Barack Obama: NRA’s Man of the Year
Okay, not officially. But I think secretly they’d love to hand him the title. Does he deserve it?
Well, consider this: During the first year of his tenure as president Americans bought a record 14 million+ guns.
That’s more than 21 of the world’s standing armies – combined.
Shocked? So was I when one of the members of my Repairman Jack website’s forum started a thread that broke the news. The site is frequented by liberals, conservatives, libertarians, anarchists, and a mixed group lovingly known as “the gunnies.”
So I wasn’t surprised by the thread itself, but the data it contained was an eye-opener: 14 million guns. The article compared that to the numbers of the world’s standing armies:
Countries By Number Of Troops: Source Wikipedia
People’s Republic of China 2,255,000 United States 1,473,900 India 1,414,000 North Korea 1,106,000 Russia 1,037,000 Pakistan 619,000 South Korea 687,000 Iran 545,000 Turkey 514,850 Vietnam 484,000 Egypt 450,000 Myanmar 428,250 Indonesia 400,000 Brazil 369,000 Thailand 306,600 Syria 296,000 Republic of China 290,000 Colombia 285,554 Germany 284,500 Iraq 273,618 Sri Lanka 266,700 13,785,972
The post-election surge in gun sales was big news back in late ‘08 and early ‘09, but I had no idea it had continued through the entire year. The initial surge was understandable: Democrats have a supermajority, many Democrats hate the 2nd Amendment, so you’d better buy a gun now or you may never have the chance. Rumors of a $3 tax per round of ammo were in the air. (Perhaps that explains the reported ammo shortage.)
The number is based on NCIS background checks (check the multi-year chart here), so the number of weapons purchased may be higher due to multiple purchases per check.
And let’s not forget, NCIS logs only legal gun sales.
Does any of this really mean anything? The chart shows that the number of background checks holds in a steady range of 8.5 to 9 million per year from 1998 through 2005. Then an 11% jump in ‘06, a 12% jump in 2007, followed by a 13% jump in 2008. So the 10% increase in ‘09 sales is not terribly dramatic, until you realize that it represents a 56% increase over the number of guns sold in 2005.
We’ve been called a gun-crazy society. If that’s so, with all these extra guns we must be killing each other off at an alarming rate. I mean, it’s the logical assumption. But the facts don’t bear that out. According to the FBI’s statistics, crime is down across the board. Again.
They say an armed society is a polite society, but it’s specious logic to attribute the fall in crime to the increase in weapon ownership. There’s certainly no way, however, that you can say more guns equals more crime.
So why the steady upsurge in gun sales the last 4 years? Can’t be Obama. Yes, a case can be made that his election was responsible for the all-time record sales in November and December of ‘08, but he wasn’t on the radar in 2006 when the uptrend began.
Something else is going on. I don’t pretend to know what. Maybe someone can clue me in. For now, consider this a heads up.
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I’ve believed for a while now that the left vs right ideological split on guns is largely an artifice; that the real splits are cultural- male vs female, rural vs urban. Perhaps the paradigms we use to look at guns in American society are flawed. Most law abiding gun owners and users, like myself, aren’t NRA members, and perhaps that’s because the NRA is a citadel of arch-conservative politics. Perhaps the very existance of the NRA, in it’s current form, makes firearms issues more ideological than they really are.
(This may be a bit off-point, but the guns that scare me are, as far as I know, not a gun crime problem at all. Those damn .50 cal sniper rifles- take out a man-size target at a measured mile, for as little as $1250.00- no one ever has robbed a convenience store with one, but you just know that someday, some maniac will run amok with one.)
I don’t belong to NRA either. I find myself more into the aesthetics of hand guns. (Gun porn?) A fine weapon is a thing of beauty. The fact that it spits hot lead is merely a lagniappe.
In response to another comment. See in context »From the research I did for my book on women and guns, the above comment is accurate. Gun ownership crosses state, gender, race, education and income lines. I was recently interviewed on this subject and (playfully) asked if all gun-owners are Republican — as the media might have some believe. Of course not. But moderates and Democrats who also own firearms don’t end up on the news — where only crazy folks do like Amy Bishop.
I was perhaps a bit unfair to you earlier, in replying to a comment you made on another thread. Apologies!- (though I’m still unconvinced by your math.)
In response to another comment. See in context »Blown Away” looks interesting, I’ll check it out.
Paul, in the aftermath of conservative media linking Dr. Amy Bishop’s murder of her University of Alabama-Huntsville colleagues to unfounded allegations that she is a radical socialist, all I can say to conservatives is thank you for protecting my right to bear arms.
I’m embarrassed. I had to look up Amy Bishop. Of course I’d heard of the shootings but I had no idea of the shooter’s name. (Too busy tracking gun sales.) Sounds like a real nutcase.
In response to another comment. See in context »Too bad her fellow professors hadn’t been carrying. Some of them would be alive now.
In response to another comment. See in context »Please don’t even tell me that you just made a comment saying that teachers should carry guns onto college campuses to protect themselves.
In response to another comment. See in context »Too bad her fellow professors hadn’t been carrying. Some of them would be alive now.
________
But not those who were accidentally shot by fellow professors grabbing their sidearms and loosing a few rounds in her direction.
Bishop was a serious killer who obtained her weapon secretly and who spent time at the range before she walked into the meeting. The carnage involved in an attempted exchange of fire might have been more than the three (so far) but we will never find out.
I refer you to Colin Ferguson and the LIRR murders.
