Why gun sales are booming in this California county

Kunzman, founder of the auto racing organization National Auto Sport Association, opened 29 Outdoor Gear in 2014 as a passion project. For years, he said, the store lost money. But these days, business is booming.

29 Outdoor Gear is one of at least five gun shops in Napa County that have collectively seen a sustained burst in sales since the COVID pandemic began, according to data from the California Department of Justice obtained by The Chronicle. From January 2020 through December 2022, the Attorney General’s Office recorded more than 17,000 firearms sold in Napa County, a 57% increase from the under-11,000 sold over the three years prior. 

While most California counties had gun sales soar, only five had bigger increases than Napa — and the county had the biggest jump of any in the Bay Area. (San Francisco hasn’t recorded any gun sales with the DOJ since 2015).

Gun sales in the U.S. boomed during COVID. Social unrest related to lockdowns and protests following the death of George Floyd sparked widespread fear of crime and violence, ushering in a wave of first-time buyers. In California, sales of handguns alone rose by 66%, while sales of long guns, which includes rifles, increased by 45%. 

At the same time, gun violence did increase in 2020. So far, research has not found a direct causal link between increased pandemic gun sales and increased violence during the pandemic in California or nationally, but an analysis of federal data did find that police recovered almost twice as many recently purchased guns from crime scenes in 2020 than in 2019.

Heather Harris, a senior researcher at the Public Policy Institute of California, pointed out that Californians’ perceptions of public safety changed during the pandemic. “Although those in the SF Bay area are somewhat less likely than Californians in other areas of the state to say crime is a problem, perceptions of safety and how well police protect communities are down — and these reduced perceptions of safety may motivate gun buyers,” she said.

Research suggests that people who were young, Republican, male or lacked a college degree were all more likely to have bought a gun during the pandemic. Retailer surveys have indicated that first-time gun buyers were a significant force behind the pandemic-era spike in sales.

But Napa County is among the more heavily Democratic counties in California, and it doesn’t have an unusually high number of young people. Why gun sales shot up so much here relative to other California counties, and what the consequences of that increase have been, is unclear.

Asked about Napa County’s outlier status in the gun sales data, representatives of the county Sheriff’s Office, plus the Napa and Calistoga police departments, all said they hadn’t seen any sign of a spike in gun ownership — no change in gun-related incidents or violent crime, no anecdotal reports of more gun owners in the area. And crime data from the Attorney General’s Office shows that Napa County’s overall violent crime rates have remained basically flat since 2019. 

“We as a city did not (see any) change in gun violence,” Napa police Capt. Fabio Rodriguez said. “We have a relatively safe community and we like that.” 

But Kunzman thinks he knows what happened in Napa, at least at 29 Outdoor Gear. He chalks his own pandemic change-of-fortune up to a city right outside of Napa County, just a few miles down the highway.

“We had a lot of people that were first-time buyers; we even had some people who looked around the room and whispered to me and said, ‘I used to be anti-gun, but the crime is bad now,’ ” Kunzman said. “Most of them live in Vallejo.”