toughest gun laws in the United States. 

Other Democratic cities saw similar increases in gun permits and concealed carry applications. In New York, applications to the NYPD to own a handgun doubled, from 2,892 in 2019 to 5,820 in 2020, according to reporting by Gothamist, a nonprofit news organization. Pennsylvania does not require a permit to purchase a gun, but applications to carry a firearm exploded in 2021: State police that year issued 384,522 permits to carry, a 24 percent increase over the year before, with the increase coming almost entirely from Philadelphia, according to an analysis by the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Those trend lines in cities powered the nationwide surge in gun sales, but it’s difficult to determine where exactly the estimated 17 million people newly exposed to firearms in their homes live. Neither the NORC study nor the Northeastern study published data on their locations, and there’s no federal registry of gun owners that can offer insight. 

The FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check system, though, suggests a sharp increase in gun purchases in Illinois during the pandemic: The number of background checks performed in the state spiked from 4.9 million in 2019 to 7.4 million in 2020 and 8.4 million in 2021. Illinois performed more background checks during those years than any other state.

Other signs also point to the Midwest’s largest city as a hotspot for new gun owners. 

Illinois is one of only three states that requires a license to own a firearm. The number of new applications the state received for a license to legally own a firearm rose to historic highs in 2020, according to data provided by the Illinois State Police.

Applications for the state’s Firearm Owner’s Identification, also known as FOID cards, rose 56 percent between 2019 and 2020, resulting in a significant backlog in the approval process. 

The number of applications climbed as the city and the country experienced a precipitous rise in violent crime. Murders rose across the US in 2020, but in Chicago, the violence was especially acute: The number of killings in the city that year jumped 55 percent, compared to 30 percent nationally. In 2021, the city saw more homicides than any other metropolis in the United States. And though other cities had higher murder rates, it was the deadliest year for Chicagoans since 1996, with more than 3,500 shooting incidents. 

The danger wasn’t spread equally across the city: The worst gun violence was concentrated in economically segregated neighborhoods that were predominantly Black or Latino and already struggled with high levels of crime, perpetuating what Sharkey calls the “rigid geography of violence.”

The lingering effects of that violence can be felt in Brown’s classroom.

“Any Chicagoan is probably suffering from PTSD,” says Cynthia, one of the attendees in Brown’s class. 

Cynthia is a retired parole officer, there to renew her concealed carry license. (Vox has agreed to withhold her last name for safety reasons.) “You worry about going out,” she says. “If you have to put gas in the car — and it doesn’t matter what time of day, it doesn’t matter if it’s 7 o’clock in the morning or 5 o’clock in the morning — we have to keep our heads on a swivel. Why do we have to live like this?”

Interest in getting a gun in her state spiked after periods of unrest: According to an investigation by the local CBS News station, on June 2, 2020, following days of rioting and looting in Chicago, 4,916 people applied for a license to own a gun on a single day — more than had applied in the previous eight days combined. Today, Cook County, home to Chicago and its suburbs, has more FOID card holders than any other county in the state.

Homicides in the city and across the United States have since dropped, but some forms of violent crime, including robberies, continued to rise in Chicago last year. 

For those who spend a lot of time traveling throughout the city and suburbs, the risks feel especially pronounced. 

Frank Brown, a student in the class (who bears no relation to Mike Brown), first purchased a gun in 2020 but decided to get a concealed carry license this year to protect himself while working as a ride-hail and delivery driver. “With the increasing amount of violence that’s been happening to those drivers nowadays, it caused me to have a bit more concern for my personal safety,” he says.  

Mike Brown’s class is calibrated to his students’ experiences of living in Chicago these last few years. Many of his students are there because they live in communities deeply affected by the violence.

“Everybody is talking, but ain’t nobody hearing the kids. But guess what?” Brown asks them. “When they shoot your ass out there, you hear them now. And that’s why your ass is in here.”

As the number of guns grows, Brown is of two minds about what it all means. He believes in the rights of law-abiding gun owners to carry weapons, especially given the number of people carrying them illegally. And his students are trying to do things the right way. But owning a gun doesn’t mean much and can be really dangerous if the carriers aren’t trained in how to use them.  

Even with state-mandated training, he thinks a lot of people aren’t fully prepared for the responsibilities of owning a firearm. 

“What I see here is a powder keg, a lot of frustration, a lot of anger, a lot of bad relationships,” Brown says. “And all those factors can motivate people to come into my class and get what they think is going to be the fixer of their problems.” 

When Brown speaks about the forces that drive gun violence, he echoes what the experts say. “People pick up guns to solve a problem,” turning mundane conflicts into lethal ones, says Alex Piquero, a sociology and criminology professor at the University of Miami and former director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Brown wants his students to understand that carrying a gun is not going to solve their problems. It could just make those problems worse. 

