Frank Langfitt

But there she was, pointing a pistol at a target, working on her aim and technique.

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.

Knowing how to shoot, how does that make you feel?

No, but among liberals and people of color these days, we're seeing more scenes like this.

No, this has been building for years.

I talked to a man named David Yamani.

He'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, you know, 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.

In 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.

Yes, politics can drive sales on both sides of the aisle.