The latest report from the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) on Wednesday revealed what many law-abiding gun owners already know: Americans are exercising their Second Amendment right to purchase, keep, and bear arms at record rates.
After adjusting the nearly 30 million background checks reported by the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System for 2023 for duplicates and for reasons other than for purchasing a firearm, the NSSF declared that Americans bought “at least” 15.8 million firearms last year. This is the highest since Covid and the George Floyd insurrections in 2020.
That number is likely far too conservative, as many states still don’t require background checks for private firearm transactions, while still others allow previously permitted gun owners to add to their collections without going through the background check system.
This no doubt is highly annoying to gun-control advocates, many ensconced inside the Biden administration, who would like nothing better than to disarm entirely the American people, turning them from sovereign citizens into serfs. Sovereign citizens have such rights. Serfs do not.
Jacob Hornberger, founder and president of the Future of Freedom Foundation, wrote recently about the intent of the Founders in putting the Second Amendment into the Bill of Rights:
The reason our American ancestors enacted the Second Amendment was to ensure that the federal government could never impair the right of the American people to resist the tyranny of their own government. The idea was that if the federal government became a tyrannical regime, Americans could, if they chose, resist the tyranny with force.
The Second Amendment has nothing to do with deer hunting:
In other words, the right to keep and bear arms has nothing to do with shooting deer. It has everything to do with defending one’s self and others from people who are initiating force against innocent people, such as robbers, murderers, rapists, torturers, and tyrants (and their agents).
After reviewing numerous examples of the U.S. government installing tyrannies abroad with no freedom of citizens to own firearms privately — i.e., Cuba, Iran, Guatemala, Chile, Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, and Bahrain — he made it clear:
If Americans ever give up their guns, they will have to passively accept the types of tyrannical acts that U.S.-supported tyrants abroad have employed, including rape and other perverse sexual acts that U.S.-supported tyrants have committed against people’s wives, daughters, and mothers.
If Americans retain their guns, at least they retain the ability to resist.
As the pressure against the Second Amendment mounts, more and more Americans — including women — are exercising their rights guaranteed by it. Firearm ownership by women has exploded in the last few years. For instance, between 2019 and 2021, half of all firearm purchasers were women, many of them making such a purchase for the very first time.
According to the NSSF, between 2005 and 2020, gun ownership by women leapt by 77 percent! Many of the buyers were women of color, reflecting perhaps the crime-infested neighborhoods where some of them live. Said gun instructor Robin Evans, who has trained nearly 5,000 women on gun safety: “Every single day there’s another woman who thought she would never pick up a gun … they understand what type of world we live in right now.”
Through the training that Evans offers there is an increasing awareness of just how precious is the right to self-defense, a right that only Americans have enshrined in their Constitution.
There are copious examples of how often those who choose not only to own but to carry concealed (CCW) thwart criminals and crazies from wreaking mayhem in public places. According to John Lott’s Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC), more than one-third of all “active shooter incidents” were stopped by a CCW-licensed gun owner. By contrast, the propaganda issued by the FBI puts that number at just 6 percent, hiding the real facts for political purposes.
The fact that Americans are waking up and purchasing the means to defend themselves is also highly annoying to anti-gun, anti-Second Amendment revolutionaries for another reason: More than 40 percent of American households have a firearm present. This makes disarming them a daunting if not impossible task.
At present there are almost 130 million households in America, which means that someone — or many — would have to go door-to-door to more than 50 million households to relieve them, by force if necessary, of their legally purchased and privately owned firearms before their final goal of total disarmament could be achieved.
As the Biden administration ramps up its pressure on private ownership of firearms, the American people are waking up to the threat, and are arming themselves at an ever increasing rate.
