WADSWORTH, Ohio (AP) – A Thursday regular at Ohio Supply and Tool, John Horne stepped up to the back corner of the hardware store where Kris Gaugler leaned gently on the selling side of a glass case full of handguns.
Gaugler opened the gun nook in 2010. The pink guns – a sign of women’s growing interest in personal protection – appeared a couple years later. Hanging from the ceiling, a jet-black .50-caliber Browning machine gun accurate at more than 1,000 feet, stretches more than 4 feet.
Rifles and shotguns line the wall behind him. These are the instruments preferred by most of his customers, who like Gaugler have killed for food since they were small children. Their appreciation for guns runs deep. “It’s a way of life,” they say.
Increasingly, though, Ohioans have armed themselves out of fear – whether from bureaucrats who link more guns to the perception of more violence or from some media and politicians who exploit crime in America as President Donald Trump did on the campaign trail, equating some cities to Third World countries.
“The media always says guns, guns, guns. Guns did this!” criticized Gaugler, who grew up in Rittman where he learned to respect his father’s firearm collection. “It’s not the gun’s fault. There are people behind them.”
Business is good for Gaugler and gun sellers.
Crime and terrorism concern small town America. “We’re in little Wadsworth,” Gaugler said. “But you still get big crime. And you’ll never get rid of the drugs.”
But there’s no denying the politics at play.
“One of the jokes in firearm stores, eight years running, is they have posters on the doors for salesman of the year: Barack Obama,” said Jim Irvine, president of the Buckeye Firearms Association, Ohio’s largest gun advocacy group.
Obama – who signed no legislation curtailing gun rights – went out with a bang, leaving an unsung legacy in a well-armed America.
2016 was the year of the gun.
Presidential candidates and the media hoisted terrorist attacks and police shootings to the top of the news hour. And demand for guns and permits to conceal them in public reached record levels in Ohio and America.
In the first three-quarters of 2016, the Ohio Attorney General’s Office reports that sheriffs across the state issued 93,851 concealed carry permits, or 22,262 more than in all of 2015.
Year over year, that’s an 83 percent jump. And with fourth-quarter figures outstanding, 2016 is easily on pace to shatter the record of 96,972 permits issued in 2013, an inflection point in America when the number of guns (357 million) surpassed people (316 million).
According to political spending reported by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics and a Beacon Journal review of FBI background checks, lobbying by the National Rifle Association from 1999 to 2015 mirrors the rise in national gun sales.
NRA lobbying, however, pales in comparison to the $52 million it spent on political ads last year portraying liberal candidates as a menace to gun rights. Some television ads portrayed women home alone, in the dark or in bed, defenseless as an intruder lurks in the bushes or busts through the front door. “Don’t let Hillary (Clinton) leave you protected with nothing but a phone,” one ad said.
On the campaign trail, conservatives painted Clinton as anti-gun, though she said in a widely viewed presidential debate: “I’m not here to take away your guns. I just don’t want you to be shot by someone who shouldn’t have a gun in the first place.”
Conservatives also considered a Clinton presidency as four more years of the Obama administration, during which two gun bills became law – both relaxing, not restricting, gun rights.
Months after Obama secured a second term, a mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut reignited the perennial debate over gun control. A Gallup Poll taken days later indicated 58 percent of America favored “more strict” gun laws. Support dipped below 50 percent in 2014 before rebounding to 55 percent in 2015 and 2016.
Gun violence, particularly the random sort perpetrated against innocent or young victims, seems to drive up gun sales and demand for reform, creating an environment of extreme polarization.
After each school shooting, educators sign up for gun safety classes offered by Roger Polk, a Wadsworth resident and NRA-certified gun safety instructor who offers double the in-class and on-range time required by the state to get a concealed carry permit.
Polk needs no more customers. “I’m swamped,” he said. He stressed that knowing the law is as important as the minimum basic safety required by the state. If a gun owner shoots and kills in public, he said, there are two possible outcomes beyond death: Either the state prosecutes the shooter or the victim’s family sues.
There’s no single, definitive record of gun sales in America.
The closest approximations come from combining guns manufactured with exports and imports, or from FBI background checks initiated when gun buyers approach dealers. These checks do not occur in peer-to-peer sales or gun show transactions, which also require no universal background checks to rule out the buyer as a terrorist threat, felon or otherwise unfit to bear arms.
FBI background checks have tripled since 2000 with precipitous growth since the 2008 election. Checks reached 27,538,673 in 2016 – a 19 percent annual increase and the most ever recorded.
While gun sales increase, ownership has fallen. In the last half of the 20th century, roughly half of Americans told Gallup they have a gun in their homes. That trend fell sharply in the late 1990s, settling at 39 percent in October 2016.
This suggests fewer gun owners owning more guns.
More Americans are shot to death than killed in vehicle crashes.
Two-thirds of the 33,000 annual gun deaths are self-inflicted, according to death certificates compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and reviewed by FiveThirtyEight, a news website that focused on the 2016 election.
The other third of gun deaths are homicidal. However, fatal incidents that prime debate are rare.
Terrorists gunned down 82 Americans between 2002 and 2015, according to FiveThirtyEight. Taking even the highest estimates, mass shootings accounted for 1.4 percent of gun deaths in 2016. The National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund reports that 63 officers were shot to death in 2016, a 50 percent increase over 2015. Meanwhile, police shot dead 963 people in 2016, a statistic not reported by authorities but one the Washington Post gathered from media reports.
Asked about his sense of crime in America, Horne, the customer at Gaugler’s counter, perked up.
“It’s insane. Nothing gives people the right to execute the police,” Horne said.
The media plays a big role in public perception.
“I don’t have any facts or statistics, but it makes the news when an officer is killed,” said Horne, who used to hunt but now target shoots in his backyard in Hinckley.
Another loose fact is the number of concealed carriers who kill.
“You don’t see that,” suggested Horne, who added that gun buyers with criminal intent avoid background checks.
There’s a fervor driving the gun industry.
When politicians start talking about gun control, panic pushes ammo sales. Shelves empty, and conspiracies about the government banning production or setting limits takes hold.
“This leads to hoarding. It’s all in that mindset,” said Polk. “We the customers were really responsible for (increased prices) because of hoarding ammo.”
With Trump in office, Second Amendment enthusiasts are at ease. They expect sales to level off, but the gun culture in America, they say, is here to stay.
“It may increase or decrease a bit, but it will continue to rise compared to historical figures,” said Irvine, the gun lobby president. “That’s because owning a gun is not a radical idea . Carrying a gun is not about being a soldier or doing battle. It’s to protect yourself or your country. It’s like putting on a seat belt.”
Irvine, who tracks legislation, is assured that a Trump administration will sign the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act of 2017, introduced this month by Rep. Richard Hudson, R-N.C. The bill would make concealed carry permits as accepted nationwide as driver’s licenses. Another bill Ohio passed into law last year, Senate Bill 199, goes into effect in March, allowing for guns in day cares if not posted and forbidding bosses from disciplining employees who leave their guns in their cars at work.
But will the pro-gun push led by Trump and Republicans calm the fervor that drives firearm sales?
“Now you have someone talking about moving legislation that hasn’t been talked about in 20 years. Will that crush the industry?” Irvine asked. “I could see how you might think it would. But the environment has changed so much. So many people are into shooting now.”