Every time President Obama makes the slightest moves toward gun safety, the right does two things. They claim that President Obama /liberals in general /the government is about to take away your guns (not linking to any terrible people, but if inexplicably you need some evidence that they’re out there), and also they buy a lot of guns. At this point the gun buying at the first tiny hint of any minor restrictions is such a cliche, that Wall Street now bets on gun manufacturers (h/t).
But if you think about it for a minute, if you actually thought your guns were about to go away, you wouldn’t spend hundreds of dollars or more on getting guns. It would be like spending money on Budweiser futures in that interim period between when the 18th amendment was passed and when it was implemented.
So either we all know President Obama isn’t taking your guns, or markets don’t work. Despite having lived through the .com bust and the housing bubble, I still don’t think that investors would be putting their money into a business that’s about to go away. That leaves people don’t think Obama is taking their guns.
Given what the president — and what governors including Inslee — have proposed, perhaps people are buying more guns now because they don’t think they’ll meet the criteria to buy them in a bit. That seems more economically rational. If you think he’s going to tighten the background checks in the future, better get your gun while you can. If you’ve got a history of domestic violence or have already set up a trust, you’re maybe hoping to slip in before that.
LMFRAO at the rubes who squander their $7.25/hr. wages from working the graveyard shift on the chicken processing line at gun shops on bayonets and 100-round magazines for their AR-15s and then vote for politicians who take away their food stamps and Medicaid!
I know a few Republicans who are not gun owners, but there always there with the rest of the gun nuts crying about Obama taking guns away.
I think those individuals should be forced to own guns. There should be a bill that every registered Republican needs to prove gun ownership, otherwise they can’t be a registered Republican.
They love to fight for a gun owner’s rights even though they don’t even own a gun (most likely because the don’t like the association of death that goes along with a gun) but they seem to have difficulty getting behind someone’s right to marry same sex. They are completely fucked up minded people.
@2,
I think I know why non-owners get so excited about this.
I think it’s because this is one of the few areas where their political agenda actually delivers for the “Reagan Democrats” (RR’s $7.25/hr rubes).
Pretty much all the other “populist” elements of the Republican agenda are bullshit failures, at least as far as those voters are concerned. All the big tax cuts go to the rich. They traded away cheap gas for bigger Congressional office budgets. The worst extremes of white-male privilege are gone for good from gov employment, housing, voting, and finance. “Smaller” government translates into shuttered public schools and parks and soaring college tuition. The “war on drugs” is now killing more white kids. And oddly enough, Mitt Romney’s sons still have their legs. I can burn a flag in my front yard. Gay couples can order wedding cakes and flowers from the same stores as everyone else. And Laura Bush can’t teach the Bible in a public school.
When it comes to the Archie Bunker voters, guns is all the GOP has ever delivered.
Gun rights = the ability to pay hundreds of dollars for an object used to make small holes in paper targets, tin cans, junked car bodies, and rural traffic signs.