According to the FBI, more than two million gun-purchase background checks were conducted in April, 400,000 more than in April a year ago. In fact, every month since last May, background checks have set new records, putting 2016 on track to beat 2015 for the number of checks conducted by the National Instate Criminal Background Check System (NICS).
In its report the FBI noted that there is no direct one-to-one correlation between background checks and gun sales, but it’s close. Especially if one tracks the performance of stocks of Sturm Ruger & Co. and Smith & Wesson in the last 12 months. They are up 39 percent and 56 percent respectively, and their stocks’ performance is likely to continue as long as the threat to the Second Amendment continues.
In the past Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democrat Party’s nominee for president in November, has tried to soften or backtrack on her position on gun controls. But no longer. They are now the centerpiece of her campaign to capture the White House.
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She was never more blatant than when she announced last month that she would take on the “gun lobby” from her “very first day in office,” while reiterating many of her previous intentions to restrict further Americans’ Second Amendment-protected rights. Many of them remain couched in terms that appear on the surface as reasonable, including concerns about people with mental health issues or a history of stalking. Said Jennifer Baker, the point person following Clinton’s campaign for the National Rifle Association (NRA), “[Clinton] lies about the issue in a way to make it seem reasonable, to really advance a radical gun-control agenda.”
Perhaps the most egregious of those lies is Clinton’s continued statement that 90 people a day, or 33,000 people a year “die from gun violence in our country.” But a careful look — avoided by the national coronation media — reveals that though the real number of gun-related deaths was, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), 32,888 in 2013, the latest year for which information is available, only 11,208 died in homicides, while most of the rest were suicides. But 33,000 sounds better, the media continues to report it as true, and so the lie becomes truth.
Clinton is not shy about her plans once in the White House. On October 5 she told her supporters, “I will push hard to get more sensible restraints.… We must expand background checks for gun shows and online sales, and close the current loophole that negates the need for a background check after a 3-day waiting period [often characterized by her as the “Charleston Loophole”]. I will also repeal legislation that shields gun manufacturers, distributors and dealers from liability suits.”
And she wants to change, by executive order, the definition of “dealers” to anyone who sells a “quantity” of guns. Depending on her definition, that could include anyone who sells just one firearm in a year, bringing the full weight of the Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agency (the ATF) to bear on every gun “dealer” in the country. There would be fees, unannounced visits, and sanctions for violating any of its various and increasingly complicated rules. And of course, every such dealer would be on the ATF’s national registry for life.
In 2014, Clinton made clear her target: every gun owner in the country. The Wall Street Journal reported in May of that year that Clinton said, “We’ve got to rein in what has become an almost article of faith that anybody can have a gun anywhere, anytime. And [in a burst of elitism] I don’t believe that is in the best interests of the vast majority of people.”
She wants to reinstate her husband’s “assault weapons ban” because, since that ban expired in 2004, “we now have, once again, police deaths going up around the country, and in large measure because bad guys now have assault weapons again.”
She wants to expand the definition of a domestic abuser so that he/she is prohibited from buying or owning a firearm by adding those names to the NCIS database.
Potential gun buyers, and those adding to their existing caches, have also noted that the Veterans Administration has already started adding names of those with “mental disabilities” to that database. The Social Security Administration, singing off the same sheet of music, just announced similar rules, which would include anyone on disability who has a “mental disorder” listing on his records, whose checks go to a third party because he cannot handle his own finances.
This is opposed by the NRA who responded, “Financial acumen, even if related to an underlying issue … has no necessary relationship to a propensity for violence, and it’s not a sufficient basis to strip persons of their inalienable right to self-defense.” Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) has opposed the proposed Social Security rule for the same reason: “It appears that, just like the VA, SSA’s regulatory action will not require the government to first prove that the individual is a danger to self or others.”
Clinton has also admitted that Australian-style gun confiscation “is worth considering” in her war against guns and gun ownership in the United States, and has told donors that the Supreme Court got it “wrong” about the Second Amendment in its recent decisions, that the right to keep and bear arms is not an individual right. Implied of course is that, given the opportunity, she will nominate as many Supreme Court justices as time will give her in support of that position.
So Americans are buying guns. The perception that the flow of potential terrorists pouring through the country’s porous borders might be armed and dangerous with plans to wreak havoc here, as they have abroad, only adds to the concerns of Americans waking up to the threat that they will be unable to defend themselves. As noted by Alan Gottlieb of the Second Amendment Foundation:
These record-setting firearm sales will continue all the way to Election Day. If Hillary Clinton wins, firearm sales will really go through the roof. Gun owners and people concerned about personal security have lost trust in the political class to protect their rights.
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].
