Why More Liberals Are Buying Guns

0:00I'm Aisha Roscoe, and this is a Sunday Story from Up First, where we go beyond the news of the day to bring you one big story.

0:11Five years ago, rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol here in Washington to try to overturn the 2020 election. It was the largest demonstration of domestic political violence in modern memory. Since President Trump began his second term, some people fear more unrest. My colleague, Frank Langfitt has been looking into how some people are responding to this fear, which led him to a gun range in Maryland to meet someone who goes every week. His name is Charles. This is a Smith & Wesson 380, and then my next gun will be a Glock, and I already have a shotgun. Charles bought his first gun in the last year.

1:03He showed Frank how he's practicing reloading his pistol. So this is a task I would stumble over. And, you know, you want to... Putting the bullets in it. Yeah, and you want to kind of be comfortable with everything because the thought is that when there's an actual situation or event, you don't want to be fumbled around. When we come back, NPR's roving national correspondent, Frank Langford, tells us what's driven Charles to embrace guns and the growing national trend he represents. We'll be right back.

1:57Be smart. Get wise. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. We're back with the Sunday story. Frank Langfitt, welcome to the program. Great to be here, Aisha. So, Frank, what drew you to this topic and to Charles? Yeah, you know, Aisha, for years, really decades, the stereotypical image of American gun owners has been white, rural, and Republican. And Charles, he's none of those things. He's black, liberal, and lives in the suburbs. Charles did not buy guns for some of the typical reasons we usually think of, like hunting or self-defense against random crime. Instead, he's bought guns because he's afraid of some of President Trump's policies and what some of his supporters might do.

2:42So what's Charles, like, specifically afraid of? He told me over Trump's second term, he's seen a lot of things that scared him. The arrest of a foreign student who criticized her university's policy on Israel. Hands on your back. Leave your left. Leave your left. Leave your left. Go ahead. Put me on my back. And the handcuffing of a U.S. senator. Other hand, sir. Other hand. Charles worries that ordinary citizens like him could eventually be targeted. 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.

3:23And that civil unrest that you expect would be triggered by the president of the administration through rhetoric? He has it all. He could dispatch citizens or the government. 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. I mean, that's really striking to hear. Of course, you know, Charles, he's just one person. How do we know that he represents something bigger? Like, how many people did you talk to? I did more than 30 interviews over seven months. And I talked to new gun owners, people who help run gun clubs for those on the political left, as well as firearms trainers and academic researchers.

4:12And Aisha, I found a lot of evidence that more liberals, people of color like Charles and LGBTQ folks are buying guns out of fear. This is just a small sample of what I heard from gun clubs and trainers. Since the second inauguration of Trump, we have seen an incredible increase in interest in training with firearms. We have seen an increase of membership across our chapters of around 40 percent. I've never seen a surge like this before. That was David Phillips. He's on the training team of a group called the Liberal Gun Club, followed by Hope, who helps lead the Socialist Rifle Association, and Thomas Boyer with the San Francisco chapter of the Pink Pistols.

4:57The Pink Pistols' motto is, armed gays don't get bashed. Now, I should add that many of the gun owners I talked to for this story, like Charles, they didn't want their full names used. They're afraid of being harassed or worse. So can you tell me more about these clubs for liberal gun owners? They provide a haven for liberals to train and learn about guns. The Liberal Gun Club, for example, has chapters covering 38 states. The club's been around for more than a decade and a half. And Phillips told me that club membership has grown by two-thirds since November. That's from 2 ,700 members to 4 ,500 members, and requests for training have quintupled.

5:37Phillips says people coming for training have the exact same fears that we just heard from Charles. 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. And Ayesha, it's not just liberal gun groups who are saying this. Even traditional Second Amendment groups say they see more liberals seeking gun training out of fear. This is Taylor Rhodes. He works for the National Association for Gun Rights. 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.

