gun store sales
The kind of business Redwood City, California's city fathers don't want. (AP Photo/Andrew Selsky)
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By Larry Keane

Americans are sending a message of their own, despite President Joe Biden’s continued push to restrict their Second Amendment rights. They are choosing to protect themselves.

Two key markers demonstrate Americans in 2021 are voting with their wallets and politicians would be wise to take note. Gun sales continue at elevated levels and if elected officials don’t take heed, they could find themselves out of elected office and looking for work.

Low Public Safety Marks

President Biden has been pushing a strict gun control agenda since campaigning for the White House. He called the firearm industry, which guarantees the ability for law-abiding Americans to exercise their Second Amendment rights, “the enemy.” He wants to dismantle it. His executive actions are about limiting the rights of law-abiding Americans, while all but ignoring the criminals perpetrating the crimes.

Joe Biden moms demand action
(AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)

That’s not lost on the American public.

A new ABC News/Ipsos poll shows the president is underwater on crime and safety, according to Newsweek. Only 37 percent of Americans give their approval to President Biden on his handling of crime and gun violence, representing a five-point drop in four months.

Other polling shows Americans’ growing disapproval of more gun control as Congress continues pushing it and the U.S. Senate stalls on considering the president’s nomination of David Chipman to lead the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). Several outlets have reported on the polling, which even includes a drop among self-described Democrats.

Claiming Gun Rights

Gun sales shattered records in 2020. So far in the first half of 2021, the pace hasn’t slowed, with nearly 9.8 million background checks completed for the sale of a gun in the first six months of the year. Stephen Gutowski’s The Reload reported on NSSF’s Adjusted National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) numbers for June, noting the more than 1.2 million checks were second only to June of last year. Also reported was that the first quarter in 2021 was on pace to beat the record first quarter of 2020. In 2020, 40 percent of purchases were first-time buyers, good for more than 8.4 million new gun owners.

“First-time gun owners, young and old from across the country, are helping to push record levels of gun sales for what looks like the second year in a row,” noted NPR. “These buyers are white, Black, Asian and Latino and come from all political beliefs. And they’re being driven by uncertainty, fear and a need to feel safe.”

The Hartford Courant reported that “Jenny,” a stay-at-home mom, purchased her first firearm recently as well. Of the tumultuous last year, she said, “It was such an unpredictable time, and people were under a lot of stress. I realized I was responsible for my own self-defense.”

As millions more Americans realize the president, Congress, and their local governments aren’t willing to take necessary steps to keep them safe, they’re turning to the local gun store and retailer.

negligent unintentional discharge training range
Courtesy Jeff Gonzales

Geneva Solomon, owner of Redstone Firearms in Burbank, Calif., said enrollment in her firearm safety and education classes is way up. “We’ve definitely seen an uptick in the class options we offer. Before they would never sell out. Now they sell out two days after we post them.”

Election Fallout

Americans will continue to exercise their right to buy firearms if their safety continues to be jeopardized by politicians pushing “woke” public safety agendas and cutting law enforcement budgets.

In a bit of good news ahead, the U.S. Supreme Court announced it will hear a potential landmark Second Amendment case in the coming term that could strike down state-level restrictions on concealed carry in New York. The nomination of David Chipman to lead the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has also skidded to a halt and police chiefs are making it clear they’ve been hamstrung by politicians to keep citizens safe.

gun store sales
(AP Photo/Andrew Selsky)

Americans previously rebuffed efforts by billionaire gun control funder Michael Bloomberg in 2019 and 2020 to buy more seats in Congress. His attempt failed. That may be the case again in 2022 as public safety remains at the forefront of voters’ minds.

Americans will keep demanding their Second Amendment rights and exercising that right at the local retail counter. Politicians who keep plugging their ears and shutting their eyes to reality will soon be looking for new work.

 

Larry Keane is SVP for Government and Public Affairs, Assistant Secretary and General Counsel of the National Shooting Sports Foundation.

 

 

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20 COMMENTS

  1. “Americans Aren’t Buying Biden’s Gun Control Agenda”

    only 50% +1 of the house/senate has to buy it.

    and if they can swing it, pretty soon not even 50%.

  2. You keep forgetting, when they’ve proven a Presidential election can be corrupted, how much of a challenge will the mid-terms be!?

    • the 2020 vote was stolen for biden by focusing on a few critical locations. the down-ticket votes swung towards republicans, who gained 10 (?) house seats and lost fewer senate seats than is typical. if typical, the 2022 midterms should see further republican gains. any effort to steal any significant number of these (in new not already corrupted districts) would be far more difficult to pull off.

