As Democrats & Gun Banners Push for More Laws, Gun Sales Smash Records

By Jeff Knox

Buckeye, AZ –-(Ammoland.com)- Barack Obama continues his seven-year run as the nation’s top firearm salesman.

Raising the question in many Americans’ minds whether they might be facing their last chance to purchase the guns they want.

Mass shootings and terrorism, along with the Democratic Party’s open embrace of gun control as a campaign issue are assisting Obama’s unintended effort to push gun sales to new records.

The FBI released an interim report on the NICS checks for Black Friday and the after-Thanksgiving sales weekend. The numbers are pretty impressive.

NICS is the FBI’s National Instant Check System that licensed gun dealers go through to verify that their customers are not prohibited from purchasing a firearm.

According to the FBI report, the numbers for Friday, November 27 2105 broke all records.

Not only were more background checks processed that day than any previous Black Friday, the numbers topped any 24-hour period in the history of the system. The day’s total reached 185,345 checks, shattering the previous single-day record of 177,170 set December 21, 2012. That previous record, of course, followed the Sandy Hook horror, and was marked by Obama getting out front on the gun issue, which he had previously kept “under the radar.”

But NICS checks are only an indicator of the total number of guns transferred on any given day, since not all firearm sales go through NICS. Several states conduct their own background checks which may or may not be included in NICS statistics. Many state-issued concealed carry licenses or purchase permits serve as a “pre-check” and allow the firearm purchaser to bypass the NICS system, and then there is the notorious so called “private sale loophole” which allows individuals who are not in the business of buying and selling firearms to sell or otherwise dispose of their personal property without having to go through any sort of federal red tape.

If you believe the Bloomies and media claims that over 40% of firearm transactions are between private sellers, with no background check (which I think are sorely exaggerated) that would indicate that those private sales account for an additional 75,000+ guns changing hands on Black Friday alone.

A conservative guestimate of transfer activity among the 12+ million Americans who hold concealed carry licenses and others exempt from background checks, and the total number of transfers could easily top 300,000 – a new gun for one out of every thousand adults in the country – in just one day!

We may not know the exact numbers, but we know that many guns change hands every day, and that number seems to go up in the wake of every mass shooting with its accompanying calls from politicians and the media to push a new set of gun laws through the system.

Some facts remain at issue. Do those guns go to new gun owners? Is the number of gun owners growing or shrinking? Michael Bloomberg and company confidently report the number of gun owners is shrinking, even as they breathlessly report that the U.S. is the most heavily armed civilian population in the world, with an estimated one gun for every man, woman, and child in the country, and average daily sales numbers tripling over the past two decades. But the hoplophobes never manage to get to the next critical fact:
Crime rates have been falling throughout that same period and now stand at record lows.

But there’s another flaw in the anti-rights logic that should have Bloomberg and company even more worried than the obvious fact that more guns does not equate to more crime.

The Bloomies and their media allies have heavily invested in polls designed to show that Americans overwhelmingly support more gun control, want expanded background checks, and want bans on “assault weapons” and “high-capacity” magazines. We have always said that the polls are biased and inaccurate, and the firearm sales numbers prove our assertion. Every time the push for more gun control gets serious, Americans buy more guns, ammunition, and magazines. The AR15 outsells all other styles of rifle, and literally hundreds of companies have sprung up to manufacture and sell magazines and accessories for just that one style of firearm. The obvious fact is that Americans want these guns and magazines, and their rush to buy them in advance of any new laws shows their desire to avoid the additional hassles those laws would entail.

In short, Americans might say they support additional laws, when asked about them in the abstract and as they would apply to other people, but they don’t want these laws to apply to them.

As I have written before, support for gun control is based on fear of “those other people.” Whether the “other people” are criminals, potential terrorists, lunatics, or just run of the mill irresponsible neighbors. People tend to be mistrustful of strangers, and the anti-rights crowd plays on that mistrust to push their agenda. As long as they can keep people worried about “those other people,” they can dodge the obvious reality that their proposed laws only impact the law-abiding, and have no effect on the people that commit crimes and atrocities.

What’s happening right now is an example of people voting with their pocketbooks. They are demonstrating the American appetite for firearms and our dislike for intrusive regulations. Like Carl Rowan, the vehemently anti-gun columnist for the Washington Post, who demonstrated his own hypocrisy by pulling an illegal gun and shooting a teenager in his backyard in 1988, they are saying, “I support gun control, but I’m going to defend my family.”

Well you can’t have both. Gun control prevents people from having the means of effectively defending themselves and their families. Even the most modest of gun control laws impede good people, and every proposal that has been put on the table lays the groundwork for more restrictions. Obama’s own experts reported that so-called “universal background checks” could only be effective if there is also universal gun registration. The American people might say they want some of these laws, but their buying trends say they don’t want them applying to them.

Now the trick is to get people to express the same sentiment in the voting booth by rejecting the politicians who want to restrict their rights.

About:
The Firearms Coalition is a loose-knit coalition of individual Second Amendment activists, clubs and civil rights organizations. Founded by Neal Knox in 1984, the organization provides support to grassroots activists in the form of education, analysis of current issues, and with a historical perspective of the gun rights movement. The Firearms Coalition is a project of Neal Knox Associates, Manassas, VA. Visit: www.FirearmsCoalition.org