"Everyone is here for the same reason: Buy it now or you're not going to have a chance in the future," said Charlie Street, a gun owner.
At Cheaper Than Dirt alone, more than $100,000 in guns and ammunition have been sold every day since Election Day. Buyers are stocking up before President-elect Barack Obama takes office.
Sales are brisk across the West. Background checks for new gun owners jumped 15 percent last month, according to Federal Bureau of Investigation data.
Colorado just set a record for the highest number of background checks for new gun owners, nearly 1,500 in a single day, according to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation.
Obama says he supports the right to bear arms with reasonable restrictions. But that has not been enough reassurance for some people or enough to quell the spreading fear among gun owners.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/Story?id=6209255&page=1
Buyers and sellers attribute the surge to worries that Obama and a Democratic-controlled Congress will move to restrict firearm ownership, despite the insistence of campaign aides that the president-elect supports gun rights and considers the issue a low priority.
From Kevin Bohn
CNN Senior Producer
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Bernie Conatser has never seen business this good.
Bernie Conatser, owner of Virginia Arms Company, displays one of his rifles.
1 of 2 The owner of a gun shop in the Washington suburb of Manassas, Virginia, Conatser said sales have doubled or tripled since this time last year.
On Saturday, he said, he did as much business as he would normally do in a week.
"I have been in business for 12 years, and I was here for Y2K, September 11, Katrina," Conatser said, as a steady stream of customers browsed what remained of his stock. "And all of those were big events, and we did notice a spike in business, but nothing on the order of what we are seeing right now."
Weapons dealers in much of the United States are reporting sharply higher sales since Barack Obama won the presidency a week ago.
Buyers and sellers attribute the surge to worries that Obama and a Democratic-controlled Congress will move to restrict firearm ownership, despite the insistence of campaign aides that the president-elect supports gun rights and considers the issue a low priority. Watch shoppers snap up guns of all types »
According to FBI figures for the week of November 3 to 9, the bureau received more than 374,000 requests for background checks on gun purchasers -- a nearly 49 percent increase over the same period in 2007. Conatser said his store, Virginia Arms Company, has run out of some models -- such as the AR-15 rifle, the civilian version of the military's M-16 -- and is running low on others.
Such assault weapons are among the firearms that gun dealers and customers say they fear Obama will hit with new restrictions, or even take off the market.
Virginia gun owner Kyle Lewandowski said he was buying a .45-caliber pistol to "hedge my bets."
"Every election year, you have to worry about your rights being eroded a little bit at a time," he said. "I also knew, because of the Democrat majority and because of the election, everybody would have the same reaction I did," he added.
"It's a fact that the liberal Democrats that now control all three branches of our government do not like guns. They want us out of business," Connecticut resident Scott Hoffman said. "They don't want the average American to have a right to defend themselves."
And New Hampshire gun owner Lloyd Clement said, "I think there's going to be an attack to some degree on the gun owners."
http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/11/11/obama.gun.sales/
What do you think? Will Obama be a "gun grabber"?
01-15-2009, 04:55 PM
Similar Threads
Linear Mode