“Pressing the trigger is easy,” he says. “The hard part is going to be the aftermath of all the other things you didn’t factor for: the police investigation, then whoever you shot, somebody loves that person, so now they’re coming for you, and you still got to live here.”

He bookends his lessons with this message. 

“Everybody’s a gangbanger until it’s time to actually gangbang,” he tells his students as he stands in front of a framed target with the center shot out. “There’s people out there waiting for you to fuck around and find out.”

“Should everyone have a gun?” he asks them.

“No!” they call out in response.

And yet, the 50 people in the room — and thousands of others who’ve gone through Brown’s classes — have decided that they should.

Like their teacher, Brown’s students are not card-carrying NRA members who treat gun ownership as an identitarian issue. They’re different, and it’s obvious after spending a minute in the class. 

Most of them are women. They speak rarely about politics and hardly at all about their Second Amendment rights. Instead, they describe a sense of fear for their children in a society awash with guns. When they speak about gun ownership, they speak primarily about safety and responsibility. They are driven by a desire to exert some control in what feels like a chaotic and uncertain time.  

“I have two boys at home, and I’m a single mom, so getting concealed carry was important to me because it’s just me,” says Zakiya Robinson, 32. 

It’s Saturday afternoon, on the first day of the concealed carry class. After a lunch break, Brown’s students reconvene at Eagle Sports Range, at the southern end of Cook County. Brown, wearing a bulletproof safety vest with a patch that reads “Black Guns Matter,” is joined by another instructor to lead students through setting up their targets and preparing to shoot. 

Inside the range, bullet casings bounce off the walls and floors; paper practice targets flutter as students draw them in on automated pulleys to see where their bullets hit.

Robinson says she is worried about how to keep her family safe. She feels tremendous pressure figuring out how to raise her son in a dangerous world while balancing his need to be a child. “I can’t express that to my son enough, and it’s hard because they’re in kid mode. They don’t know that the world is crappy. They don’t know that they have to be aware of their surroundings. He just wants to go to the park and play. It’s a hard thing.”

Her concerns are shared by other mothers in the city, including those at a gathering the night before organized by Vanessa Longoria, a concealed carry instructor, in Humboldt Park, a neighborhood on the West Side of Chicago. Three weeks before, the police killed 26-year-old Dexter Reed in the same neighborhood during a traffic stop, in a case that sparked local protests and captured national attention. And just three days earlier, Longoria pointed out, a 4-year-old child had been shot while traveling in a car several blocks away. Hearing about those shootings has spurred their protective instincts. 

Longoria, 35, decided to become a firearms instructor in 2020, when her gun teacher told her there were plenty of women who wanted to learn to shoot but would prefer to be taught by someone like them.

She finds that other women relate to her reason for weapons training. “I want to protect myself but also my family,” she says. The women she’s worked with want to feel that, too.

Generational shifts have almost certainly played a role in their relationships to guns. In 1990, according to the Urban Institute, women were the heads of household — or the main breadwinner — in about a third of US households. By 2019, women were the heads of household in half of American homes. 

These women were used to doing it all, including taking on the traditionally male roles of providing and protection.

“I got divorced, so then it was just me and my daughter by ourselves. There’s no man in the house anymore,” says Lynda Gilly, 46, who got a gun in 2020. “So now I have to just keep it there in case of anything. Thank God nothing’s ever happened to where I’ve had to pull it out.”

In Black homes, the share of families with women as heads of household is even higher, at 60 percent. The concerns about safety are compounded by the knowledge that the rate of gun deaths among Black children in the US is more than five times higher than for other children, and the danger can come both from the community and also from the police. Sixty-one percent of victims of gun homicide in 2020 were Black, with the largest increases in deaths among Black boys and men ages 10–44.   

For that reason, LaSinda Thompson, 32, and her husband have decided they would rather their children learn about guns from them. “When they both turn 8, we will be teaching them about gun safety and taking them to the range,” she says. 

“With me having a child, it’s like, I can’t imagine letting him just be out by himself,” says Sade Adejumo, 33, who grew up with Longoria. “It just makes you feel fearful because my one job in this world is to protect this child and make sure nothing happens to this child.” 

The problem, experts say, is that having a gun in the home can be extremely dangerous, substantially increasing relative risk. While most people safely and responsibly own firearms, those who have guns in their homes are more than twice as likely to be shot and killed than people who don’t.

“It’s conclusive that buying a gun doesn’t make you safer,” says Roman, an expert on firearms data. “If you’re a woman in a household with a gun, your chance of being the victim of a firearm homicide goes way up. If you’re a teenage or 20-something boy or man, your chance of committing suicide goes up fourfold. We underestimate the cost of gun ownership, in terms of risk of somebody in our household being seriously injured or killed by that gun.”

