It’s not surprising when the Left attacks Americans’ Second Amendment rights or goes after the NRA. We’ve come to expect it. But it is strange when their anti-gun strategy gets them the exact opposite of what they say they want: fewer guns. They’ve created a situation where Americans don’t necessarily want but feel they need guns.

So, we have the Left, BLM, Antifa, and others working feverishly to defund or abolish the police. But what has the Left admonished people to do if they become victims of crime? You don’t need a gun; call the police.

With cities defunding or abolishing the police as in New York City, Minneapolis, Seattle, and other cities, what is the argument now? What does the anti-gun Left tell people who ask, “How do I protect myself and my family if there’s a criminal pounding on my door, about to storm in?”

With no “call the police” as an answer, the Left will now have to completely ignore the question. In fact, with the call the police answer, even cops tell people, in most cases, the police won’t arrive in time except to investigate your robbery or murder.

So, with the defunding or abolishing of police being threatened or initiated, people are answering the question themselves: they’re buying guns. In fact, it appears they’re buying guns by the bucket load. And another ancillary element is the number of first-time gun buyers gun sellers say are among their customers.

FBI statistics on NICS background checks tell the story. I’ll just pluck out a few states to compare with last year to give you an idea.

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Alabama:  (2019) 690,084       (2020) 645,950

Florida:     (2019) 1,195,539      (2020) 1,064,366

Illinois:     (2019) 4,949,570     (2020) 4,592,449

The FBI reported after the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) virus struck in March, “an all-time sales high was recorded…” The FBI conducted some 3.7 million background checks in one month. But Americans preparing to live in a country without guns or police protection weren’t done. In June, the FBI conducted 3.9 million, for another record. And July recorded another 3.6 million. That’s over 11 million gun purchases in only three months.

So, you’ve probably noticed that we have not yet made it through 2020—though, I’m sure most of us would love for this horror of a year to be over. Yes, the numbers listed for background checks in 2020 are only for the first six months of this year, January through July. These states, and many others, are already near the numbers for all of last year.

These gun buyers are not paranoid, as the Left likes to portray gun owners, but they are afraid—and they have every right to be. The Left wants not only to take their gun rights away but also their police. These folks, many of them traditional Democrats, liberals, and some apolitical are watching on their nightly news reports of riots allowed by Democrat mayors and city councils to occur nightly. And the violence is no longer limited to the cities.

Recently, a group of 200 or so BLM and Antifa members traveled over 30 miles to the rural home of Seattle’s police chief. If it weren’t for her protective, and well-armed, neighbors, who knows what might have happened.

With the Left always blaming guns rather than criminals for violent crimes like robbery and murder, it makes one wonder if an inanimate object, such as a firearm, has agency and can function without a human finger pulling the trigger.

In Chicago, the truly detestable Mayor Lori Lightfoot, rather than blaming her and other Democrat mayors’ inept running of the city, blames “illegal alien” guns. In particular, guns from Indiana or other surrounding states “with more lenient gun laws.” Well, Chicago has stricter gun laws than any state or city surrounding it. Yet, they have more shootings and murders than all those other states and cities combined.

Why? Can’t the guns find plenty of people to shoot in Indianapolis, Milwaukee, or Minneapolis? Guns can only shoot people once they arrive in Chicago. That is an absurd argument, but absurd is all they have. Logic sure won’t work. Democrat leaders’ resistance to dealing with violent crime in black neighborhoods is unconscionable. But they continue to get away with it because the Democratic leadership allows it and the mainstream news media facilitates it by ignoring it.

Every few days we hear about yet another child, toddler, or infant shot while sleeping in their cribs or sitting in their strollers. Can you imagine the mother who looks down to see her eight-month-old treasure has been shot in the abdomen? Or think about the proud father who has to look at the bullet hole in his two-year-old daughter’s forehead? This is happening, folks!

I’m not writing this to be gratuitous or unduly inflammatory. It’s how I felt seeing those stories, as a grandfather of a two-year-old. It wasn’t hard for me to empathize with those parents and grandparents in Chicago, and, increasingly, in New York City, and in other cities with rising violent crime. I felt it viscerally, imagining how I’d feel if something like that happened to my youngest grandson.

So, if you wonder why people are buying guns at such record rates, either you’re not paying attention, or you’re a leftist who is paying attention, but you just don’t care about people’s safety—or their God-given rights.

This piece was written by Steve Pomper on August 8, 2020. It originally appeared in LifeZette and is used by permission.

Read more at LifeZette:
Michelle Obama slips up, says COVID is an opportunity to change ‘how wealth is distributed’
Pelosi unravels, claims President Trump and Republicans can’t accept the ‘gravity’ of the COVID-19 pandemic
Senator Ted Cruz denounces Antifa as Marxist terrorist group wreaking havoc in America

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