Americans have cut back on buying cars, furniture and clothes in a tough economy, but there’s one consumer item that’s still enjoying healthy sales: guns. Purchases of firearms and ammunition have risen 8 to 10 percent this year, according to state and federal data.
Several variables drive sales, but many dealers, buyers and experts attribute the increase in part to concerns about the economy and fears that if Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois wins the presidency, he will join with fellow Democrats in Congress to enact new gun controls.
If only conservatives cared as much about other amendments to the U.S. Constitution as they do about the Second Amendment, this country might be getting somewhere. At least we know some necessities are recession-proof. Besides, didn’t the U.S. Supreme Court just recently give a big boost to gun owners when they struck down a ban on guns in DC? Maybe Obama wasn’t that far off after all when he suggested that conservatives are bitter and cling to their guns (or get new ones, apparently).
J.R., Mark Steyn recently wrote an excellent observation regarding the liberal agenda and why conservatives fear “the change” B.O. has promised:
“Point Of No Return (Mark Steyn: America Flirts With Adopting Eurosocialism Alert)
National Review ^ | 10/25/2008 | Mark Steyn
Posted on Saturday, October 25, 2008 8:55:34 AM by goldstategop
Across the electric wires, the hum is ceaseless: Give it up, loser. Don’t go down with the ship when it’s swept away
by the Obama tsunami. According to newspaper reports, polls show that most people believe newspaper reports
claiming that most people believe polls showing that most people have read newspaper reports agreeing that polls
show he’s going to win.
In the words of Publishers’ Clearing House, he may already have won! The battleground states have all turned
blue, the reddest of red states are rapidly purpling. Don’t you know, little fool? You never can win. Use your
mentality, wake up to reality. Why be the last right-wing pundit to sign up with Small-Government Conservatives
For The Liberal Supermajority? We still need pages for the coronation, and there’s a pair of velvet knickerbockers
with your name on it.
Yes, technically, this is still a two-party state, but one of the parties is like Elton John’s post-Oscar bash and the
other is a church social in Wasilla. As David Sedaris put it in The New Yorker:
“I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks
it beside my seat. ‘Can I interest you in the chicken?’ she asks. ‘Or would you prefer the platter of s—t with bits of
broken glass in it?’
“To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.â€
Well, to be honest, I’ve never much cared for chicken.
McCain vs Obama is not the choice many of us would have liked in an ideal world. But then it’s not an “ideal worldâ€,
and the belief that it can be made so is one of the things that separates those who think Obama will “heal the
planet†and those of us who support McCain faute de mieux. I agree with Thomas Sowell that an Obama-Pelosi
supermajority will mark what he calls “a point of no returnâ€. It would not be, as some naysayers scoff, “Jimmy
Carter’s second termâ€, but something far more transformative. The new president would front the fourth great
wave of liberal annexation — the first being FDR’s New Deal, the second LBJ’s Great Society, and the third the
incremental but remorseless cultural advance when Reagan conservatives began winning victories at the ballot box
and liberals turned their attention to the other levers of the society, from grade school up. The terrorist educator
William Ayers, Obama’s patron in Chicago, is an exemplar of the last model: forty years ago, he was in favor of
blowing up public buildings; then he figured out it was easier to get inside and undermine them from within.
All three liberal waves have transformed American expectations of the state. The spirit of the age is: Ask not what
your country can do for you, demand it. Why can’t the government sort out my health care? Why can’t they pick up
my mortgage?
In his first inaugural address, Calvin Coolidge said: “I favor the policy of economy, not because I wish to save
money, but because I wish to save people.†That’s true in a more profound sense than he could have foreseen. In
Europe, lavish social-democratic government has transformed citizens into eternal wards of the nanny state: the
bureaucracy’s assumption of every adult responsibility has severed Continentals from the most basic survival
impulse, to the point where unaffordable entitlements on shriveled birth rates have put a question mark over some
of the oldest nation states on earth. A vote for an Obama-Pelosi-Barney Frank-ACORN supermajority is a vote for a
Europeanized domestic policy that is, as the eco-types like to say, “unsustainableâ€.
More to the point, the only reason why Belgium has gotten away with being Belgium and Sweden Sweden and
Germany Germany this long is because America’s America. The soft comfortable cocoon in which western Europe
has dozed this last half-century is girded by cold hard American power. What happens when the last serious
western nation votes for the same soothing beguiling siren song as its enervated allies?
