Gun sales in Washington have dropped significantly this year as new gun safety laws have taken effect. The drop follows a spike in sales last year that happened when buyers scrambled to purchase guns as lawmakers debated legislation. David Gutman recently wrote about this for The Seattle Times. He joins us with more on Washington’s gun laws.
The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer: Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Gun sales in Washington skyrocketed last year when the state legislature was debating new gun regulations. Those regulations did become law, and then gun sales ‒ or background checks, which are seen as a proxy for sales ‒ dropped by half in the first months of this year. David Gutman wrote about these trends recently in the Seattle Times and he joins us now with more details. It’s good to have you on the show.
David Gutman: Thanks for having me.
Miller: So you focus on background checks, which you say are one of the best available data, but you do note it’s not a perfect analog. What can these background checks tell us and what are the limitations?
Gutman: They tell us a lot about how many gun sales are going on. Both in Washington and in Oregon you need to do a background check for every legal gun sale. That being said, sometimes the background check turns up a criminal violation in your past and you don’t get to buy a gun. So not every background check results in a gun sale. But it’s only around 1% of background checks, at least in Washington, that end up blocking a gun sale.
And then the other caveat is that you could go to a gun shop ‒ you could go to Cabela’s and buy two guns or three guns or five guns ‒ with only one background check performed. So there are rare instances where there’ll be multiple gun sales but only one background check. But on the whole, it’s a really good proxy for how many gun sales are happening.
Miller: So when you look at that proxy, what do you see when you look at last year?
Gutman: Last year, we see, in Washington, gun sales going through ‒ the gun sales as measured by background checks ‒ going through the roof in the early months of the year, particularly February and March, where they’re higher than they have been in years.
Miller: What was happening politically at that time?
Gutman: At that time, the Washington legislature was debating a ban on AR-15 style, high-powered, semi-automatic rifles.
They’re commonly called assault rifles. The gun industry calls them modern sporting rifles. And there’s been a push for years in Washington to ban them, and it was really gaining traction in the legislature in the early months of last year.
Miller: And in fact, it did pass. Is it possible to know how popular these particular ‒ now banned firearms that can’t be sold ‒ how popular they were in the past?
Gutman: Yeah, I think they’re no longer legal to buy or sell in Washington, you can still own them, but they’re still legal to buy and sell in most states and they’re very popular. The firearms industry says there are more than 24 million of this kind of rifle in circulation in the country. I think by most estimates, they’re the best selling kind of rifle in the U.S.
Miller: How have the mechanism and timeline of background checks changed? That’s another new part of gun laws in Washington.
Gutman: In Washington, you’ve always had to do background checks for gun sales, but we instituted a new way of doing them this year. It used to be, depending on what kind of gun you were buying, either the gun dealer would just send the information directly to the FBI, or they’d send the information to their local police station or sheriff’s department.
Now it’s one central location. All gun dealers send information to the state police which runs background checks through five or so different databases looking for criminal violations, looking for past, perhaps involuntary mental health issues, and that’s how it’s done now. But it’s a change that, if you’re buying a gun, it’s not a change you’d notice. It’s just conducted differently on the backside.
Miller: There’s also newly required training. But you note that five of the twelve pages of that required training have nothing to do with gun safety. They’re gun advocacy including things like fundraising requests or information on how to talk to “anti-gun” citizens.
And you can do it online. It doesn’t seem like it takes that long. So it seems more like a minor speed bump as opposed to a serious roadblock that would prevent somebody from buying a firearm.
I want to turn back to that headline number, that background checks at the beginning of this year were about half of what they were at the same time last year. Are they just below the spike last year, or are they below where they were before the spike?
Gutman: No, background checks in Washington in this year, in the first three months – which is what we have data for so far – are lower than they’ve been at least in any month since 2019. They’re way down from the first three months of last year when we saw that spike right as the ban on high-powered rifles was being debated, and right before it went into effect. They’re 70% down from then, but they’re lower than just about any month in the past half-decade.
Miller: What happens when you look at Washington’s numbers compared to federal numbers when you look nationwide?
Gutman: They’re still significantly lower. Nationwide, in the first three months of this year, background checks are down a little from last year, it’s 10 or 11%. But in Washington in January and February, it’s down 50%, and then in March, it’s down 70%. So it’s a much, much bigger decrease here than nationally.
Miller: How did folks that you talked to explain this drop?
Gutman: They said a couple of things. One is, pretty much everybody attributes the spike last year to people buying these kinds of AR-15 style rifles right before the ban went into effect. And that, as you said, the legislation passed. Washington banned these kinds of rifles and the law went into effect immediately. And so that obviously explained the spike and the decrease since then.
But then at the beginning of this year, a couple other new laws went into effect. One was the training requirement that you note, which, while not extensive or difficult – I completed the training in five or ten minutes online – it is a requirement. And the other one is a ten-day waiting period to buy any kind of gun that went into effect on January first of this year in Washington. And I don’t know if the decreases this year, they certainly seem corollary with those changes. Are they directly attributable to those? It might be a little too soon to say, but it certainly seems like they could be connected.
Miller: David Gutman, thanks very much.
Gutman: Thanks for having me.
Miller: David Gutman is a reporter for the Seattle Times. He joined us to talk about the huge increase in gun sales in Washington in the early part of last year, and the gigantic drop in the first three months of this year.
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