BANGOR DAILY NEWS.COM October 27, 2020 –  LOS ANGELES — Four months ago, as protesters marched through the city demanding justice for George Floyd, Vena Petty was standing at a market in Burbank when she spotted an older white man glaring at her. “It’s all your fault!” he hissed, adding an expletive.

Petty — who is Hawaiian, Black and Chinese — was standing quietly by herself at the time, so she’s confident he targeted her as a woman of color. She tucked the memory away, but it resurfaced after President Donald Trump during a debate told the Proud Boys, a far-right hate group, to “stand back, and stand by,” and again two weeks later, when Sen. Lindsey Graham made a comment, which he later said was sarcastic, about “the good old days of segregation.” By then, Petty was convinced.

That afternoon, the 56-year-old, who was laid off from her temporary job at a film studio in March, visited Redstone Firearms in Burbank, determined to start the process of buying her first gun — something small, she said, to keep in her home. She hoped she would never need to use it, but believed that having a gun might give her some comfort in a world that felt increasingly out of control.

“Who knows what will happen?”

While the days leading up to most presidential elections carry a certain frenzied, exhausted energy fueled by attack ads and nonstop robocalls, this election cycle has felt abnormally anxiety-inducing for many Americans.

“We’re certainly in the middle of a perfect storm,” said Dr. Esther Sternberg, research director at the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona. Humans

respond physiologically to stress — we sweat, our hearts race — and those responses, Sternberg said, are essential for our survival.

“It gives you the energy to fight or flee.”

And, in a sense, that’s precisely what some Americans are now doing.

Some voters — those with the means and flexibility to do so — have channeled their preelection stress into finalizing plans to move out of the country depending on who wins in November. Others have ramped up their campaigning efforts and some, like Petty, have spent recent weeks researching the steps behind buying a gun. Thousands of Californians, including many first-time buyers, purchased firearms in 2020 — a spike attributed to fears over the pandemic, but also, in part, to people’s fears of “government collapse,” according to a recent survey conducted by researchers at the University of California, Davis.

And the worries are bipartisan.

In the days after Kamala Harris was announced as Joe Biden’s running mate, Google searches for the phrase “Move if Biden wins” spiked, and after the first presidential debate, searches jumped for “Will Biden take away guns?” [full article]