Posted on 11/17/2008 11:49:52 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
From sea to shining sea, the election of Barack Obama has sparked a run on guns by firearm fans who fear stiffer rules are on the way.
During election week, the FBI did 374,510 background checks on prospective gun owners, compared with 251,804 in the same week last year. Last month, the G-men did checks on 285,894 people buying handguns, compared with 223,141 in Oct. 2007. "It is a significant jump," Special Agent Jason Pack said.
Obama has vowed to protect gun ownership rights, but as an Illinois state lawmaker, he supported a ban on all forms of semiautomatic weapons and tighter restrictions on firearms.
Bucking the national trend, local New York gun shops report no major rise in business, and cops have seen no big increase in gun permit applications.
"New Yorkers that have guns often get them from other states, Pennsylvania and Florida in particular," theorized Evan Thies, a gun control advocate and City Council candidate. "New York City has the toughest gun control laws in the nation."
Still, even city gun dealers worry that an Obama presidency will usher in even tougher laws.
"We don't deal in handguns, and personally, I don't know why anybody would want a machine gun," said Guy Davies, executive director of Holland & Holland Sporting Weapons on E. 57th St., where the cheapest gun is a handmade, $60,000 hunting rifle.
"From our point of view, these laws are a step in the wrong direction," said Davies.
Elsewhere in the country, there is evidence the heat-packing public is stocking up.
Gun peddlers in Georgia have staged "Obama Sales." Up in Sarah Palin country, the demand is so big that Alaska gun dealers are running out of ammunition. Even in Obama's home state of Illinois, business has been brisk at rural gun shops.
In Pennsylvania, they aren't just clinging to their guns, as Obama said during the campaign, they're stockpiling them.
"We've easily doubled our normal sales of guns," said Jere Dunkelberger, who owns Dunkelberger's Sports Outfitter in Stroudsburg, Pa. "The biggest sellers are security-style shotguns and handguns. Mostly a combination of self-protection and home protection firearms."
"The increase in firearms sales was predictable," said Lawrence Keane of the National Shooting Sports Foundation. "It's clear from President-elect Obama's voting record, and the promises he continues to make, that gun control will be coming back to the White House."
Well, it IS a guarantee that if you thwart the will of any government official,
eventually agents of the gov’t will show up on your doorstep carrying firearms.
No...they’re really that ignorant.
It's called practice & training.
The silver lining is, of course, that most of those rifles came *here*, either intact or as parts to keep others operational.
I’d love to see the CMP cut loose with all the semi-automatic M-14s that are collecting dust in some government warehouse.
When first I got my C&R FFL in the mid-1990’s, there was quite a variety of foreign arms to collect...Swedish Mausers, Argentine Mausers, Finn-captured Mosin-Nagants, British Enfields, etc. It was hard to choose what to concentrate on.
For the last two years though, I see the same old offerings in the Distributor flyers. There doesn’t seem to be much in the line of new imports.
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