Asian-Americans are stocking up on guns to protect themselves during coronavirus pandemic

As Americans react to the spread of coronavirus, it’s not just toilet paper and groceries being snapped up by panicked customers. It’s guns too.

Stores across the US have in the past month recorded a surge in firearm and ammunition sales. Ammunition retailer ammo.com reported a 276 per cent sales surge on March 10, as numbers of confirmed cases climbed in the US, while local media have reported long lines of people queueing outside gun stores.

In California and Washington, the states with the largest initial outbreaks, customers include first-time Asian-American buyers fearing for their safety: the coronavirus was first reported in the Chinese city of Wuhan, giving rise to increasingly ugly expressions of xenophobia.

Attacks on Asians have been reported in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York and cities around the world since the pandemic began, with attackers often mentioning the coronavirus. On March 19, a coalition of Asian-American groups based in California recently launched a webpage where people can report virus-related hate crimes – within 24 hours, it had logged more than 40 reports.

Los Angeles County is home to 1.5 million Asian Americans, more than any other county in the US. At Arcadia Firearm & Safety in the San Gabriel Valley, owner David Liu is exhausted. His store has been so busy he barely has time to eat or sleep. It has been that way for weeks.

“I’m a small shop and my customers wait up to two hours just to get in – I open at 11am and they show up at 9am,” Liu says. “For some big gun shops, you wait four to six hours. And you might get inside and find there’s nothing to buy.”

Asians account for 17 per cent of Californians overall – or 6.9 million people – and 8.3 per cent of the population in Washington, about 607,000 people. California last week ordered residents to stay home and non-essential businesses to close.