Requests soaring this year for handgun permits in region
More than 4,800 people in Orange, Ulster and Sullivan counties sought handgun permits in the first six months of this year, a demand surge that more than doubles last year's application pace and follows a string of mass shootings in the U.S. that may have helped fuel the local trend.
Requests for handgun permits in all three counties through June 30 already had far surpassed the total applications for all of 2015.
The Orange County Sheriff's Office had taken the fingerprints of 1,630 prospective handgun owners as of that date, or 240 more applicants than it fingerprinted last year.
The county is on track this year to surpass its previous application peak of 2,615 in 2013, when demand soared after the state enacted the SAFE Act to tighten gun restrictions in response to the school massacre in Newtown, Conn.
Ulster and Sullivan have seen even sharper spikes than Orange.
The 718 gun permits sought so far in Ulster is 60 percent higher than the full-year total for 2015; Sullivan's 460 applications are about 30 percent over last year's tally.
The figures for all three counties reflect people who are seeking to become handgun owners for the first time, not existing owners adding new guns to their collections.
The sheriff's departments that review the handgun requests and gun-rights advocates attribute the leap in gun demand to two related factors.
One is the spate of heavily publicized gun attacks like those that occurred at an Orlando nightclub in June and a San Bernardino, Calif., office in December, which they say has made people fearful and anxious to protect themselves.
The other is the renewed calls for gun control after those killings - a push they say inspires people to get guns before new regulations prevent them from doing so or make it harder.
"Since Orlando, we have been overwhelmed," Orange County Undersheriff Ken Jones said. "Every time there's an event, we see a significant increase in submissions."
The jump in local application numbers preceded the latest violent spasm that has dominated the news: the shooting of 12 police officers and two civilians by a lone gunman during a demonstration in Dallas on Thursday night.
The protest was itself a reaction to police officers fatally shooting two black men in back-to-back incidents in Minnesota and Louisiana, a sequence of events that sharpened the nation's anguished debate over race and policing but also featured gun violence as a shared element.
Motivation for buying guns
John McGovern, chief civil officer for the Ulster County Sheriff's Office, argued that 24-hour cable news coverage of mass shootings has heightened viewers' anxiety, making them feel vulnerable to similar attacks.
He said people seeking gun permits lately are concerned not only about their own safety but about protecting people around them in the event of an attack.
"I think people are waking up to the fact that criminals have guns, and are always going to have guns," McGovern said.
A 51-year-old Montgomery man
who recently got a handgun permit - and whose wife got one, too - told the Times Herald-Record that hearing gunfire at noon near his workplace in the City of Newburgh last year inspired him to get a gun, even though he's not allowed to bring it to work.
But he had other reasons as well: fears of bear encounters at home, and fears that Democrats will impose further gun restrictions.
"The biggest motivator to me at the time was the political climate being favorable for possibly the last time in my lifetime," he explained by email.
That new gun owner - who asked that his name be withheld for fear that his home would be burglarized - said the recent mass shootings played no part in his decision.
Similarly, a group of permit applicants recently waiting to be fingerprinted at the Orange County Sheriff's Office also dismissed those high-profile incidents as a factor, complicating somewhat the conventional explanations for increased gun demand.
Though none of the seven permit seekers approached by a reporter in Goshen was willing to discuss their reasons in any detail or be identified, one woman said that her husband had guns and that she wanted to be able to handle a gun if something happened to them. Another simply said: "It's something I always meant to do."
George Rogero, a gun-safety instructor from Blooming Grove who has operated the gun advocacy web site OCShooters.com for about 15 years, calls himself a "Clinton convert": someone transformed into a gun rights' champion by the passage of the federal assault-rifle ban under President Bill Clinton in 1994.
He contends that new gun restrictions and demands for them have the paradoxical effect of inspiring people to get guns, before new regulations erode their ability to do so.
Today, he said, there are fresh ranks of "Obama converts."
"When the politicians come in and say, 'We're going to come in and take your guns,' more people say, 'No, you're not,' " said Rogero, who argues that the growing popularity of sport shooting also has contributed to the trend.
Long processing times
One effect of the increase permit demand has been longer wait times.
In Ulster County, it now takes as long as 10 months to complete the multi-stage process, which culminates in a judge's review.
In Orange County, even with the Sheriff's Office processing applications seven days a week, the backup is so severe that applicants calling today to get fingerprinted won't get an appointment until October.
The leap in permit applications dovetails with recent statistics from the FBI, indicating that 26.5 million background checks for firearm purchases were done in the U.S. during the last 12 months - a nearly 30 percent increase over the total for the preceding 12 months.
Leah Gunn Barrett, executive director of New Yorkers Against Gun Violence, agrees with gun rights' advocates that fear is increasing gun sales but calls that an unfortunate trend, one that she said is driven by a myth that owning a gun makes you safer.
She argues that the increased risk of accidental shootings, suicides, homicides and break-ins that come with gun ownership has the opposite effect.
"This is a myth that the NRA has been pushing to get gun sales up," Gunn Barrett said.
cmckenna@th-record.com
