It Bears Repeating

I was stunned, stunned at the lack of available firearms at the local retailers this week.  I've bee buying guns, off and on, for most of my life, and I've never seen the shelves this bare.  I'm not the only one who noticed.

If soaring gun sales are a guide, millions of Americans are with the McCloskeys. This week the FBI announced a record 3.9 million background checks for June, the highest monthly total since the FBI began keeping the statistic in 1998. Adjusting to reflect checks only for gun purchases, the National Shooting Sports Foundation says this works out to 2.2 million, a 136% increase over June 2019. NSSF spokesman Mark Oliva says about 40% of these checks are for first-time gun buyers.

This correlates with what my local merchant told me.  People who, ninety days ago were anti-gun, or ambivalent,  are buying guns in unheard of numbers.  It's the first-time gun buyer who is driving the shortage.  Most of the rest of us have our guns.

We should remember on this Independence Day weekend, that we are  Americans, slow to wrath, but generally self-sufficient.  If it appears that society is going through an upheaval, then we take our safety into our own hands.  Not the law, which applies to everyone, but our own safety.

This is a warning to the Defund the Police movement about unintended consequences. The more progressives push policies that mean cops won’t be around when people need them, the more they are inviting Americans to exercise their Second Amendment rights to protect themselves.

As Instapundit often says, "The police aren’t there to protect the public from criminals, they’re there to protect criminals from the public."

That is a powerful distinction, and those who would do us harm should remember it.