Sixteen times since he was first inaugurated, President Obama has chosen to speak against guns following a shooting. Sixteen times he has either directly or indirectly assailed American citizens’ right to keep and bear arms as guaranteed by the Second Amendment. Sixteen times he has demanded that Congress do something about it. Sixteen times the American people have bought more guns.
Monday’s speech was no different. He spoke of the “assault” rifle used by the monster in the Orlando shooting on Sunday morning. He spoke of how “easy” it was for the shooter to obtain his weapons:
It appears that he was able to obtain these weapons legally because he did not have a criminal record….
It was not difficult for him to obtain these kinds of weapons….
We are … so lax in how we make very powerful firearms available to people in this country….
We ignore the problems with easy access to firearms….
We have to make sure that it is not easy for somebody … to be able to obtain weapons….
How easy it is for [self-radicalized individuals] to obtain weapons….
We make it very easy for individuals … to get very powerful weapons very quickly. And that’s a problem.
Translation: Government is determined to make it more difficult than it already is for honest law-abiding citizens to purchase a firearm. Result? Those honest law-abiding citizens head to the gun store.
Target World, a gun store in Cincinnati, is seeing a spike in gun sales, including people who have never bought a gun before. Said Bob Freeland, who brought his girlfriend to the store to buy her first gun, “It’s not at all out of the ordinary for gun sales to spike following mass shootings. Here at Target World people are buying everything from AR-15s, hunting rifles and handguns.” Said his girlfriend, Kimberly, “With the concerns in the United States, it’s just — you don’t feel safe anywhere you go, so I decided to go ahead and purchase a gun.”
The Gun Room, Denver’s oldest firearms dealer, is seeing three to four times the usual volume of sales following Orlando. Background checks are taking hours to complete, not just minutes as they usually do.
Hunters Warehouse in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, sells firearms to dealers over the Internet and the owner, Tom Engle, told reporters for WeAreCentralPa that, as of early Tuesday morning, his store had sold between 13,000 and 15,000 semi-automatic rifles through his website since the shooting.
And many are new, and different, customers. More are women and older people arming themselves for the first time. And another niche has opened up: the lesbian and gay community. Pink Pistols is a national gun club for the LGBT population that saw its membership more than double over the weekend, with dozens of new chapters being started.
Gun makers are seeing their stocks rise in tandem with the increased demand. Sturm, Ruger & Co. and Smith & Wesson have seen their stock prices soar as well. Smith & Wesson Holding Company (stock symbol: SWHC) has seen its stock rise from $3 a share to over $21 since 2011, a seven-fold increase. One analyst has charted the sixteen times that Obama has railed against guns against SWHC stock. Every time the president speaks against guns, SWHC stock moves higher. (See the chart here.)
If anti-gunners were really interested in reducing the number of guns owned by Americans they would keep their mouths shut, or else talk about real remedies to thwart terrorist attacks by radical Muslims and others, such as eliminating gun-free zones and encouraging even more Americans to exercise their Second Amendment-guaranteed rights. But, no. The push by totalitarians to remove guns from innocent citizens is so strong that they warn the citizenry of more sanctions against guns, and the more strident the attacks, the more those citizens head to the gun stores to stock up.
A graduate of an Ivy League school and a former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American magazine and blogs frequently at LightFromTheRight.com, primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at [email protected].
