Less than 60 shopping days till the big gun grab

It’s been a week and a half since Barack Obama was elected president. He won’t take office for another two months. But he’s already got one big group of Americans on their feet.

What is Barack Obama’s position on the rights to bear arms?

Sen. Obama’s campaign Web site says he “respects the constitutional rights of Americans to bear arms.” It promises he will “protect the rights of hunters and other law-abiding Americans to purchase, own, transport and use guns.”

Seeking to reassure gun owners, Obama told a campaign audience in Ohio in October: “I will not take your shotgun away. I will not take your rifle away. I won’t take your handgun away.”

But the crowds mobbing America’s gun stores this week say a large number of Americans — including first-time gun-buyers — don’t believe it.

In 2003, while serving in the Illinois State Legislature, Barack Obama voted in favor of a bill in the Judiciary Committee that would have made it illegal to “knowingly manufacture, deliver or possess” a so-called “semi-automatic assault weapons,” reports Chris Cox, chief lobbyist for the National Rifle Association. “Under this bill, a firearm did not actually have to be semi-automatic to be banned. According to definitions in the bill, all single-shot and double-barreled shotguns 28-gauge or larger, and many semi-automatic shotguns of the same size, would be banned as ‘assault weapons.’

“Any Illinois resident who possessed one of these commonly used guns 90 days after the effective date would have had to ‘destroy the weapon or device, render it permanently inoperable, relinquish it to a law enforcement agency, or remove it from the state.’ Anyone who still possessed a banned gun would have been subject to a felony sentence.”

In an April television debate, Sen. Obama argued someone else on his staff improperly filled out a 1996 questionnaire stating support for a ban on the manufacture, sale, and possession of handguns — even after ABC News’ Charlie Gibson told Obama “Your writing was on the questionnaire.”

And the National Shooting Sports Foundation sent out mailers last month warning that — while in The U.S. Senate — Sen. Obama voted for versions of Senate Bill 397 that could have bankrupted gun manufacturers by allowing them to be sued for misuse of their products (“equivalent to holding car makers responsible for drunk driving”), as well as for a 500 percent tax increase on guns and ammo and a ban on virtually all deer-hunting ammunition.

Americans aren’t waiting to see which Barack Obama takes office in January. They’re voting with their feet, and their billfolds.

Glen Parshall of Bargain Pawn in North Las Vegas reported Wednesday that sales are “through the roof. I can’t get anything. I mean handguns, rifles, ammo, you name it. Ammo’s doubled in (wholesale) price in the past week if you can find it. I had a line of people waiting for me this morning when I showed up for work, waiting to buy AR-15s. Everybody’s fearful of the messiah, very, very much fearful, I mean hanging their heads and cannot believe he got elected fearful.

“We had that rush in ’94 when they passed the first so-called assault weapons ban, but that’s nothing compared to what we’ve got going on now. I mean, people come through the door asking me ‘If I buy this now, they won’t be able to confiscate it next year, will they’? I tell them ‘My crystal ball is in the shop.’

“My biggest distributors nationwide, they’ve got a strict allocation of two AR-15 rifles per week per dealer — if they get them. Everybody wants ’em. Brownell’s is out of everything: nuts and bolts and screws. I just got done ordering a few barrels and upper receivers a few nights ago, but they’re out of magazines. I can’t buy a Glock anywhere in the country except the oddball ones, weird calibers or the ones in green with orange slides, things like that. I did find a couple ARs last week, match rifles that go for $2,000, I’ve got those coming in for customers.

“In October before this all started, my sales were approximately double what they were last October. This week it’s up more than that, and It’d be a hell of a lot higher if I had anything. People are looking for handguns, looking for rifles, looking for magazines.

“Ammunition? 7.62-by-39 was $180 a case last month, now it’s $350 for a (thousand-round) case. .223 was $300 a case, I haven’t been able to find any, but it would run me over $400 if I could get any. A guy across town got in two pallets” (about 100,000 rounds) “of 9 millimeter, it lasted about a day and a half. It’s absolutely mind-boggling. I’m still selling a lot of revolvers. I can’t get short shotguns.”

But why do his customers believe Democrats impose more gun bans, we asked Mr. Parshall, who’s sold guns and gold in this town for decades. After all, aren’t crime rates highest precisely where law-abiding citizens are barred from carrying weapons for their own defense?

“That’s not what they care about. They’re socialists. They want to be in total control. They want to confiscate — that’s their word — all the IRAs and 401-Ks, put them in a government fund paying you 3 percent interest. People are afraid.”

“People are terrified of losing their right to protect themselves,” DeWayne Irwin, owner of Cheaper Than Dirt, a large gun store in Ft. Worth, Texas tells the Chicago Tribune. “The volume is ten times what we ever expected. It started with assault rifles, but at this point, people are buying ammunition, high capacity magazines, Glocks — it’s all flying off the shelf. With the economy the way it is, people are worried about instability. They are scared of civil unrest.”