In response to another comment. See in context »This is a point re defensive firearms use- pistolcraft- that is often made by anti-gun people; that any defensive firearms use by a law-abiding citizen will necessarily be surprised, incompetent, ineffectual, and more a hazard to bystanders than to the aggressor, or even more so than the agressor. This is true only if the armed citizen is foolish enough to assume that the gun is some sort of magic protective charm that requires no training. However, most gun owners aren’t that foolish; the weight and heft of a gun is sobering, and engenders a certain seriousness of mind. Fact is, if one wants a CCL, one must complete several hours of classroom and range training; further, most people who want a CCL already have some familiarity with firearms, and are not neophytes in their use. Anyone who’s attended Gunsite or Thunder Ranch is better trained than most Cops. So, anyway donner, I respectfully dismiss your point: I see it, but knowing guns, and gun people, I just don’t buy it.
That being said, I’m not convinced you’re entirely wrong. The thing about CCLs is that most of the people who have them don’t pack on anything like a regular basis; they just want the option. The first rule of gunfighting is to have a gun, and who’s going to pack for a faculty meeting? Even armed, a sudden, close-range ambush attack is the worst-case scenario- we saw recently how four police officers, armed with high-capacity autoloaders, and protected by body armor, were unable to save their own lives in the same kind of surprise attack- even though one of them was able to wound the attacker, and none of them harmed a bystander.
In response to another comment. See in context »Here in Los Angeles I live near the armed and polite societies of Rampart, Compton, East LA and South Central. It is a fairly dangerous place to visit even more than cities in Mexico where guns are banned. At least we can say that no one can dispute the jobs and economic recovery Obama has stimulated in this portion of the economy.
“An armed society is a polite society” should be revised to “Certain armed societies are polite”. Unfortunately certain cultural and socioeconomic traits preclude politeness even when the other party is armed.
I.E. it’s much harder to apply this philosophy when there is very little within the society to lose.
In response to another comment. See in context »Why did gun ownership increase after the election of the first African-American president? Probably for the same reason that membership in white nationalist organizations like the KKK surged after Obama’s election. Because there are a lot sick twisted white people who fear and hate people who aren’t as white as them. Whites are more likely to own firearms than people of other races. In the U.S., the highest rate of gun ownership is in Wyoming (96% white). The lowest is in Washington D.C., (36% white). There is no big mystery here, unless one wants to pretend that racism is no longer serious problem in this country. I’d be willing to bet that gun sales to African-Americans haven’t surged under Obama.
Phillip Crawford: Look a few posts up at the comment about South Central LA, East LA, Rampart, and Compton. These are NOT white-dominated areas.
And if you lived in Washington DC you would know that DC banned guns for a number of years until the supreme court overturned the law. Now they are technically legal but no one owns them or reports them because they are either illegal or feared to be illegal again and you’re trying to avoid having the gun taken away at the next political wind shift.
Take a drive in a decent car through South East DC sometime. Better yet, take a drive with a white friend in a nice car dressed like a law-abiding citizen. The guns saturate predominantly black areas of DC, they just aren’t registered. Moreover, blacks go on killing sprees there all the time, WPGC and mayor Fenty have been out in force many times holding community meetings and begging for the killing sprees to stop in DC.
AS LONG AS YOU TOUCHED ON THE RACISM TOPIC, REMEMBER OBAMA IS HALF WHITE!!!
In response to another comment. See in context »Paul, I feel exactly the same way about firearms. They are things of beauty. And I love how it feels to shoot one. Though I don’t hunt. I don’t own one as of yet, but my dad has several, and is a member of the NRA. That’s one organization I can’t get behind, no matter how much I believe in the second amendment.
I’m a Canadian that glowed with pride when Moore’s “Columbine” movie held us up as such paragons. And while my views on guns have evolved since then, I do think that the “crime has gone down” argument is like the “Americans have stopped getting fatter” issue: guns don’t affect crime any more because they just can’t: 20,000 gun deaths per year (to Canada’s 120 or so) simply can’t get worse.
However, in discussing “Columbine” with a friend who hails originally from Moscow and grew up under the last years of Communism, I tried to explain to him why Americans love them so. I gave him the matter-of-principle argument I’d heard from some NRA members in a forum, about like this:
“Their declaration of independence specifies that it is the right of the people to alter or abolish any government that becomes destructive of their rights. Further, that ‘it is their right, it is their duty’. And they are unable to discharge that duty if they aren’t capable of taking over the government at any time. In other countries, it is illegal for the government to become a tyranny, but the people are dependent on the army to enforce that. In America, the private gun ownership exceeds the power of even THEIR army: I mean, 50 MILLION guns out there – the US army itself would have no chance. In America, tyranny is literally, physically, militarily, impossible.”
I was kind of smirking as I said this – I mean, the scenario is ridiculous. I hadn’t noticed that his eyes had become as wide as saucers. I thought for a moment I saw tears forming.
He said, in a hushed voice with no hint of irony, “God Bless America”.
Maybe you have to grow up under a dictatorship to feel that way. The notion that dictatorship was impossible had never entered his mind before. It was a revelation to him.
I still wouldn’t swap Canadian gun ownership rates for Americans. The accidents alone are a yearly tragedy. But I don’t disrespect those who are 2nd amendment fanatics. (I’m a 1st amendment fanatic myself.)
I don’t know how this figures into things but I’m a pretty solid Obama supporter who accounts for 6 those sales. I’m sure there will be more.
I never owned a gun before but started thinking about it after the economic crash last year. I didn’t get around to it until the juxtaposition of wingnut Tea Parties with the occasional loony with an assault rifle here and the sight of populist religious fascists shooting down protestors in Iran got stuck in my mind. It’s not that I expect wingnuts to get that way here but I think its foolish to assume they won’t. And along the way I found that I like guns to.