I haven’t been very active lately and to be honest it’s because I’m fatigued and gun posting just reminds me of work now, but this year has been unlike any other so I felt I needed to share what it’s been like being a gun salesman in 2020 - between COVID-19, riots, protests, and the upcoming election, it’s been pure insanity.
The year started off to a decent start sales-wise, we had the usual post-holiday I-got-christmas-money spending, followed by the traditional post-tax-return impulse buying. I knew with the election coming up towards the end of the year we’d see a pretty large increase in sales around then, but hadn’t expected 2020 to be anything too crazy for the firearms industry.
Then COVID-19 became a global event.
I’ll never forget the first insane day of sales we had because it fell on Friday the 13th back in March, right around the same time businesses began having to close and people started having to go on unemployment, and unfortunately, on the day Breonna Taylor was murdered. We had a never ending stream of new customers walking in wanting to buy something for home defense, along with our regulars who were just trying to check items off their wishlist before inventory was gone. To say we had to put little effort into making sales is an understatement - everyone thought as people went on unemployment and business shuttered that immediately they would turn to theft and violence, and whatever they could use to defend themselves they wanted it and all the ammo to go with it immediately.
Depending on how many used/estate/trade-in firearms we have we would usually have around 100-130 handguns in stock, and around 80 long guns, along with a decent selection of ammunition. At one point in March we had 5 handguns left on the shelf and about 25 long guns left, all of which were only there because they were either collectible in nature or a dedicated hunting/sporting firearm. Any modern defensive firearm was gone, and all common ammunition calibers were out of stock as well. Even things like magazines, holsters, cleaning kits, safety gear, parts, etc. were getting bought up.
The good news at least was at this point we could still restock inventory. Shipping times were taking much longer than usual since every shop in the nation was hammering distributors with orders, but we were still able to order in product and re-fill the shelves in a reasonable timeframe. By about mid-May sales had slowed back down to around near-normal as we ran out of stuff to sell and everyone began to adjust to living in COVID-19 America. After our first dead week of sales in awhile I thought we were through the worst of it and things would return to normal.
Then George Floyd was murdered.
Being located within a reasonable distance of downtown Portland put us right near the heart of protests and riots that would eventually draw global attention, and along with it came the panic buying. Business owners, residents concerned about their safety, people arming themself for what they believed was the start of a conflict - they all came in droves. What little inventory we were getting in was leaving near immediately, and with the entire nation seeing similar events happening in major cities the supply chain was gutted quickly.
It’s mid-September now and while we still see the high demand for firearms, the reality is we’re running out of things to sell and unable to restock easily. We used to be able to reserve small stashes of 9mm/5.56 in the back for customers to pick up with firearms, but that’s all long gone now with no ETA on when we’ll get more. Companies we’ve reached out to about becoming new dealers with or backordering some calibers have quoted us Q2 of 2021 on new orders. The few new defensive firearms we do restock sell within a day or two of being put on the shelf, and we’re definitely selling more than we are restocking.
COVID-19 has limited the importation and production of firearms/ammunition so badly that some many I had backordered back in April have still not been filled, and although I check daily on the multiple distributors we use they are getting such limited inventory that everything is being allocated out and not even put on their websites. I just have to hope there is anything good on an allocation email and that I reply quickly enough to get it, or that I’ll get a shipping notice from one of the many backorders we have pending.
The bigger concern for me now has become the general unpleasantness that has spread to nearly everyone. Customers don’t understand why we’re out of all the calibers or firearms they’re looking for and get angry when we can’t just order more for them. First time buyers get frustrated when their driver’s license is expired, or has an old out of state address, and they need something else for us to use to submit their background check. Background check queues that used to take minutes or hours on a busy day to clear now take weeks since over 5,000 people are in line and even though we communicate that, people still impatiently call us every few days to check where they are in line. The first time buyer who didn’t give a damn about the Second Amendment until now is suddenly an expert on their rights and is furious at us because the State Police put a Delay or Denial on their background check.
Don’t even get me started on the masks.