6:26So you have people who are telling you they're afraid of President Trump's policies and his rhetoric, as well as, you know, potentially what some of his supporters may do. What does the White House have to say about all of this? Well, I reached out to the White House, of course, and spokeswoman Abigail Jackson, she dismissed this reporting and she called it disingenuous. And I'd like to read you a part of the statement that she sent me. She says, quote, This type of biased and left-wing coverage is why NPR no longer receives taxpayer money. That's something we can all celebrate. And President Trump has weighed in on the issue of political violence in America.

7:04He blames it on what he calls the radical left. Trump, of course, he cited his near assassination at a rally in Pennsylvania, though investigators still haven't established a clear motive for that shooting. And the president has also cited, of course, the killing of Charlie Kirk, a political activist who, as everyone remembers, was assassinated at a university in Utah. Here's what the president said from the Oval Office just after that happened. It's a 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.

7:45For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world's worst mass murderers and criminals. I mean, it is a fact, though, that President Trump does also speak very harshly about the many people and groups that he doesn't like, right? Yes. Some liberal gun owners that I talked to, they made this exact point. From their perspective, it's the president who demonizes others, whether it's undocumented immigrants. They're poisoning the blood of our country. That's what they've done. Or political opponents. We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.

8:41Frank, so the people that you talked to, these were people who had until recently been maybe anti-gun or didn't really have experience with guns? Exactly. How do you get to this point of, I'm going to go out and buy a gun? I was really curious about that. So when I went to the range with Charles, I talked to him about it, and he told me back when he was a kid, guns of any kind were forbidden in his house. I grew up in Brooklyn, New York, out of the 70s. Back then, it was a very, very tough neighborhood and a lot of crime. And my mother was very strong in the church, and she forbade me to have any sort of E-weaving guns to play with.

9:33So I couldn't even play with a water gun.

9:39Charles' view of guns really changed after President Trump got a second term. And Charles began to think a lot differently. I have a family. I have daughters. I have a wife. I have a home. If there's ever civil unrest, anyone who's ever going to try and break into my home to get whatever to harm myself and my family, I want to be prepared and protected as the father of the home. And Charles isn't the only person in his household thinking about self-protection. When I met him at the range, he'd also brought along his daughter. Her name's Charlie. She's 19 years old. I've never used guns before.

10:16I never really did anything with guns or paintball or BB guns. But there she was, pointing a pistol at a target, working on her aim and technique. I'm getting better with headshots. I think that the trick is that you just have to raise your shoulders up a little. Charlie's here at the range with her dad to learn how to protect herself. Of course, she worries about random crime. She also is afraid of being targeted because of her race. The day after the election, a man drove onto her college campus and yelled racial slurs at Black students. Some people, they hate us so much that they really try to make it known how much we're not wanted here.

10:57Black people, women, and also I feel like who's targeted now is just liberals because of Trump's second term. Knowing how to shoot, how does that make you feel? It makes me feel strong, I'm not going to lie. You know, this is a father-daughter day at the gun range in 2025 and not who you would necessarily expect. But among liberals and people of color these days, we're seeing more scenes like this. Now, this trend of, you know, black people, liberals, LGBTQ folks, you know, buying guns, it didn't just start on election night in 2024. No, this has been building for years. I talked to a man named David Yamani.

11:47He's a professor of sociology at Wake Forest University. And actually, he's been studying this for a long time. 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. And while we're focusing on the last year, I think it's important to note that more liberals have been buying guns even before President Trump entered politics.

12:32In 2022, the University of Chicago, they put out a study that found that 29 percent of Democrats or Democrat-leaning people nationwide had a gun at home. Now, that's seven percentage points higher than it was a dozen years earlier. But isn't it also true that, you know, when Democrats get in office, then a lot of right-leaning people go out and buy guns? Yes. Politics can drive sales on both sides of the aisle. I'm going to give you a couple of examples. When Barack Obama was elected in 2008, it did trigger a buying spree because some people were afraid that he would enact more gun legislation.

