April Was 57th Month in a Row With More than 1 Million Firearm Purchases

The National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) reported on Tuesday that more than one million firearms were purchased by Americans in April, marking the 57th consecutive month in which more than a million firearms were purchased by the citizenry.

Said Mark Olive, NSSF’s managing director for public affairs:

Over 1.2 million Americans showed President Biden exactly where they are when it comes to his promises of increased gun control should he be elected for another term.

President Biden has used every tool at his disposal to attack the firearm industry, from publishing Constitutionally dubious and overreaching administrative rules that bypass Congress to create criminal law, to weaponizing the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security to throttle firearm and ammunition manufacturers and exporters.

Americans reject these misdirected and politically motivated maneuvers to infringe on their Second Amendment freedoms and punish the industry that makes it possible to exercise the rights to keep and bear arms. By the millions, for 57 months straight, Americans choose to lawfully purchase, keep and use the firearms of their choosing.

What’s remarkable is that the data used by NSSF, the NICS database that tracks background checks, is incomplete. Many states still don’t require background checks for private transfers, and the black market in used or stolen guns is likely more active than ever as the government ramps up its attack on legal ownership.

Two years ago it was revealed that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) had collected and then stored on its computer network nearly a billion firearms purchase records. These records contain pertinent and personal information on private buyers of firearms, so the ATF knows where the guns are and who owns them.

The ATF is now pushing credit-card companies to track and report on purchasers using a credit card to make a firearm or ammunition purchase. This is ostensibly to help reduce gun violence.

John Lott of the Crime Prevention Research Center pointed out the absurdity of the idea that tracking firearms purchases through credit-card usage will help reducing gun violence:

Given that gun buyers who use credit cards have passed background checks, what “suspicious” activities could credit card companies possibly look for? Is buying two or three guns suspicious? The majority of mass public shooters since 1998 only used one gun, and virtually all the rest use two guns.

Is it suspicious to buy AR-15s, America’s most popular rifle? Even the Associated Press now recognizes that AR-15s aren’t “weapons of war” and are no different from other hunting rifles.

Gun control activists argue that a gun registry could help to solve crime. In theory, guns left at a crime scene can be traced back to the perpetrator. But in real life, a firearm is usually left at the scene of a crime only when the gunman has been seriously injured or killed.

In that case, with the criminal and weapon present at the scene, police can solve the crime even without registration.

Also, guns used in crimes are rarely registered. In the exceedingly unusual instances that they are, they aren’t registered to the person who committed the crime.

Firearms registration doesn’t help solve crimes, according to Lott:

Police in jurisdictions from Hawaii to Washington, DC have used registration for decades but can’t point to any crimes that this has enabled them to solve. Even entire countries such as Canada haven’t had success.

At least two states tried registration of firearms under the illusion that such a registry would help law enforcement solve gun violence crimes. Said Lott:

New York and Maryland spent tens of millions of dollars creating a database on new guns sold in the past 15 years, even recording the ballistic fingerprint of each gun. But these states eventually abolished their systems because they never solved a single crime.

Lott then asks the ultimate question:

If registration doesn’t solve gun crime, why is it pushed so hard?

Countries such as Canada, the U.K., and Australia used registration to ban and confiscate guns — and they aren’t alone.

California, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., have also used registration to learn who owned different types of guns before enacting a firearms ban.

It’s comforting to assume that the savvy firearms buyer in the United States now knows what the agenda of the Left is when it comes to the Second Amendment, and that as a result, more and more of them won’t be using credit cards to make their purchases.