We’ve had more crazies coming out of the woodworks in the last 6 months than the entire 8 years I’ve been in this industry. Between multiple Delays and Denials on a weekly basis, combined with having had to ask a few customers to leave because we didn’t feel confident selling them a firearm or they were rude to our staff, it’s been stressful for the entire crew. One of our regulars who works nights and commutes right by the shop informed us he’d seen two cars parked outside the shop around 3am one morning, and after reviewing the security camera footage, we were definitely being cased. Thankfully all of our firearms are locked up in safes at night, so it’s clear to anyone looking in the windows that there’s nothing they can easily steal if they do get in, but it’s still concerning that someone might try anyway.
With the Presidential election being about two months out I have a feeling we haven’t seen the last of the insanity, not by a long shot. They say an armed society is a polite society, but America is feeling less and less like a functioning society, and more and more people are forgetting how to be polite.
Flat Stack Rock Trail on the Blue Ridge Parkway on a foggy day. Getting outside as much as possible during this lockdown is essential for everyone’s mental health.
Unpopular but true: a large reason why grocery store are empty now isn’t just because there’s a bunch of greedy, awful people panic everything in sight to spite others. Sure, there’s some hoarding assholes, but a lot of it is people realizing they will now need over a month’s worth of groceries in one go when they might usually only buy enough to last them a week, maybe two, and people who can no longer supplement with going out, people who are now eating three meals at home when usually their kids eat lunch at school and they have lunch at the office… that’s a hell of a lot more food than most families need to have on hand, including people who normally never cook and just grubhub everything. The food supply chains will hopefully stabilize a bit in the coming weeks - just wanted to point out it’s not all malicious and people aren’t as awful as is being said. I’m under self imposed quarantine, social distancing, working from home and staying away from others. Hoping all of you guys are safe and feeling ok.
just about every person coming through my line at the grocery store is just buying what they’d usually buy when they buy groceries. They’re just buying MORE of it than they’d usually buy. Because they’re needing more than they’d usually need. I lost count of how many times I was asked if we had any more eggs simply because people told me they were cooking sit down breakfasts for their kids now instead of ‘something they can send them out the door on the way to school with’. We’re not sold out of milk because we’ve got milk hoarders stalking up their garage for the next five months with milk. We’re out of milk because everyone’s home now and drinking more of it. Same with bread. Our cake mixes aren’t flying off the shelves because people are worried about dessert shortages. It’s because people are home and doing baking with their free time. So - yeah - there are some assholes out there hoarding shit. But its not that simple. It’s rarely that simple. Beware of people that tell you its that simple.
should also point out that my store, and most others, have, for a couple weeks now, had a limit on how much of a certain thing people can buy. So no, even when we do get trucks in, no one’s walking out of our store with two cartloads full of toilet paper. And I’ve only had to turn away two people that tried to overbuy in the past two weeks as well.
Okay I’m gonna get my nerd on here for a minute because one of the things I love about history is what people did at home. Forget your huge wars and royals and whatnot, how did they handle feeding themselves and going to bed?
World War II is a great time for studying this sort of thing because of the need for rationing. Britain in particular had a time of it because once you cut off access to, yanno, the entire world it becomes a very tiny island without a lot of resources to self-sustain. There’s no orange groves in Britain, for instance. Plus global trade meant relying on things from other countries. For example, Britain grew its own cereal crops (eg. wheat, barley, etc) for centuries but then it was cheaper to import them from America so farms turned away from that to focus on things like meat and dairy production. To give an idea of scale, in 1939 Britain imported something in the neighborhood of 20 MILLION tons of food.
So the start of World War II meant not only having to figure out where in the ever loving fuck the food was going to come from, but having to completely revamp farming as the nation understood and was set up for it. Many of us know the West Wing quote about how during WWII FDR said the US would produce 50,000 airplanes and instead managed 100,000. Britain had to do the exact same thing with food.*
(*Note: other countries did as well, of course, such as the US which is where this artwork is from. I’m focusing on Britain to keep this simple though.)
The way you make up for that 20 million tons of food is both by making more and using less.
Making more is a fascinating study on the topic of how farming was changed forever in Britain. But the key takeaway for the purpose of this discussion is what also ties in with using less: People had to pitch in.
