AmmoLand.com

Santa Deliverers 1.5 Million Firearms For Christmas

AmmoLand Gun News

Washington DC - -(Ammoland.com)- Making a Christmas list is always fun.

And I remember as a kid listing things in order, putting the gift I would most like Santa to bring at the top of list.

One year that was a bicycle, another year a certain type of BB gun, and another year a video game system.

Throughout other years the number one gift request varied but was always the one thing on my list I went to bed dreaming about on Christmas Eve. And although such is to be expected of a child, it seems that a lot of adults now go to bed on Christmas Eve dreaming of what Santa might bring them as well: especially when the number one thing on their list is a Walther .380 or a Glock model 27 or a Springfield XD subcompact 9mm, all of which are splendid guns for concealed carry permit holders.

As a matter of fact, judging from sales receipts and FBI reports regarding sales for December 2011, it seems that Santa delivered at least 1.5 million firearms for Christmas.

Not only is this news in light of the fact that it required the FBI to do a record setting number of background checks in a month – 1.5 million in December alone – but also because it continues to highlight what has been a growing trend among people of all walks of life: namely, folks are less and less trustful of government’s ability to keep them safe.

In early December I had a post on Big Government in which I pointed out gun sales on black Friday had already shattered records. On that day alone, the FBI had done 126,166 background checks for firearms sales. Moreover, an obvious trend on that day was the growing number of women interested in firearms for personal protection. My observation then, which has not changed now, was that the freaks who have been paraded out in Obama’s #OccupyWallStreet movement, the blatant civil unrest that has been fed by Obama’s ongoing class warfare rhetoric, and the violence (sexual and otherwise) that has marked both has reminded us that our safety rests in our own hands. As a result, a growing number of women who want to be safe scratched clothing off the number spot on their Christmas lists and instead wrote “a Smith & Wesson BODYGUARD .38 Special” or “a Sig Sauer P238 .380.”

Of course men bought and received the lion’s share of guns for Christmas, and outside of hunters, the majority of these sales were driven by the same concern – personal safety. After all, what better way to keep yourself and your family safe than to have a firearm that can be used to repel and if need to be, to kill, a household intruder, carjacker, or other criminal who is intent on doing harm to you?

Therefore, when all was said and done Dec. 23 became the second largest single day for gun sales (second only to black Friday) with 102,222 background checks performed.

A timely example of how this return to taking responsibility for our own lives played out right before my eyes over the Christmas break. I was fortunate to go shooting with a couple of friends, a husband and a wife, and the wife had never shot a gun before in her life. The husband had purchased a Ruger .380 LCP, a Glock model 27, and a Smith & Wesson Governor revolver. We shot each weapon repeatedly until Mary settled on the one she was most comfortable operating.

As we were packing up her husband said: “Okay, this gun will be in your nightstand, ready to go if anyone breaks in when I’m not home.”

America is the land of the free, and that freedom was exemplified on Christmas as Santa did his part in bringing us guns we can keep and bear for self-defense.

AWR Hawkins

About:
AWR Hawkins writes for all the BIG sites, for Pajamas Media, for RedCounty.com, for Townhall.com and now AmmoLand Shooting Sports News.

His southern drawl is frequently heard discussing his take on current events on radio shows like America’s Morning News, the G. Gordon Liddy Show, the Ken Pittman Show, and the NRA’s Cam & Company, among others. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal (summer 2010), and he holds a PhD in military history from Texas Tech University.

If you have questions or comments, email him at awr@awrhawkins.com. You can find him on facebook at www.facebook.com/awr.hawkins.

Filed under: Featured Articles, Gun Rights News by Ammoland No Comments »

From the desk of AWR Hawkins on Fri, 2011-12-30 18:32

Christmas worship in a war zone: U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Ronnie Mays sings "Silent Night" during a candlelight service Christmas Eve in the Chapel at Camp Phoenix, Kabul, Afghanistan, Dec. 24. Mays is from Macon, Ga. and serves with the 48th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, Georgia Army...