Matthew Miller, an epidemiologist who studies the links between gun access and violent injury and death, and who authored the Northeastern study, puts it more starkly. “The people who are now exposed to guns in their home for the first time, they are several-fold more likely to die a violent death” by suicide or other gun-related injuries, he says. Guns increase risk because easy access to a firearm makes violent impulses especially lethal.

Gilly, whose daughter is now in college, says she’s aware of the risk of her gun being used against her or her family. “It’s not like my gun’s out in the open,” she says. But, she says, “If I’m pulling it out — oh my God, I better be able to defend myself.” 

For policymakers already concerned about the dangers guns pose, their proliferation is a troubling development.

“We haven’t helped people feel safe enough. We need to step up and do more to help people feel like they don’t need a gun,” says Rep. Robin Kelly, a Democrat whose district includes parts of Chicago’s South Side and suburbs. “I can’t tell people how to feel, especially when they see things on the news.” 

“I’m disappointed that people have more guns, and that it’s spreading to different populations,” she says. “But I’m not surprised.” 

A number of factors make it difficult for those who, like Kelly, are working to reduce gun violence. 

Illinois is surrounded by states, including Kentucky, Indiana, and Missouri, with some of the nation’s least restrictive gun laws and worst firearms mortality rates, making regulation more difficult to enforce. 
Following a mass shooting in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park in 2022 that killed seven people and injured 48 others, the state passed the first assault weapons ban in the Midwest.

A 2022 US Supreme Court decision, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, upheld the right of Americans to carry guns in public and placed the burden on the government to prove that their regulations were consistent with historical gun laws. As a result, almost all restrictions on guns became vulnerable to legal challenges. Illinois’s law banning assault weapons was immediately contested by gun rights groups. In July, the Court declined to take up the challenge, leaving the Illinois law in place. 

The Court’s recent decisions didn’t happen in a vacuum. Before Bruen, several states had passed laws making it easier for people to carry guns in public. At the same time, gun manufacturers increased production of weapons, and methods for illegally obtaining a gun became easier. Those factors, experts say, almost certainly contributed to an increase in demand from people looking to get weapons for protection. 

The explosion in new guns has created other concerns about public safety, Roman says. The fact that more people have guns and that they’re increasingly carrying them in their cars and on their persons, as well as at home, creates more opportunities for guns to be stolen. 

“That means that the homeowner’s gun has a higher chance of becoming a crime gun,” Roman says. “We see that in the data: The time from purchase to a gun showing up at a crime scene has fallen. Newer guns are ending up as street guns quicker than they did in 2019.”

A recent investigation of FBI crime data from Everytown, an organization that supports stronger gun safety regulations, also found that the rate of guns stolen from vehicles has tripled in the last decade, with an average of one gun stolen from a car every nine minutes. 

Complicating matters further, the millions of guns the government estimates were sold legally almost certainly undercount the total number of weapons that flooded the US during the pandemic. 

The number of ghost guns — homemade guns that aren’t traceable because they don’t use serial numbers the way gun manufacturers do — that were recovered from crime scenes increased 1,083 percent between 2017 and 2021, according to an analysis by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.  

“What we’re seeing in the official records about purchases is one thing. To me, that number is the floor. There are more above that,” Piquero says. 

“How many more? We don’t know.”

While many of the new gun owners are obtaining their guns legally, experts worry that the spread of even more firearms will make the nation more deeply entrenched in the problems that come with a highly fractious society with too many guns. These factors, Roman says, make efforts to reduce America’s gun violence epidemic exceedingly difficult.

So the American arms race continues. 

“With this many guns in civilian hands, it’s unlikely that we are going to be able to do much better than we are today” on gun violence, Roman says. “Firearms make fist fights into gun fights, and there’s always going to be some fist fights.” 

This last part is what concerns Brown. 

On the second day of his class, he leads the students through different hypothetical encounters, each involving the threat of violence. After giving a short description of the situation, he asks the students a question: 

“In this instance, do you have to shoot, or do you want to shoot?” 

The students debate different possibilities, many of them ripped from local headlines and social media: One is based on a recent case in New York City, where a neighborly dispute over apartment noise escalated into a double homicide caught on camera. Another is about the murder of 24-year-old Aréanah Preston, a Chicago police officer, during an armed robbery attempt outside her home. Each scenario sparks intense discussion and disagreement about the best course of action.

There’s a reason Brown walks students through these scenarios. “I don’t consider myself to be a die-hard Second Amendment community member,” who believes that guns are a solution to every problem, he says. Instead, he considers himself a “part of the intellectual branch of the conflict-avoidant group, who happens to carry guns.” 

“I can use violence. I’m not afraid of it,” he says. “But do we have to?”

It’s a question that grows more urgent as more Americans take up guns. 

So Brown is trying to drill his message home, again and again. In several of his scenarios, he tells students the best thing to do is to back down, disengage, even let yourself be a victim. It might save your life. 

“Just because you have a gun,” he says, “doesn’t mean you’ve got to use it.” 

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