13:11And if you think about California in 2019, that was the year that they put in a law requiring background checks to buy ammunition. And that also sparked some panic buying. Is there any way to know just how many people are actually buying guns these days because they're scared of the political environment? I wish there were, but no, the answer is no. When people buy a gun in the United States, of course, they don't have to say why. But I did look at Google Trends, and it was interesting. I put in the phrase, how do I buy a gun? And I saw that it spiked a number of times in the last year. And so when were those occasions?

13:48Yeah, pretty interesting. Around the time of Trump's election, his inauguration, the first immigration enforcement blitz, that was back in January, and the day when Trump held a military parade here in Washington. When we come back, we'll hear from another group that's arming up, trans people.

14:11We're back with the Sunday story. I've been talking with my NPR colleague, Frank Langfitt, about a growing trend. More and more liberals and people of color are buying guns and getting training because the political environment scares them. Frank, earlier we heard from Charles and his daughter, who they're both black. But you also mentioned that more LGBTQ people have been buying guns. Like, what are they telling you? You know, they feel, Aisha, the ones that I talk to, that the Trump administration has it out for them. Here's just a couple of examples that they cite. You know, the president ordered federal departments to define gender as unchangeable and assigned at birth.

14:57He also banned transgender people from serving in the armed forces. I've been talking to Dana, who works as a software engineering consultant in the Boston area. Like Charles, Dana grew up in a very anti-gun household, and also like Charles, does not want their name out there. Now, Dana had done a little bit of training with the Pink Pistols. That was a group we heard from earlier, which caters to LGBTQ folks. But watching the riot on January 6, 2020, really changed the way Dana thought about the need for firearms. Basically, the complete breakdown of forces of the state to maintain any kind of order in that situation made me realize that if we had that level of political violence pent up in America, that I was very likely going to become a target.

15:53About two years later, Dana got a license to carry a concealed firearm and began buying guns. So I have two pistols and one, two, three, four AR-style rifles. Now, Dana identifies as non-binary trans-feminine. I first talked to Dana about the Trump administration all the way back in June. I have been absolutely terrified. I'm fortunate enough to have the financial privilege to start the process for getting out, getting out of the country.

16:34I mean, where is Dana planning to move? Europe. But Dana doesn't want to say specifically. But, you know, you can imagine we're talking about a warmer climate. And so as the summer wore on, Dana and other trans folks say they saw more moves by the administration that really worried them. Late August, you'd remember there was a mass shooting at a Catholic school in Minneapolis. Huge news in the United States. And there were questions about the gender identity of the shooter. Now, afterwards, a number of news organizations reported that senior justice officials were considering, you know, trying to classify trans people as mentally ill to bar them from owning firearms.

17:13So did anything ever come of that? No, it did not go anywhere. And I checked in with Dana last month, and Dana's much less concerned about that issue right now. We kind of realized that in order to do this, the amount of effort that the DOJ would have to go through would be kind of enormous. And trans people got a boost from what might otherwise seem like an unlikely source. The NRA came out and said, we may not like trans people having guns, but we are not. You know, we are opposed to the federal government stripping guns away from any particular, any non-criminal offense. The NRA did not mention trans people specifically, but made it clear that it opposed sweeping gun bans of any kind.

18:00I was pleasantly surprised. I didn't necessarily expect them to come out with a statement like that. And how important do you think that was to killing the idea? I think it was very important. So fear of the administration instituting a gun ban actually united liberal trans people and conservative Second Amendment groups. Exactly. I think it says a lot about how the president's policies to limit individual freedoms can actually unite people who are usually on opposite sides of the fence.

18:40You mentioned that you did these interviews over, you know, many months. President Trump has made big, bold changes since he took office last January. Have the attitudes of any of the people that you've interviewed changed since you first talked to them? I haven't had a chance to call everybody back, but when I talked to Dana last month, the tone was actually very different. I am feeling significantly better, significantly more positive. Dana said they've seen more collective action against some of the president's policies, including people challenging ICE raids. It is people getting activated and getting out of their little helpless cages.

