United We Must Stand

by
posted on December 23, 2020
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As this was going to print, it looked like Joe Biden would be our next president, with Kamala Harris as his vice president. Both have explicitly said they want America’s most-popular rifles banned. They want gun makers bankrupted by lawsuits. They want judges who will rule there is no individual right to keep and bear arms. They want gun-owner registries. They want “smart-gun” mandates. In sum, they want every gun-control restriction they can dream up.

As we brace ourselves for this next chapter in the struggle to win back and keep our American freedom, let’s step back and take a look at the big picture.

The U.S. Bill of Rights was ratified 230 years ago, this coming December. This November 17, the NRA will celebrate its 150th birthday. By comparison, the span of a four-year presidential term is but a tiny fraction.

Still, as the history of any nation upon this Earth can attest, long-held liberty can be lost quickly, even quietly, during a pivotal time when the people are distracted by great calamities or cultural upheavals.

We can’t let this be such a time.

For years now, data analysis has shown that there are more than 100 million gun owners in America. This increased in 2020. The National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) estimates that nearly 7 million more Americans bought their first gun during the past year.

Meanwhile, as of October, the NSSF estimated that the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) performed 17.2 million background checks on likely gun sales in 2020; with two months to go, that’s a record, as the previous yearly record was 15.7 million checks conducted in 2016.

So yes, a Biden-Harris administration says they will do all they can to restrict and eradicate our Second Amendment rights, but the peoples’ will is clearly going the other way.

Last summer, an NSSF survey of gun dealers determined that gun purchases made by African American men and women were up 58%. Overall, 40% of gun sales were to women.

These trends aren’t new, but the growth of gun ownership seems to have accelerated among demographics that don’t fit into the mainstream media’s stereotype of the average American gun owner.

When cultural changes like these reach a tipping point, they influence politics even in areas once safe for politicians like Joe Biden.

And this election was hardly a referendum on Second Amendment rights; at least, not in the way politicians like Biden would have you believe. Not even one question was asked on this issue in either presidential debate or during the one vice-presidential debate. Also, many of the politicians whose records show they are opposed to your freedom opted not to talk about this issue during the election season. Even gun-control groups opted to spend a surprising amount of their campaign war chests on issues like health care.

This might sound overly optimistic now, given that, as this was being written, we were facing the most anti-gun administration in American history; but, if enough of us gather together behind the National Rifle Association, we could change the politics on this issue so much that the national focus could shift to targeting the actual problems: the criminals who prey on others and the few mentally ill individuals who might do harm to themselves or others—rather than on America’s millions of law-abiding gun owners.

Just imagine the good that could come from that honesty!

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