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.

When news of the outbreak in China first broke, his customers “were worried about being targeted because they are Asian”, Liu says.

Liu says his customers have read news reports of xenophobic attacks in several US cities, adding: “They’re coming in to buy a gun because they fear that they’re going to be next.”

Liu also suggested that Asian-Americans have more general concerns about public safety and the prospect of robberies, particularly after Los Angeles County’s early release of more than 600 inmates to lower the risk of a prison outbreak.

Liu lived through the 1992 Los Angeles riots, triggered by the acquittal of police officers charged in the brutal beating of Rodney King.

As parts of the city burned, Asian-American communities such as the one in Koreatown had to fend for themselves. For the first three days of looting, the police did not come to Koreatown and residents turned away looters with guns and baseball bats. When the week-long riots were over, about half the US$1 billion in damage had been sustained by Korean-American businesses.

Liu fears it could happen again.