AmmoLand Gun News

Washington DC - -(Ammoland.com)- In the not-so-distant past, Christmas was a season of “comfort and joy” throughout the West.

Encompassed by spiritual ties that bound people together, even people of different languages and varied religious outlooks, the celebration of the babe in the manger brought university in the midst of diversity and reminded us of our heritage and our common humanity.

But as the last Christmas came and went, we were reminded again that those spiritual ties, and that Western heritage, have been ruptured. As a result, historical (actual) events in our past which demonstrated our culture’s university are not even remotely possible today.

Case in the point: The Christmas Truce that took place in the trenches of World War One during the Christmas of 1914.

As Christmas Day drew near during that first year of the war, German forces crouched or sat in their trenches facing British forces doing the same in their trenches a few yards, and in some cases a few hundred yards, away. A life that was already miserable for so many of those soldiers, due to the cold that gripped them at night and the monotony that pressed upon them by day, was only going to get worse as blood, urine, feces, and disease were added to mix. Yet they fought.

With German guns facing British trenches and British guns facing German trenches, an onlooker might not be faulted for thinking the only thing these forces had in common was a desire to kill one another. But that false paradigm was shattered on one of the winter nights leading up to Christmas, as British forces heard not the sound of gunfire, but the words of “Silent Night” (“Stille Nacht”) rise from the trenches opposite them.

Thereafter, signboards in English were held up by the Germans, informing the British forces that they wanted a truce to celebrate Christmas. Nothing elaborate mind you, rather, simple messages that conveyed the Germans’ promise not to shoot if the British would promise the same. It was Christmas Eve when a German soldier emerged from his country’s trenches and began to walk toward the trenches opposite him: a brave gesture meant to solidify the start of a truce for soldiers in that that area on Christmas morning. He was met by a British soldier and then both returned to their respective trenches to wait out the night.

When Christmas morning broke, no shots were fired, no hostilities exchanged. Rather, on the land that that lay between the German and British trenches—“no man’s land”—the soldiers met and sang carols and exchanged gifts (cigarettes, sweets, etc.), and even engaged in sports (soccer). Although they were enemies on the battlefield, they shared a common denominator which greater than their aggression, and that denominator was their faith, which was intrinsic to their Western heritage.

Fast forward to this past Christmas (2011), and think of how far we’ve fallen. Over the course of decades court systems, educational curriculum, and the relentless encroachment of political correctness have all been used to rid Westerners of their faith, and as consequence, of their reason for Christmas. We have traded our faith, rich in heritage and transcendent in meaning, for a secularization which literally sucks the life not only out of the West, but out of the West’s holidays as well.

Ask yourself, if under some strange circumstance Britain and Germany were to find themselves at war, “What would happen to a soldier today, were he to lay down his gun in order to sing of the babe in the manger or the silent night on which that babe was born?” My guess is that the soldier would be reprimanded, forced to take “sensitivity training,” or maybe even worse. Moreover, I would venture to say that if the soldier tried to emerge from his trench and walk toward his enemy to celebrate Christmas, he would probably be shot dead the moment his enemy had him in their sites.

Simply put, we Westerners have lost the ties that bind. And now, in a manner completely antithetical to that witnessed in the winter of 1914, we are more apt to exchange hostilities between ourselves instead of gifts.

AWR Hawkins

About:
AWR Hawkins writes for all the BIG sites, for Pajamas Media, for RedCounty.com, for Townhall.com and now AmmoLand Shooting Sports News.

His southern drawl is frequently heard discussing his take on current events on radio shows like America’s Morning News, the G. Gordon Liddy Show, the Ken Pittman Show, and the NRA’s Cam & Company, among others. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal (summer 2010), and he holds a PhD in military history from Texas Tech University.

If you have questions or comments, email him at awr@awrhawkins.com. You can find him on facebook at www.facebook.com/awr.hawkins.

Filed under: Gun Rights News by Ammoland No Comments »