“Why are white people buying assault weapons?” asks Ben Agger, a sociology professor at the University of Texas at Arlington who wrote a book about the Virginia Tech slayings. “I almost hate to say it, but there is a deep-seated fear of the armed black man, because Obama now commands the military and other instruments of the justice system,” Professor Agger told the Chicago Tribune, a newspaper which routinely refers to semi-automatic rifles as “assault rifles,” which they are not. “They are afraid Obama will exact retribution for the very deep-seated legacy of slavery,” Professor Agger figures.

Oh, please. What we’re seeing in the gun stores this week is not a nation arming itself for revolt, but Americans in a thoroughly defensive mode, stocking up now to avoid the Democratic gun bans they believe are coming. What many Americans fear is that Barack Obama — aided by congressional allies like Senators Dianne Feinstein of California and Charles Schumer of New York — will revert to his true, pre-campaign nature come Jan. 20, and once more move to take away Americans’ guns.

Obama “says he’s in favor of common sense gun laws,” says DeWayne Irwin. “Well, what people up north think is common sense is something different from us down here in Texas. The criminals have all this illegal stuff. I don’t want to fight them with a handgun if I can get an AK. I’m entitled to that. I should be able to defend my home.”

“We’ve had a lot of people concerned because our president-elect is extremely anti-gun and so is his running mate,” says Jerry Bricco, owner of First Class Firearms in suburban Zion, Illinois. “They’re afraid of future gun bans and what you will be allowed to get.”

After all, Democrats have tried before. In fact, a notable public figure said after Republicans recaptured Congress in 1994 that that happened precisely because Democrats tried to take away Americans’ guns.

Who was that insightful analyst?

Bill Clinton.

4 Comments to “Less than 60 shopping days till the big gun grab”

  1. Milton DeGeorge Says:

    I just purchased my first rifle this week. I didn’t realize that I wasn’t the only one on the bandwagon. I don’t trust Obamianity and I want to preserve my family’s ability to hunt for itself and defend itself if necessary. God bless America!

  2. John Brook Says:

    Here in the Puget Sound area of Western Washington, gun shows have been cleared of semi-auto rifles and pistols, gun shops are experiencing the same flood of buyers you’re seeing elsewhere. One of our biggest shops, Federal Way Guns, has been nearly wiped clean.

    My order to Bushmaster for magazines “disappeared.” Have to re-order.

    It seems to me a high risk bet to think that Obama and company won’t impose very harsh measures.

  3. Mike Glaser Says:

    I salute those of my fellow citizens who see the unmistakable handwriting on the wall and who are demonstrating that there are still vast numbers of us who do not take our personal liberty and the sovereignty of the United States for granted. They are to be commended for refusing to buy into the lie that bleats that if all of us are made equally weak we are somehow “secure.”

    Every right and responsibility that one delegates to some outside authority, that authority usually being the State, including to no small degree the right to and responsibility for self-defense, causes one to be at the mercy of that outside authority when a crisis occurs.

    Now that Barack Obama is President-elect, one can observe the Gun-Ban Lobby and numerous media personnel nearly salivating over the prospect of law-abiding citizens being further disarmed; unfortunately, far too many of my fellow Americans will buy into the pernicious suggestion that because 80 million of us choose to exercise our Second Amendment rights in good faith, we are somehow culpable every time some miscreant opens fire.

    We currently have societies in the U.S. where the population is strictly prohibited from possessing firearms or any other weapon, for that matter. Only the authorities are allowed arms. These oases of peace and tranquility are none other than our Nation’s prisons. There the most brutal reign in a gun-free paradise, beating, raping and sometimes killing weaker inmates when the guards happen to be elsewhere. I am obviously not suggesting that prisoners be armed, but merely pointing out that transforming America into a kind of giant penitentiary where the law-abiding live at the mercy and whim of the depraved is not conducive to security; on the contrary, it borders upon insanity.

    Whether people want to admit it or not, we are currently engaged in a civil war in America waged between those of us who recognize that freedom defines the difference between living and merely existing, and those who proclaim that freedom is too dirty, too expensive, too selfish, too unfair and simply too dangerous to be enjoyed by this and future generations. When I observe potential tyrants whisper “danger,” and watch far too many of my fellow Americans nearly trample one another in their haste to surrender yet more freedom in exchange for more false promises of security, I greatly fear for the future of our Republic. If America falls, she will fall from within. Perhaps a fitting epitaph for a Nation that achieved her greatness not from a mindset of “safety first,” but rather “live free or die,” but whose citizenry ultimately lost their backbone along the way will be simply this: “Too ignorant, too lazy, and too craven to remain free.”

  4. az_conservative Says:

    “Those who would sacrifice Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” Ben Franklin