Once upon a time, Barack Obama was America's best gun salesman.  Now Obama's a mere piker.  Combining the Wuhan virus shortages with Black Lives Matter violence has resulted in the greatest gun-buying binge in American history.

Small Arms Analytics & Forecasting ("SAAF") released a study about firearms sales in the United States in 2020.  The numbers are astounding.  Over the last few months, Americans have witnessed mob violence over everything from toilet paper shortages to the artfully created (and completely wrong) perception that police are gunning for black men and that the U.S. is a racist country.  Not being idiots, Americans have responded to this sense of encroaching lawlessness by arming themselves.

The study's results are stunning.  After reviewing raw data from the FBI's National Instant Criminal Background Check System (adjusted for checks that were probably unrelated to firearms), SAAF concluded that, just in June, Americans purchased almost 2.4 million guns, which represents a 145.3% increase over sales in June 2019.  The biggest increase (+177.5%) came from handgun sales, with more than 1.5 million sold.  Long-gun sales were 114.3% greater than last year, with over 690,000 sold.

According to The Washington Free Beacon, Americans have bought approximately 8.3 million firearms since March — "a record-setting place likely to make 2020 the greatest year for gun sales in American history if the trend continues."  No wonder that both brick-and-mortar and online gun and ammunition purveyors are rapidly running out of stock.

While it's great that Americans are arming themselves, they should do so for reasons greater and more profound than concerns about shortages and violence.  With the July 4 weekend around the corner, Mike McDaniel, a veteran, former police officer, English teacher, firearms instructor, and concealed carry licensee, has pulled together the many reasons why we carry guns.  Self-defense is high on the list, but there are other reasons transcending that most basic and appropriate instinct:

* The Constitution is only paper and ink, a statement of principals and intentions. When the will wavers and when some wish to change, ignore or destroy those principals and intentions for imagined good reasons–or bad–only the threat of, and if necessary, the application of the force of arms will serve to preserve liberty.

[snip]

* Thomas Jefferson was right: 

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

That's why we have a Second Amendment, not for hunting, not for self-defense, but always and primarily to deter tyranny, and to allow the common man, the normal Deplorables of the great cultural wasteland of Flyover Country, to resist and overthrow a tyrannical government.  Democrats/Socialists/Communists scream bloody murder when anyone says this.  They should; they're the people about who Jefferson was talking, and the domestic enemies of Normal, law-abiding Americans.

*Circa July 2020, the force of arms may be necessary if we wish to preserve the factual history and great legacy given us by the Founders, including their images on canvas, in bronze and in stone.

*The Second Amendment merely recognizes the unalienable right to keep and bear arms. It does not create the right. Government does not grant the right, nor can government take it away–not that some governments care about that.

*It demonstrates, as nothing else can, that I am the master of my government, not its slave; that elected officials work for me and only with my consent.

*I am a free man and no evidence of that fact is more meaningful and convincing than that I own and carry the firearms I prefer.

*It makes those that would rule me—all of us—through tyranny, soft or hard, red with rage. It couldn't happen to worse people.

*It reminds them that in America, there are lines no rational, honest politician dare cross. They hate that.  They want to draw the lines where they will and whenever its convenient.

*It reminds them that every iota of power they possess is on temporary loan from me and every other American. They hate that too.

*It reminds us all that the whims of the most connected and powerful politician may not prevail over the Bill of Rights as long as it lives and burns brightly in the hearts of patriotic Americans and is not merely fading ink on yellowing paper.

*As politicians try to abolish or emasculate the police, hire private security for themselves with taxpayer money, encourage and support lawless mobs, refuse to enforce the law, and continue to try to disarm the law-abiding, it reminds us we're on our own.  We always have been.

If you read the rest here, I know you'll take a moment to say a prayer of thanks for the Founders' wisdom in making firearms a fundamental and inalienable right.