Barrack Obama- “Gun Salesman of the Year 2009”

By Michael F. DeVietro           

As soon as Barrack Obama was declared the winner of the 2008 Presidential election, both the radical left and the radical right started screaming about guns. One example was Tom Diaz of the Violence Policy Center, a Washington DC based gun control group, being quoted saying that if he were an Obama advisor he “would tell him to shut down this valve that allows military-style assault weapons to be imported into the country. He can change that easily with an executive decision. Third, I would tell him to renew the debate about assault weapons. The 1994 law was a joke. The gun industry easily got around it because there were so many loopholes.” In fact Obama even stated on both his change.gov website and later on the Whitehouse.gov website that “Obama and Biden also favor commonsense measures that respect the Second Amendment rights of gun owners, while keeping guns away from children and from criminals. They support closing the gun show loophole and making guns in this country childproof. They also support making the expired federal Assault Weapons Ban permanent.”

“Gun Show loophole” is a term that gets tossed around a lot without much explanation. In short, the gun show loophole is private sales. Currently most states allow the private transfer of firearms from one person to another without the need of a firearms dealer or background check as long as both people involved are residents of the same state. All transfers across state lines must go through a federally licensed firearms dealer. To the pro-gun lobby, it maintains that private sales are important for a number of reasons ranging from allowing for gifts and inheritance from family to being able to purchase a gun “off the books” for privacy reasons. It is already illegal to sell a firearm to a person who you know is legally prohibited from owning a firearm. However many sellers make a point to ask few questions of their buyers. This has become a large issue at gatherings such as gun shows where several hundred private firearms transfers may happen in the same location on the same day. For this reason several states including Oregon have placed a threshold law saying that if more than “X” number of guns are for sale at a gun show then all transactions must go through the NICS background check system.

 This sort of reaction was pretty much what the gun industry and the 85-90 million gun owners in the US expected. However, when gun owners started screaming about the election of Barrack Obama, they did it with their wallets. One clear example of this is that during the middle of October, just prior to the election, Cope Reynolds, owner of Southwest Shooting Authority in Farmington New Mexico, held a “Pre Osama Bin Biden sale” the sale covered most firearms in his store but discounts were most heavily focused on weapons and ammunition that would be the target of a future assault weapons ban. He made it clear that this was not about moving out merchandise – it was to put more guns into the hands of lawful gun owners.

The data that we have indicate that Americans are buying guns as fast as they can. In fact, their purchasing is so rapid that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives has had to modify the rules placed on gun dealers just to keep up with the paperwork. All firearms sales that go through licensed firearms dealers are recorded on a standard form which is named the ATF Form 4473. On January 6^th, 2009 the Department of Justice issued a letter to all federal firearms dealers stating: “As a result of an unprecedented increase in demand for ATF Forms 4473 (5300.9) Part I Revised August 2008, inventory of the form at the ATF Distribution Center is running low. As a temporary measure, ATF is allowing FFLs to photocopy the form 4473 in it’s [sic] entirety until they receive their orders from the ATF Distribution Center. A notice will be posted at the expiration of this temporary authorized change.” Prior to this memo, if a gun dealer ran out of 4473 forms they would have to either borrow from another dealer or stop sales of firearms, in fact recording a gun sale or transfer on a photocopied 4473 would be grounds for financial sanction or loss of one’s dealer license.

Additionally we can look at the number of requests sent through the National Instant Crime background check System (NICS), which seems to suggest a general rise in gun sales nationwide. Specifically, NICS checks for people who wanted to purchase a gun have jumped twenty-four percent -- 1,523,426 in November 2008 compared to 1,230,525 in November 2007.

For Americans to be spending so much money on firearms, which are often classified as luxury items by many economists during such an economic recession, shows a clear sense of fear among gun owners for the future availability of certain weapons. Ironically enough, the rush of gun sales has actually made many firearms unavailable for the simple fact that manufactures and distributors can’t meet demand. Almost ever major distributor has notes on their websites stating that - due to unprecedented sales - orders are back-ordered for as long as 3-6 months, even on those items that were regularly kept in stock.