If the hands-on use of a freedom does influence people to vote to protect that freedom, then Joe Biden has a surprise coming.
In a 3,400-word treatise on his campaign website, Biden tells us he wants to ban popular rifles, to use trial lawyers to bankrupt America’s many gun makers, to confiscate guns from law-abiding people, to force gun-owners’ licensing schemes on more than 100-million Americans, to mandate that citizens buy, not reliable, time-tested firearms, but some kind of “smart gun” … and that’s just the beginning of what Biden wants to do with our freedom.
So Biden is in this entrenched, authoritarian and deeply un-American position on a fundamental part of our freedom at a time when we have this new group of millions of gun owners who have, depending on the jurisdiction they reside in, just found out that a lot of bureaucracy already has to be navigated just to buy a gun these days.
To put this in context, realize that, in a recent Rasmussen survey, 27% of people said that at least one gun in their home had been purchased in the past six months, so more than a quarter of those surveyed have a brand-new gun around the house.
A survey done by the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) determined that most of these guns were bought for personal or home-defense. The most-popular gun type being bought has been the semi-automatic pistol. Meanwhile, the biggest reason for this spike in gun sales is uncertainty during a time when officials in many major cities are not effectively giving their residents law and order; indeed, cities like New York and Chicago are seeing surges in murder rates, which appear to be a direct result of their policies.
This is why, as this was going to print, the most-recent monthly numbers from the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) were again astonishing. The FBI carried out 3.6 million background checks in July—making it the third highest month on record. When adjusting to reflect checks for likely gun purchases, the NSSF says this translates to 1.8 million gun sales for July 2020—a 122% increase over July 2019. This means that an estimated 12,141,032 guns were sold from January through July, which is just under the 13,199,172 likely gun sales that occurred in all of 2019.
Many of these gun sales occurred in swing states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. But a lot of them also occurred in states Biden is likely taking for granted.
To put an exclamation point on this, realize that 40% of first-time buyers are women, according to an NSSF survey; in fact, an NSSF survey of gun retailers reports that sales to black Americans are up 58.2% for the first six months of this year.
So, let’s go back to the pivotal question: Will these new gun owners vote for their freedom in these uncertain times?
A year ago, gun controllers caught those who love their freedom sleeping in Virginia. The first thing the Democrats who took over did was to go for the peoples’ guns. Michael Bloomberg’s gun-control group Everytown for Gun Safety, which funded many of those Virginia Democrats, is now using a $60 million campaign in an effort to do that again.
The only real danger now is that enough voters won’t understand that their freedom is on the November ballot. They should, of course, as the policy contrast between the presidential candidates on this issue could not be starker. Trump talks up the Second Amendment at every rally, whereas Biden actually called gun manufacturers “the enemy.”
Still, mainstream media outlets are doing all they can to downplay this contrast to voters.