“People of the world,†declared Senator Obama sonorously at his self-worship service in Germany, “look at Berlin,
where a wall came down, a continent came together, and history proved that there is no challenge too great for a
world that stands as one.â€
No, sorry. History proved no such thing. In the Cold War, the world did not stand as one. One half of Europe was a
prison, and in the other half far too many people — the Barack Obamas of the day — were happy to go along with
that division in perpetuity. And the wall came down not because “the world stood as one†but because a few
courageous people stood against the conventional wisdom of the day. Had Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan
been like Helmut Schmidt and Francois Mitterand and Pierre Trudeau and Jimmy Carter, the Soviet empire
(notwithstanding its own incompetence) would have survived and the wall would still be standing. Senator
Obama’s feeble passivity will get you a big round of applause precisely because it’s the easy option: Do nothing but
hold hands and sing the easy listening anthems of one-worldism, and the planet will heal.
To govern is to choose. And sometimes the choices are tough ones. When has Barack Obama chosen to take a
stand? When he got along to get along with the Chicago machine? When he sat for 20 years in the pews of an ugly
neo-segregationist race-baiting grievance-monger? When he voted to deny the surviving “fetuses†of botched
abortions medical treatment? When in his short time in national politics he racked up the most liberal – ie, the most
doctrinaire, the most orthodox, the most reflex — voting record in the Senate? Or when, on those many occasions
the questions got complex and required a choice, he dodged it and voted merely “present�
The world rarely stands as one. You can, as Reagan and Thatcher did, stand up. Or, like Obama voting “presentâ€,
you can stand down.
Nobody denies that, in promoting himself from “community organizer†to the world’s President-designate in nothing
flat, he has shown an amazing and impressively ruthless single-mindedness. But the path of personal glory has
been, in terms of policy and philosophy, the path of least resistance.
Peggy Noonan thinks a President Obama will be like the dog who chases the car and finally catches it: Now what? I
think Obama will be content to be King Barack the Benign, Spreader of Wealth and Healer of Planets. His rise is, in
many ways, testament to the persistence of the monarchical urge even in a two-century old republic. So the “Now
what?†questions will be answered by others, beginning with the liberal supermajority in Congress. And as he has
done all his life he will take the path of least resistance. An Obama Administration will pitch America toward EU
domestic policy and UN foreign policy. Thomas Sowell is right: It would be a “point of no returnâ€, the most explicit
repudiation of the animating principles of America. For a vigilant republic of limited government and self-reliant
citizens, it would be a Declaration of Dependence.
If a majority of Americans want that, we holdouts must respect their choice. But, if you don’t want it, vote
accordingly.”
Deadmessenger,
Your arguments would be more convincing if the Republican Party didn’t mimic the Democratic Party in so many respects.
The Republican Party has presided over the largest expansion of the federal government, both in terms of employees and spending in our history. They have consistently practiced “liberal” spending practices by running up record deficits and doubled the federal debt.
While accusing Obama of socialism, they supported nationalizing the banks and added a prescription drug benefit to Medicare. Wasn’t it John McCain that advocated for the federal government spending $300 billion to buy people’s mortgages? The article you cite cherry picks facts to arrive at very dubious conclusions and I find it very hard to take seriously.
The Republican Party you remember is long dead and George W. Bush and John McCain killed it.
Joshua has spoken. Make note of this date in your calendar and come around 12 months from now.
J.R., I agree with you, there’s not much difference between the two. Myself, I’m for busting the two party system head-lock on our democracy. However, their choke-hold is so tight we can’t seem to obtain enough oxygen. I feel completely disenfranchised. Not that it matters much to anyone, but me, I couldn’t vote for either one of those “gentlemen.”
I have the impression, our greedy partisan representatives spend all their time serving and enriching themselves at the feet of white-collar criminals, misguided sociopolitical divisionists (includes generational incremental communist indoctrination and diversity fanatics), financial anarhchists, soverign nation lobbyist and global corporate carpet baggers.
Not much left for the piddily middle class, is there? Not even freedom of choice. Mark my words, the more dependent we become on more and more government, the less our freedom will ring.
My senior highschool son just reported that his school held a pseudo presedential election today, that resluted in favor of B.O. vs J.M with a ratio of something like 900 to 89 respectively. Why is that? I say its mostly media and populisim. I don’t seriously belive 90% of the students could articulate the issues as a justificaiton for their votes. I suspect if I were to take the time to query them, I would discover ample evidence their liberal history and english teachers were, as Mr. Steyn suggests “pulling the other levers of society”, by consitently and unethically campaigning in the classroom all year.
Deadmessenger,
I don’t blame you for feeling disenfranchised because in reality, most of us are.
With the Electoral College system we have, only a handful of swing states matter. My home state is definitely going to vote for Obama so no one campaigns here and my vote is essentially worthless.
Meanwhile, undecided voters in “swing states” such as Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida, etc. get all of the attention and their votes actually do account for something substantive. I thought the “one person, one vote” concept ensured all of our votes count equally. Unfortunately, that is just another myth about the strength of our democracy.
I would not take the vote of your son’s school too seriously. Besides, don’t you think it is difficult for an 18 year old to relate to someone that is 72?