      • I don’t know, they stole 2020 in broad daylight so it seems it’d be even easier in smaller elections with fewer eyes on them.

        • Of course it would be easier. And it’s easier to ‘fund’ ‘ringer’ candidates with no intention of having them win, but whose purpose is to dilute the voting base for a Republican/Libertarian Candidate to take out the Marxist candidate. The other problem is that quite a lot of people don’t even vote in the midterms. They just don’t bother with anything but a straight ticket in the major POTUS election because they don’t understand that midterms are actually just as, or sometimes even more important!

  3. “A new ABC News/Ipsos poll shows the president is underwater on crime and safety, according to Newsweek. Only 37 percent of Americans give their approval to President Biden on his handling of crime and gun violence, representing a five-point drop in four months.”

    Here we go again with “polls”.

    Note that “Only 37 percent…give their approval”. The implication is 43% “disapprove”. But why? How many responding “disapprove” because Biden is not doing enough? How many “disapprove” because Biden is doing too much (i.e. the wrong things)?

    We people like to “read into” these binary choices that every person polled who “disapproves”, do so because they agree with “our” reasons for disapproval. It is the same whether “your guy” is being evaluated, or the “other guy”.

    Of course, there is always the question of “weighting” the pool of people contacted.

    Be skeptical of polls and surveys. They are very difficult to create if “objectivity” is the goal; very easy to manipulate if “objectivity” is optional.

  4. Isn’t a poor rating on crime one of the things that got us the AWB?
    That and the MSM pushed day-drinking, country-club Democrats persistent fear of the black man.

  5. Ordering the police to stand down is what caused this surge in gun sales. Now everyone finally knows. You are on your own. The police are not coming to save you. And they don’t have to save you, if they don’t want to. Or they are told to strand down.

      • Real life zombies now, called Zocialists. Harder to hit their brains tho. Seriously, this admin is not a political party it’s an organized crime syndicate. Chaos and anarchy in cities and at the southern border first. It’ll spread.

    • Well, not all police are standing down. Apparently, Commifornia is still operational on their APPS ‘Prohibited Persons’ gun confiscation scheme even though it’s costing too much in tax-payer’s dollars for what it’s ‘purported’ to accomplish? Which is ‘supposedly’ keeping guns out of the hands of the mentally ill (even though mental illness is NOT a crime) and ex-convicts (even though it’s NOT a crime to be an ex-con if you have been rehabilitated and released back into society and attempting to get your life back in order as a law-abiding citizen and not engaged in criminal activity! ). But they know that. They don’t care, because it’s all part of the greater agenda plan..

      And apparently, The Marxist People’s Republic of Illinois’ Poliburo admires California’s active Gun Confiscation prototype operation so much that they are now attempting a knock off in the form of ongoing blanket screening surveillance on all FOID card (Firearms Owners IDentification) holders to ‘check’ if any of them committed any offenses or Red Flag behavior that will make them ‘Prohibited’ persons, thereby suspending their FOID cards and banning them from having firearms and having STATE police going out to do the actual confiscations. This goes above and beyond the NICS checks. NICS stops you from purchasing a gun at a dealer. This, like the Califuckya confiscations, are patently Unconstitutional PRE-Crime tactics with No legal Due Process constraints! Just ‘subjectively perceive’ based on biased behavior assessment that a person is having ‘guilty’ thoughts and is about to commit a crime so we have to illegally search and seize their firearms, and anything else we can ‘say’ is an illegal item.

      I often give myself a splitting headache trying to wrap my weary brain around how they get away with this shit? FOID CARDS!? I thought ‘Registrations’ of any private items are against the law?

      To add insult to the injury to the 2nd/A and 4th/A the City of Chicago also just announced new task force specifically focusing on guns, again, not the Gang related shooters, They’ve got political power and even have a voting base, to where they want to surveillance and track and search and seize questionable gun dealers and recent purchases!

      So let me get this straight. Illinois and Chicago are basically broke and bankrupt, yet they are going to spend large resources of cops they don’t have to enough of to stop all the street gang carnage by violating the rights of gun dealers and other private citizens?

      Last I read it, the ’86 Firearms Owners Protection Act’ made it illegal to register firearms to their owners and have a data base registry? Why aren’t these California and Illinois lawmakers being arrested and charged with ‘Deprivation of Rights’ crimes?

      The cold hard reality is that not only are the ‘hardbingers of gun doom and glom’ absolutely correct about Confiscations coming soon, to an inside mandatory Mask wearing barbecue near you.

