Americans have more access to firearms than anywhere else in the world. Even in a heavily gun-controlled state like California, guns are easier to get than in most other countries, and that's a great thing.
What makes it greater is that we have Black Friday, and this year, gun sales showed Americans still love the Second Amendment.
Sales of firearms on Black Friday were surprisingly strong, with some retailers reporting their best post-Thanksgiving sales day since the 2020 COVID-19 crisis.
“This was our best Black Friday sale since COVID. Full stop,” said Justin Anderson, the marketing manager at Hyatt Guns in Charlotte, North Carolina, one of the nation’s biggest firearms stores.
The FBI reported robust requests for gun sales background checks, and November’s overall numbers are expected again to top over 1 million sold, continuing an unbroken five-year trend.
The National Shooting Sports Foundation, the industry trade group that tracks the sales numbers, said that the FBI recorded 169,906 sales background checks on Friday and 613,380 during the week.
While sales overall were down 9%, NSSF said that the healthy numbers showed a continued appetite for protection.
“The background checks reported by the FBI are in keeping with the trends NSSF has seen throughout the year. While the overall trends are still coming off the peaks experienced in recent years, firearm sales remain consistently strong, with over a million per month for more than five years running,” said Joe Bartozzi, NSSF’s president and CEO.
There was a possibility that gun sales would be lower considering Trump's electoral victory. People buy more guns when they think their gun rights are in peril, and with Trump winning, that's just not the case.
Now, if we consider that in light of these sales, I can't help but wonder just how much higher they might have been if people were freaking about a Kamala Harris presidency.
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After all, her anti-gun views made Joe Biden look like a shoo-in for the next president of the NRA were it not for his extreme pro-Second Amendment views.
Considering his track record, that's saying something.
Unfortunately, we need to keep these numbers in some perspective. Yes, these are good numbers and they're good for the firearm industry. What we don't know is how good they are for gun rights as a whole.
See, new gun owners are fairly likely to become new gun voters. However, we don't know how many of these represent new firearm sales and how many are people buying their 57th gun or whatever.
Either is fine, but new gun owners may well signal a shift in the public perception of the Second Amendment. It means new people are joining the ranks of gun owners, and may well become more and more pro-gun as time goes on, meaning gun control will be even less popular and less likely to serve as a winning issue for anyone. Yet we don't know if that's what's happening.
But what we do know is that Americans, by and large, still love their guns and that's bad news for anti-gun Democrats, which is just about all of them. I'd cry for them except I'm too busy laughing at their misfortune.
