Fifty-one percent of recent first-time gun buyers in Texas favor former Democrat Vice President Joe Biden over Republican President Donald Trump in a poll released days ago by the Dallas Morning News and University of Texas at Tyler.
“Most of the people who bought their first gun this summer bought it in the past two weeks,” the newspaper said in a published report. “Of the people who bought a gun in the past 14 days, 84% were buying for the first time.”
This doesn’t bode well for the president, who has stressed his allegiance to the Second Amendment repeatedly during public appearances since taking office. Biden, on the other hand, is a perennial gun control proponent who boasts about his involvement in pushing through the Brady Handgun Act and 1994 ban on so-called “assault weapons.” The former vice president has also vowed to push for new gun restrictions if elected.
According to FBI National Instant Check System (NICS) raw data dating back to 2015, the Lone Star State has racked up more initiated checks so far this year than in all of 2019 or 2017, and is certainly on track with setting a new record. In 2016, Texans initiated 1,721,726 NICS checks and at the rate the state is going that figure could be surpassed by year’s end.
The Morning News quoted Pearland gun dealer Tony Ashcraft, who stated, “I think there is a general panic and unrest.
He has seen a huge number of first-time gun buyers in the past six months.
The survey was taken from among 1,150 Texas voters, the newspaper indicated. Nearly half said they expect “the pandemic will lead to civil unrest.” But that doesn’t account for people who have bought guns in reaction to the civil unrest that’s been occurring over the past four months, since George Floyd’s death while under police restraint in Minneapolis.
President Trump, the newspaper reported, has warned of “rampant lawlessness should former Vice President Joe Biden win the election.”
Another interesting revelation of the survey is that just over one-third of Texans polled say they own “at least one gun.” About 17 percent of them bought a gun within the past three months. More than half of those people were first-time buyers, the story said.