19:26For a long time, I felt like the American populace was basically asleep and was not going to do anything. And it was just going to sort of silently roll over and let fascism come along. And I should add something here. You know, President Trump has repeatedly denied that he's a fascist. And instead, that's how he describes some of his opponents. Did Dana's change in attitude surprise you? It did. I was not expecting that. And that's why it's so important for reporters to check back with sources over time when we can. Reporting, it's often just a snapshot. And I always find I learn so much more if I can continue the conversation.

20:09So does this mean Dana is giving up their guns? No. Dana still has the pistols and rifles and still plans to move overseas. but it doesn't feel quite as urgent.

20:22So we've heard from the Liberal Gun Club, and Dana learned to shoot with the pink pistols. Frank, why do you think people on the left and minorities seek out these kind of training groups? Yeah, I asked that question to a trainer I've been talking to for the last few months. My name is Alessandro Padovani. I'm originally from Italy, but I've been living in California now for over 20 years. Padovani runs this company called Progressive Defense Training. And he says there are things that he saw in the industry that alienate progressives and other kinds of minorities. Padovani says sometimes he would come across teachers who were outspoken in their right-wing politics and came off as really macho.

21:12Classic examples are people that teach an entry-level class, but they're decked out like they're special forces people. I remember a class in Sacramento, old places, where the instructor was making jokes about all the libs and how if there ever is a civil war, they don't stand a chance because they hate guns. Padovani's white, and he says he's also come across trainers who made disparaging comments about minority groups. Like, why do gay people want to get into firearms? You know, they're gay anyway. Implying, you know, they're not good at fighting or defending or they're effeminate. So Padovani, what he's describing is that some trainers create what it sounds like a very toxic environment.

22:06Like, is that common? Well, you know, Padovani and the other trainers that I talked to, they emphasized there are a lot of politically conservative trainers who do a very good job. And I want to say when I went to this range with Charles Aisha, it was very, very welcoming, completely professional, no sign of politics one way or the other. But Padovani says enough people have had bad experiences or fear bad experiences that it's created a market for his services. Well, Frank, I have one final question for you. People you talked to said they fear political unrest and they worry that fellow citizens might attack them.

22:48How likely do they think that is? Do they think that this is a real possibility? I pressed them on this because I was like you. Like, okay, how likely – what do you think is really going to happen? All of them said they did not expect this to happen. when we first talked, Dana put the risk at 20 % tops. And everybody, I want to reemphasize this, was very clear that they would not engage law enforcement. I asked people under what conditions they might have to mount some kind of armed defense, and Dana cited the example of, let's say, a hate group threatening a nearby neighborhood. Charles worried, as he said before, we've heard about civil unrest in which people might possibly target his home.

23:31I'm not talking about the government. I'm talking about other humans, other citizens other Americans other people that feel somehow that I have something that they're going to take and that is my mentality and I was never ever ever like that now Charles hopes he never has to use the skills that he and Charlie were showing me when we were the shooting range but he also said that if you know the nation were to turn violent and unpredictable he'd really regret not owning guns and not knowing how to use them. As a man, as a father, as a husband, how remiss and derelict will it be for me to not be prepared?

24:15Frank, thank you so much for your reporting on this. Thanks for the opportunity to talk about this. I learned a lot over the last few months talking to these folks.

24:28That was NPR's roving national correspondent, Frank Langfitt.

24:38This episode of The Sunday Story was produced by Thomas Coltrane and Andrew Mambo. Liana Simstrom and Catherine Laidlaw edited this episode. Fact-checking by Susie Cummings. The engineer was Kwasi Lee. The Sunday Story team also includes Justine Yan and Jenny Schmidt. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. I'm Ayesha Roscoe, and Up First is back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Until then, have a great rest of your weekend.