Tommy Bushnell lifts the AR-15 rifle and aims at his target.

Some of the other shooters in this indoor gun range near the Los Angeles airport are aiming at human-shaped paper targets complete with red internal organs, but Bushnell’s is just a simple outline of a blue man on a white background.

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“This was a large number of weapons that came into the ecosystem that we estimate would not have were it not for these shocks to the public conscience,” says David Studdert, a professor of medicine and law at Stanford University and leader of the study.

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He found that handgun purchases rose by 53 per cent during the six weeks after the mass shooting in Newtown. After the attack in San Bernardino, sales rose by 35 per cent in most of California and grew by 85 per cent in San Bernardino County.

“It does raise the question of whether a succession of events — mass shootings, elections, firearm legislation being introduced into legislatures, terrorist events … may have an impact overall both on the number of firearms that exist in households in California and the rest of the country and then the risk to occupants of those households.”