Hey, looks like even ill-informed lockstep liberals — and Maryland, my home state, is thick with them — can be awakened from their intellectual and political stupor from time to time:
I took a ride up to Frederick, Maryland this weekend to meet a friend at the Fairgrounds for the gun show. What we found was similar to what gun shows and gun dealers are experiencing across the nation: lines and limited supplies.
AR15’s were scarce as were most guns. Ammunition was limited and prices were inflated. The lines were long to get in and the tables were packed.
Gun enthusiasts were buying whatever ammo was available. Magazines were flying out of dealers’ hands.
I spoke to a few gun owners at the show who voiced the same concerns I’ve been reading and hearing for weeks: “I need to stock up now before Obama makes it illegal.”
Since the Newtown school shooting, gun owners have been buying semi-automatic rifles (if they can find them) and high capacity magazines over fears that the Obama administration will soon make them illegal.
Dianne Feinstein plans to introduce legislation on January 22 to do just that. The bill seeks “to stop the sale, transfer, importation and manufacturing of military-style assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition feeding devices.”
My advice, as always is to get ’em before they’re gone.
Between higher health care premiums, smaller paychecks, and the nearly non-stop attack on personal liberties, I get the feeling we’re going to be seeing a lot of buyer’s remorse here soon. But that’s an argument for a different day, and besides, it ends with ego and doubling down, so best not to broach it here.
Instead, tell me: what’s more disturbing here, the actual attempt to neuter a fundamental right over Dianne Feinstein’s aesthetic sensibilities, or the near foregone conclusion that We the People will be virtually powerless to stop it — especially because the same Court who told us that what was explicitly not a tax becomes a tax for purposes of upholding a law pushed through by a single party against the popular will can’t be trusted to tell lawmakers that no, they can’t arm the police with “military-style” weapons and then insist on keeping private citizens restricted to black powder rifles and revolvers without creating the conditions for a police state?
And what does that say about what our government — of, by, and for the people — has become?
About a week back I went to the Tanner Gun Show here in Colorado (I didn’t buy anything; I was there looking into getting a custom shoulder rig made for a pistol that I hope one day to find at the bottom of the nearby lake into which it plummeted during my skiff accident), and I was told by some of the reps there that it was the single largest gun show in Colorado history. Lines out the door snaked through and around the parking lots. And once you got in, the market realities hit you smack in the face.
As an anecdote, I found a single dealer who had two 20-round SCAR-17 magazines protected on a center table. The cost? $200. Each. Or ten dollars per cartridge position. Just to give you an idea of the mark-up, they retail for about $35 each.
Too, every weapon I saw in the AR-15 platform was marked up a good 40%, often more.
It’s a shame having to watch a free people scramble to gather supplies before their freedoms are forcibly taken away. In fact, it’s surreal.
And yet, so perfectly emblematic I almost want to memorialize the decline and fall with a tasteful set of ceramic dinner plates bearing the picture of plucked bald eagle on a spit, with a legend that reads, “it was cool while it lasted, though, amiright?”
I saw that one coming just in time to get in a good stock of 30 round PMags for my AR at $12.50 apiece…
Tulip bulbs, eh?
Posted in another thread a bit ago.
Gun control, the Obama methods of putting the Left’s doctrine into effect. BAMN hits the gun control road.
What I expect the “crony capitalism” will be, is working a further limitation on who may sell firearms. Before GCA-68, except for full auto weapons, anyone could sell to anyone anywhere as long as State laws were not broken. GCA-68 meant sales across State lines were limited to those persons who had the time and money to obtain an FFL. Over the years the ATF made having an FFL more and more of a burden.
The Clinton Administration made it that only commercial businesses could have FFLs. Taking away thousands of persons through which a sale could be made. What Obama will likely do is try to further restrict who can sell to only large retailers like Walmart and Dicks who can then be pressured later as to what and to whom they can sell firearms.
Cut off the suppliers and then you may have the right to “keep and bear” but no way to actually do so.
The money quote from the above-mentioned article:
You know, “Stroke of the pen, law of the land. Kinda cool” and all that…
Funny how the media doesn’t seem to care a about “price-gouging” in this instance. Couldn’t be because they finally figured out how supply and demand work in a free market, could it?
Didn’t think so either.
Stop assaulting us with your heteronormative, patriarchical eurocentric logic, you imperialist oppressor you!
This is about FEELINGS!
I smell Black Market, boys.
You heard it here first.
If what geoffb predicts actually happens (a huge restriction on who can sell guns), you will see a lot of underground gun manufacturers appear, as well as a thriving black market in used guns.
Ask a thug near you, cranky. They’re already out there.
“black market”
And motive to theft.
Okay, true, they are pretty easy to get. But it won’t just be thugs buying them any more.
cranky-d:
What I’m predicting is an increased restriction on who can sell firearms. We already have gone through at least three increases, two within my adult lifetime. The NFA of 1934 was the first, GCA 1968 was the second, the Clinton administrations restrictions the third.
I could add another which was the Hughes amendment to the Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986 which closed the registry for newly manufactured fully automatic firearms causing their number to diminish and price to vastly increase.
If they get the addition of semi-auto firearms to the NFA then the same method, even without the ban of transfers to heirs that is part of the Feinstein bill, could be used to make these firearms first, too pricey for most, and second a diminishing number available over the course of time.
Right now it’s possible to create a corporation and therefore have a firearms license fairly easily. One of the guns I lost in a tragic accident was a stripped lower purchased from a guy in a local cowtown who had a machine shop. Changing it so only big-box retailers could sell guns would be a huge restriction. So, I don’t think I mischaracterized your prediction.
I agree it’s huge.
But we have had huge before. In 1967 I could mail a check to a company in, say, Texas for a rifle and they would ship it to me. After ’68 I had to find someone local with an FFL who would make the transfer or comply with the paperwork and fees of the BATF to get an FFL for myself.
This restriction alone meant that you no longer really owned a firearm. Ownership meaning that if I own something I can sell it, destroy it, give it away, without having to get any one’s permission to do so except for the person who is buying. As time has gone on we have had our “ownership” of firearms grow fainter and fainter, purposefully so.
*I get the feeling we’re going to be seeing a lot of buyer’s remorse here soon*
The people that voted for President Nine Iron are too stupid to experience buyer’s remorse.
Buyer’s remorse only occurs when it dawns on you that you paid too much for something you don’t need. My bigger fear is that all these folks will look back and think, “You remember how much you yelled at me for spending all that money on a rifle? You don’t seem so mad now!”
As for myself, I’m investing in SCUBA gear, so that I can comb our 10,000 lakes and pull out all the cool gear that was lost in tragic boating/ice fishing accidents…
Speaking of investing, I lucked out at the local sporting goods store and stumbled into a small quantity of barter commodities.
Sadly, I wasn’t able to augment my small portfolio as much as I would have liked.
I did not consider that aspect. Your point is well-considered, and I agree.
I did NOT lose anything in Lake Calhoun, okay? Definitely not there.
The lake I lived on for 10 years is what can be called bottomless. The marl-mud bottom at 40 feet just gets thicker as you go down. Lose something there and no one is going to recover it even with scuba.
electro magnets
Apparently when I lost my ammo in my pond the grass carp turned out to be brass carp.
Their population has been exploding since then.