Tag: Gun Safety

Record Numbers in Florida Locked and Loaded

Trish
Welcome to Florida

The news that nearly 800,000 people in Florida requested the background checks needed to purchase a firearm in 2012 gives the rest of the country one more reason to avoid the Sunshine State. If you come, keep in mind that one in every 24 people around you is probably armed.

A bulletproof Hawaiian shirt to go with those black socks and shorts might not be a bad idea.

Gun sales surged after Obama’s re-election, but really took off after the recent shooting with semi-automatic weapons in Newtown, Conn. killed 20 children and six adults (plus the shooter).

In December alone, there were 131,103 background checks requested through the [Florida Department of Law Enforcement] — the highest number the agency has recorded in any single month. That beat the previous record, set only a month earlier, when 84,745 background check requests were submitted in the same month that Obama was re-elected.

It doesn’t hurt that the NRA and Gun Owners of America keep telling people that Obama is going to take their guns and then turn the country into a socialist dictatorship.

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The Less Influence They Have, The More Radical the Pro-Gun Groups Grow

Trish
Reba McIntyre and Michael Gross as the Gummers in the movie, Tremors

There’s an interesting list of numbers on the website, Meet the NRA. Ladd Everitt, communications director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, recently called the National Rifle Association a “paper tiger.” With this record, I can see why.

  • The National Rifle Association of America Political Victory Fund received a 0.83% return on the $11 million they spent during the 2012 election cycle, the worst performance of any Super PAC that spent over $5 million in the election.
  • NRA PACs spent more than $13 million to defeat Pres. Obama alone, all for naught.
  • The NRA spent $100,000 in eight Senate races, and lost seven of them.
  • Of the 30 House incumbents who lost, 17 were endorsed by the NRA.

Maybe the NRA’s political fortunes are in part behind the rise of the even more radical Gun Owners of America (GOA). GOA refused to endorse Sen. John McCain in 2008 because they thought his record on “gun rights” (yes, apparently guns have rights) was weak. They endorsed Rep. Ron Paul in 2012 because they admired his inability to compromise.

And although Everitt continued to reference the more widely recognized NRA when he appeared recently on the Diane Rehm Show and described the unhinged nature of the new Burt Gummers of the world, he was probably also thinking of the GOA:

We often tell people this not your grandfather’s NRA. And, you know, the modern pro-gun movement today is marked by what we would call insurrectionist ideology, which is this belief that the NRA and others have put forward that there is an individual right under the second amendment to essentially shoot and kill government officials when you personally disagree with democratically enacted laws.