      The CA APPS and Illinois FOID card suspensions and other tactics to find out who has guns are merely Beta Testing for the big one. They are testing to see how effectively they can target focus certain owners and sweep them and their weapons up as domestic terrorists en-masse.

      And don’t be so absurdly gullible to listen to armchair rangers who say it’ ‘impossible’ to confiscate enough guns to matter in a country that arguably has more military adequate small arms in the hands of private citizens (as was designed to be by our Founders) than the current standing Army.

      Here’s how it’s going to be handled. The NSA will provide any and all info needed to find who has certain firearms and/or will be most likely to be a threat to totalitarian Marxist socialist government. Priority targets will adjust accordingly to ongoing strategy changes.

      What few people know is that the plans for American disarmament was started decades and even generations ago. Now it’s just in your face and not even discreet anymore.

      See, they knew it would always be difficult, if not impossible, to out right make a law that bans all civilians from owning firearms. It would never pass our Legislative system which never was so indoctrinated into New World Order Communism as it is today. In a capitalist free enterprise system like ours, it’s just almost impossible to prohibit or even restrict Americans who want ‘Stuff’. We like our ‘Stuff’ too much and really don’t like someone trying to take it from us.

      So they Figured out a simple, but perfectly suited scheme to eventually disarm everybody.
      Nobody likes bad people, especially wielding dangerous weapons. It’s kind of a meme built into our sense of non-violent social arrangement.

      So they started with making laws ‘prohibiting’ certain people like criminally insane or ex-felons from having firearms. Now technically it can be said that permanent prohibition only should apply to those who are imprisoned? But it wasn’t too hard to create the meme that ‘There are just too many people out there who shouldn’t have guns’. (nevermind that this is such a logical fallacy as to defy common sense to the core) To justify and ‘normalize’ permanent and eternal prohibition for anyone who commits a felony even though this creates a discriminatory side-culture of law-abiding who made a mistake in their lives.

      This is one of the reasons why minority citizens in poorer urban areas can’t get a lot of jobs and turn to more crime to make a living. They can’t GET a decent job because they can’t ‘lose’ the stigma. So much for equal rights, cruel and unusual punishment, and rehabilitation and justice. Once you do something seriously wrong, your life is over. You’re never ‘allowed’ to repent, and fix it. That’s not justice. That’s an aberration of all that is just? Even so-called Christian religionists fall into this clap-trap. I always piss them off and say, there but for the grace of G…goeth YOU, mofo? when they say the ‘some people shouldn’t have guns’ shit or ask them what would old JEEZE himself say about ‘forgiveness’ ?

      And similarly with these slippery sloped down Red flag mandates, and mental illness prohibitions. It’s surprising to most that a clinical diagnosis of some sort of cognitive psychological or emotional content disorder can be determined in 1 out of every three persons!

      Testing for this is now going on in many industries and the military, and that’s how they ultimately will take your guns.

      They don’t have to ban so-called assault weapons. You just won’t be able to have them after you’re tested and ‘evaluated’! Like they do already in a lot of countries.

      They’ll eventually manage to make enough laws concerning other offenses to make virtually everyone a potential felon at large, and/or also prohibited because of potentially dangerous mental issues. Then they’ll tax or restrict any firearm-related industry so what good is your gun without ammo or parts or companies to make them after they’re ‘taxed’ and restricted out of business?

      Then let the mass confiscations begin. And they won’t stop until THEY ARE Stopped!

      And when you get Commie liberal judges that won’t even issue an injunction in an obviously anti-Constitutional violation. That’s another main claw in the justice system. How the fuck can they ban ‘ghost-guns’ when you have the established right to make your own firearm and the government is not allowed to register or relate the gun to the owner?! That’s the whole ‘assurance’ factor to your gun ownership privacy as put forth in the Firearms owners protection Act that there’s absolutely ‘No Registry’?

      So the only chance, unfortunately–or fortunately–depending how you look at it, is to take back the government sooner, in the political arena. rather than later, when it will be far too late to do it at the ballot box.

  6. Americans will continue to demand and exercise their Second Amendment rights at the neighborhood shop counter. waffle game Politicians who consistently close their eyes and ears to reality will soon be looking for other employment.

  7. Despite popular belief, the process of disarming the United States actually began many decades, if not generations, ago. As oDespite popular belief, the process of disarming the United States actually began many decades, if not generations, ago. As of recently, it’s no longer subtle or oblique in any way.f recently, it’s no longer subtle or oblique in any way.

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