The Wondering Mind

According the NY Times, guns sales were up as the NRA-types fretted that Obama would win and take away everyone’s guns.

“He’s a gun-snatcher,” said Jim Pruett, owner of Jim Pruett’s Guns and Ammo in northwest Houston, which was packed with shoppers on Thursday.

“He wants to take our guns from us and create a socialist society policed by his own police force,” added Mr. Pruett, a former radio personality, of President-elect Barack Obama.

Really? Or do you think he’s just playing his customers for suckers?

David Nelson, a co-owner of Montana Ordnance & Supply in Missoula, Mont., said his buyers were “awake and aware and see a dangerous trend.”

Mr. Nelson said sales at his store had risen about 30 percent since Mr. Obama declared his candidacy. “People are concerned about overreaching legislation from Washington,” he said. “They are educating themselves on the Internet.”

In Colorado, would-be gun buyers set a one-day record last Saturday with the highest number of background check requests in a 24-hour period, according to figures from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation.

“We’re not really sure who is promoting the concept that a change in federal administrations might affect firearms possession rights,” said an agency spokesman, Lance Clem, “but we do know that it’s increased business considerably.”

Well, let me have a guess: I’m thinking gun store owners are promoting the idea for one. How about the NRA for another?

What is clear is that every gun seller — not to mention every advocacy group for gun ownership that depends on dues-paying members — has an incentive to stoke the concern that can prompt a gun sale. Political uncertainty, gun dealers say, is great for business.

“Clinton was the best gun salesman the gun manufacturers ever had,” said Rick Gray, owner of the Accuracy Gun Shop in Las Vegas. “Obama’s going to be right up there with him.”

But no. The NRA are a good sort of organisation that never plays on people’s baser fears.

A National Rifle Association spokesman, Wayne LaPierre, dismissed the notion that the group had any incentive to increase gun sales or membership. “Ridiculous,” Mr. LaPierre said. “I hope President-elect Obama keeps his promises and protects gun rights. If he does that, we’ll be cheering.”

Right, because you really thought he was going to take away people’s guns. And he was really! Thank God the NRA was there to stop him!

Let’s face it: there has been very little that has been done in the U.S. to control gun ownership. What few measures there have been have been limited to such things as a waiting period while a background check is performed and limiting the size of magazines. And many such measures have been repealed, like the limits on magazine size.

This is about unreasonable people acting irrationally. Obama spoke insightfully, if not politically, when he spoke of people clinging to their guns.

But some gun buyers and sellers never forgot, or forgave, Mr. Obama’s widely reported comment in April to a group in San Francisco that some Americans “cling to guns or religion” in times of adversity.

“It was an annoying comment, and it showed there’s a lot more to him,” said Mike Warner, 38, of Las Vegas, who was shopping for a gun there on Thursday.

Mr. Warner said he was an N.R.A. member and an owner of two guns but wanted at least one more.

This is what I don’t get: before Mr. Warner thought Obama would be elected, he had no use for an extra gun, but now he does? For what? And what will that third gun allow him to do that he couldn’t do before with two guns?

The answer is, there is no rational, sensible answer. We can only hope that some of these people will one day stop acting like 5 years throwing a tantrum and act like adults.

James Sykes, a gun collector who was shopping at the Gun Room in Lakewood, Colo., called the rush to buy guns “a lot of hysteria about very little.”

Mr. Sykes, who said he had voted mostly Republican in the past but supported Mr. Obama this year, said that issues like war and the global economic crisis were more pressing for him right now and that he imagined the same was true for Mr. Obama.

“My Second Amendment rights are unquestionably important to me, but so is feeding my family,” he said. “In reality, you won’t be able to afford to buy a gun if your job goes overseas.”

Maybe one day Mr. Warner can grow up and join Mr. Sykes.