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.

Liu, 54, was born in Taiwan, lived in Hong Kong and moved to the US when he was 15. He says his customer base is mostly Asian and although there is no reliable system for tracking how many people are buying guns from week to week, his sales have averaged US$10,000 a day in recent weeks. That’s more than most months in the second half of 2019. The uptick began about five weeks ago, he says, as alarm over the pandemic intensified.

“Before, my sales were mostly to immigrants from mainland China,” he says. “Then a week ago, when Trump declared an emergency, that really shocked everybody.”

Liu estimates “80 to 90 per cent” of his customers are now first-time gun buyers, and increasingly include Americans of Vietnamese, Philippine and Japanese backgrounds.

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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.

“All these people are out of work, and what are people running out of food and money going to do? It’s going to be scary,” he says.

Gun control advocacy groups might argue more widespread gun ownership will not make the country safer and that, if anything, firearms in the home lead to more murders, suicides and accidental shootings. Liu does not agree.

The 54-year-old taught his three daughters, aged 20 to 28, to shoot “as soon as they were ready to learn”, and urges them to sleep with a loaded gun close to hand.

Ruby Kim, a 48-year-old Korean-American management consultant, had been considering buying her first gun for a while “for personal protection and things like earthquakes. And now there’s this coronavirus thing”.

“There’s a lot of agitation and uncertainty right now,” she says. “I vacillate between thinking this will pass and getting paranoid.

“Times of crisis bring out either the best or the worst in people, and you just don’t know which it’s going to be. So you kind of want to be prepared for any situation.”

David Chan, a 41-year-old small-business owner, bought a shotgun more than 10 years ago but barely touched it. As the coronavirus spread, though, he decided to dust it off and stock up on ammunition. He found this nearly impossible, due both to a shortage and the state losing track of his firearm registration.

“The gun store told me a lot of people have run into this,” he says. “The state does not even know I have a firearm any more, which is just not very reassuring as a citizen of California.”

Chan, who is half Chinese and half Japanese, is less concerned about the virus or xenophobic attacks than he is about the government’s ability to manage the disruption.

“They’ve caused a lot more panic and the downward spiral in our economy has been really quick,” he says. “And this is hurting a lot of folks, especially people living pay cheque to pay cheque. They may not be able to get back into the workforce fast enough and it could push the country into a depression.

“And maybe my caution is also because I lived through the LA riots. You read about what happened after Hurricane Katrina [in New Orleans in 2005] ... it was pretty horrific. But I hope it does not get to that point, that it ends up being a complete waste of my money to buy all this ammo.”