It’s in anticipation of stricter gun laws. People who already have plenty of guns load up on even more. Those considering buying their first gun, rush to do so while the window remains open.
Then nothing happens and sales slack off. Until the next incident.
And I completely agree that the ubiquity of guns contributes considerably to the amount of accidents and gun suicides.
The podcast I linked to talks about it (the precise point you are making and the point I feel all 3 of us already knows) about 40 mins in.
To borrow language Pat is not going to use but from an economic background (beautiful mind nonsense from mathematician Nash
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2d_dtTZQyUM
This is not irrational, yet is emotional / maddening / madness where we are stuck in an insane system (as individuals and as a society).
This is because we are trapped in a bad system of game theory where everyone's individual choices are rational to that system, but that increases the amount of disorder in the system which causes people to have less faith / trust in the system, which produces more and more guns in the system which produces more accidental death, more domestic abuse,
more people using guns to just fight with their neighbors / strangers in the control of space / they are afraid, so on and so on. And also the more rare causes of gun death but still real and tragic those mass shootings in general, and especially the mass shootings in schools.
*I prefer the term Prisoner's Dilemma for we have known about this phenomena for about 200 years now under various names and Prisoner's Dilemma with all its "double-binds" just feels apt for it is how it feels in the inside. But I linked the Nash clip from a bad movie for movies are fun / familiar. Once again Pat says it better than me in the audio podcast.
This is the Bad Place and there is (almost) No Exit!