These days we think of WWII and we know the stories of victory gardens, Make Do and Mend, ration books, and so on. We remember how people during this time dug in, found inner strength, and did what they needed to do.
But the thing is that didn’t happen automatically.
At the start of WWII preparations went into place. People were taught about blackout curtains and preparing for gas attacks (a reasonable worry after WWI) and so on, but the war didn’t hit them on the home front right away. This led to a period of time of people basically looking around and going huh, we did all this for nothing. Whole buncha hype for no reason.
It was only with time that the danger started to get close, and the need for the extra food came into play. And even then it wasn’t as though ration books were handed out and people went whelp, guess that’s goodbye to meat and sugar for this week! People still had to be brought on board with the concept.
Hence the need for artwork like at the top of this post. “A Fair Share” was a key phrase at the time. It was used to remind people and teach them that they and their neighbors were all in this together. Heck, not just them but their loved ones on the front lines: if you hoarded food, for example, that meant more food was needed, more work for everyone else, more that might have to take the risk of being imported, more chance that ships might get shot down by Germany bringing those supplies to you. You had to do your fair share and thus get your fair share.
Mind you it also helped that leaders stepped in and did the same. Now granted it’s propaganda of a sort but even so the royal family used ration books. Queen Elizabeth 2 (then only a princess) famously used them to get enough cloth for her wedding dress. Of course the royal family had resources the average person did not, not the least of which was their own farm, but even so they understood the importance of showing that they were doing their part.
The other thing about rationing that people don’t realize is that it didn’t stop when the war ended. Most know that rationing got harder and tighter over the duration of the war but it’s not like VE Day suddenly made the food appear. World War II ended on September 2, 1945. Rationing ended July 4, 1954.
(That wedding dress I mentioned earlier? She got married in 1947. Still using ration books.)
So when you look at the above picture, realize that it’s more than just a quick comment about a single concept. Know that it was about a people who were told of a danger, had the knowledge to prepare but thought the requests for it were exaggerated, were hit hard once the danger arrived, may or may not have had exemplary guidance from those in charge on what to do, even so had to dig deep and learn how to work with their neighbors and countrymen to embrace entirely new ways of living so that they all could survive, and who had to keep working and sacrificing for that survival long after the active danger had passed.
…which of course is COMPLETELY unlike any situation we find ourselves in today.
With all the insanity of people hoarding needless things leaving out those who need it and rich people not giving a shit about the health of others causing many to fall ill and cities to shut down, we need some uplifting news.
I designated myself emergency manager of infection control, designed a pager schedule and protocol to guide new people through how to field COVID19 calls, worked on algorithms with our infection control practitioners, took samples to the lab for testing, returned calls from physicians and other healthcare providers on COVID risk stratification.
This was just today.
And we have four ID physicians and three hospital epidemiologists also on the phones answering calls from concerned healthcare workers, patients, and administrators.
Whatever happens, just remember: a strong public health response leads to calm, organized responses. Not this. Fuck Pence. Fuck Trump. Fuck all this shit.
If you work anywhere and interact with infectious diseases or infection control, please take time tomorrow to offer them a coffee, a kind word, buy them a snack. We need it right now.
So you’re probably like me: your family and friends see you’re in the medical profession. Or maybe you’re not in the medical profession but you’re pretty well read and you keep up with news. And they want to know if they should believe the panic. What’s accurate? What’s old? What’s new? What’s reliable?
I’ll tell you right now that keeping on top of the information itself has been an Olympic-level task unto itself.
This is not meant to be comprehensive, but designed for folks who need a few key, reliable resources to touch upon.
Those with NEJM access: Use it. The front page is doing a great COVID19 update every day, so check that out!
As an infectious diseases fellow working in the infection control division, I want to let you guys know that there’s so much I want to share with everyone but just not enough hours in the day to get it all in writing. I’m going to think about how best to get things out in a timely manner, but would love everyone’s suggestions and input for strategies to keep updates consistent without them being too time consuming and what kind of COVID19 content would help people right now.
