Gun ownership boomed during the pandemic. Meet some of the reluctant firearm owners.

Janice Tosto never thought she would become a gun owner, especially now at age 58.

But over the last year, she began feeling a growing sense of lawlessness and danger in the city and particularly in her Germantown neighborhood. Now, she’s applying for a permit to carry a firearm.

“I’m not thrilled that I have to do this,” she said. “I’m kind of scared about doing this, but at the same time because of the way that things are going [with] all this lawlessness in the city, … as a Black woman, I just feel that it’s really important for me to have all the tools necessary to be able to defend myself.”

Tosto’s far from alone.

Since the pandemic began, gun sales and permit issuances have risen sharply in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, matching nationwide trends. In 2021, the city issued 52,230 new license-to-carry-permits, an increase of more than 600% from the year prior. In both 2020 and 2021, there were more than a million gun sales or transfers across Pennsylvania.

“I’m not thrilled that I have to do this.”

While the boom of sales and permits have slowed since their pandemic peaks, those who work in the industry attribute the increased interest in firearm ownership to fear amid growing gun violence, as with Tosto. In 2022, for example, 514 people were killed in homicides in Philadelphia, the vast majority by gun.

“We get [customers] from all over,” said Tom Dixon, a firearm trainer and the owner of Surplus Armé, a gun store and manufacturer in Chester. “A lot of women. Definitely a lot of women. All demographics.”

Darren Watson, owner of the security and firearm-safety training company Born 2 Protect, said that he particularly saw an influx of Black people buying firearms during the pandemic.

As people who grew up in communities disproportionately affected by gun violence, Watson and Dixon are intimately familiar with the risks that guns pose. But legal firearm ownership, they say, isn’t a risk if people are trained on how to safely store and handle their weapons.

“Even for myself living in the inner city, there was a lot of information around firearms and the Second Amendment that we just didn’t talk about,” said Watson, who’s from West Philadelphia. “Education is key. Education eases inquiring minds.”

But a significant group within this class of new gun owners are people who are not excited to carry such powerful weapons. They are not gun enthusiasts or Second Amendment hard-liners, and many of them don’t fit Pew’s demographic profile for the typical American gun owner. Over and over, this group articulated their growing fear for their safety in Philadelphia, and how they felt like buying a gun was the only way left to protect themselves.

Someone was shot and killed near the laundromat where Tosto takes her clothes. Citizen app alerts about nearby robberies and shootings make her tense.

But it wasn’t until she read an interview with Republican mayoral candidate David Oh in the Philadelphia Sun toward the end of his campaign that she got serious about getting a gun. Without mentioning statistics or specifics, Oh spoke generally about Philadelphians who are more fearful than ever about the crime and violence in the city.

“A lot of people don’t venture out of their homes. They don’t want their kids going outside,” he said in the interview. “A lot of people have already purchased guns. And these are not people who love guns.”

Tosto felt like Oh was speaking directly to her; she eventually voted for him. As she awaits approval of her license, Tosto has spent time thinking about what it would mean to not only own a gun, but have to use it to defend herself and possibly take another person’s life.

» READ MORE: Gun sales and permits surged during the pandemic in Philly and Pennsylvania

“I don’t want to hurt an innocent person,” she said, being clear that she plans to align with a gun owners group so she can learn how to safely use and store her gun. But her own safety is too important to go without one. “If I have to injure and potentially kill someone, I’m OK.”

Tamika Murray walked into Founding Fathers Outfitters a bundle of nerves.

She had been sitting on the idea of owning a firearm for years. She had even applied for and received her license to own a firearm in 2013. But Murray couldn’t bring herself to actually purchase one.

“There’s a lot of trauma in our community … from firearms,” said Murray, who is Black. “So many of us have lost brothers and cousins and uncles — it’s been a plague.”

Guns were always taboo in Murray’s community when she was growing up. Murray herself never expected to become a gun owner. And it wasn’t until 2018 — five years after she first received her license — that she decided to buy her first gun, after having worked in probation and parole.

“It just opened my eyes more to saying this is a safety concern I need to address, and I need to learn what I need to do,” Murray said. “As a single Black mother, in the area that I live in, I just want to protect my family.”

That’s when she went to Founding Fathers, a small gun shop in Montgomery County. It was like trying on a pair of shoes: She had to feel the weapon, grip the weapon, to determine whether it was right for her. She felt empowered.

Since purchasing her firearm, Murray has been taking training classes to increase her knowledge around gun ownership and safety. She knows gun ownership is a catch-22 (“The same way it can help, it can hurt,” she said.), but to Murray, education is an answer.

“If we had more education, more resources, it wouldn’t be such a strong issue,” Murray said.

Aside from hearing the occasional gunshot or seeing people carry guns illegally, Brandon Hall wasn’t exposed to guns — or at least legal firearm ownership — throughout his lifetime.

But over the last few years, as gun violence has steadily increased, Hall’s perception began to change. He’s lost many friends to gun violence, and most recently, his younger cousin was killed at a store in Mantua during his college break.

“I felt more secure, to be honest with you.”

That’s what Hall was thinking about when he ultimately decided to get his license to carry in 2018, and purchase his first firearm in 2019.

“It was always more for safety for myself and my family,” Hall said. “I felt more secure, to be honest with you.”

Since Hall got his first firearm, many of his family members started purchasing their own, too: his wife, his mom, his brothers. He even convinced his grandmother, who was against firearms, that legal gun ownership was a good idea for safety.

“I think the Black community is getting more into gun ownership,” Hall said. “With what happened during the pandemic, I think people were just feeling less secure. All that accumulating made people want to own guns legally, and put less taboo in the community.”

In 2020, a person was shot and killed right in front of Dionne Jackson’s home in Olney. Her children, then 10 and 4 years old, saw the body lying in the street.

“My children lived with that,” Jackson said.

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Jackson started fearing more and more for her own safety, too. There was looting in Olney not far from where Jackson lived, and her Citizen app kept buzzing about home break-ins. A year later, a woman was raped inside the bathroom of the Center City Macy’s, even while her husband was waiting for her in the store. It shocked Jackson.

“That really was unsettling for me,” she said. “It just felt like this circle of crime [was] kind of pushing in around me.”

Jackson had always thought of guns as tools for the military and police, or for people intending to use them for violence. She’d dismissed her husband’s efforts to convince her that they ought to buy a firearm for family protection, believing it wasn’t necessary.

“It just felt like this circle of crime [was] kind of pushing in around me.”

But to her, the Philly her children are growing up in now feels different and more dangerous than the one she grew up in. Jackson talked with her family about what it would mean to have a gun, started taking training courses, and studying firearm owner education materials. She bought self-defense liability insurance too, all before eventually purchasing a handgun last June.

Now, Jackson takes live-fire training sessions monthly, and makes sure that when her gun isn’t holstered on her hip, it’s in a lockbox at home. Her biggest concern is making sure her children never get hurt, either by accident with the family’s firearm, or by someone else.

“They’ve never said, ‘Oh, I feel safer’. But there have been times when [we’re] leaving the house … [they ask], ‘Do you have it, Mom?’”