The Reload has been growing fast so far this month, and I wanted to welcome all the new members to the weekly analysis newsletter. Thank you for your support! The site literally could not survive without all of you. This week I’ll be talking about new evidence for a theory I discussed a few weeks back, and that saw renewed focus after an MSNBC anchor brought it up again on Thursday. Plus, you’ll get early access to the new podcast episode where I talk about guns and race with Rangemaster’s Tiffany Johnson. Oh, and I’ll give you all a rundown of some fun I had at my local gun shop on Saturday after watching the latest Chris Pratt movie. New Study Backs Up My Theory on the Murder Spike and Gun Sales The state of California spent a bunch of money and manpower in a successful attempt to prove what I said back in June: The 2020 gun sales spike is likely not responsible for the 2020 murder spike. Okay, so maybe their specific goal wasn’t to prove me right. And, obviously, a single study doesn’t mean the theory is completely beyond doubt now. But I’ll take the support nonetheless. The study, funded by the University of California and published in Injury Epidemiology, actually went a step further and specifically examined firearm violence. It found no association between gun sales and gun violence. “Nationwide, firearm purchasing and firearm violence increased substantially during the first months of the coronavirus pandemic,” the authors concluded. “At the state level, the magnitude of the increase in purchasing was not associated with the magnitude of the increase in firearm violence.” As I explained to MSNBC’s Chris Hayes earlier this week, there are several reasons to think the gun surge didn’t cause the murder surge. And, in fact, there’s reason to think the causation is the other way around—at least, to some degree. For one, what we call a gun sales spike is actually a gun background check spike because that’s our best barometer for gun sales. So, that tells you the people buying all those guns had clean records. That makes it unlikely a significant number of them immediately turned into violent criminals, especially since the average time the ATF says it takes a gun to go from first sale to a crime scene is more than eight years. Plus, last year’s biggest surge in gun sales came in the weeks after violence and rioting broke out across the United States. That suggests the sales spike may well have been motivated by increasing violence rather than being the catalyst for it. The study does find some potential association between elevated gun sales and domestic violence in April and May but notes the estimates “were sensitive to model specification.” The researchers conclude that other factors besides gun sales were responsible for the rise in gun crime, and more study into those factors is needed. Podcast: Tiffany Johnson on Reaching Black Gun Owners, and a New Gun