Earlier today a friend reached out and asked if we could help her and her husband get a gun. I was on air, so my husband went to help, and texted that the store was “packed.” Later on another friend, someone whose viewpoints aren’t aligned with mine, texted to ask if she should get a handgun or a rifle for home defense. These weren’t isolated incidents today, either.

Gun sales surged last month, an 80% jump from gun sales this time last year:

“Almost, you couldn’t even keep up with it – that’s how crazy it was,” said Joe Hawk, owner of Guns & Roses in New Jersey. “After Memorial Day, it spiked again – it just went crazy again.”

Small Arms Analytics & Forecasting, a private research firm, estimated that there were more than 1.7 million gun sales in May – an 80% jump from May 2019.

[…]

There were more than 3 million checks run through the FBI’s national instant check system in May – about a 32% increase compared to May 2019.

The FBI checks don’t represent a one-to-one correlation to gun sales, but are used as a general approximation to gauge the health of the market.

People across the country are watching terrifying images of assaults, buildings set ablaze, property destruction, all from the well organized exploitation by Antifa of legitimate protest. They’ve watched business owners dismayed over losing their livelihoods in the riots. People aren’t taking chances:

For citizens, they know that they’re their own first responder and they don’t want to be collateral damage; business owners are reliving the rooftop Koreans’ story, protecting themselves and their livelihoods — especially when politically-appointed, useless police chiefs publicly state that they won’t protect businesses.

Meanwhile, the same gun control advocates who demand that only the protested police should carry guns are trying to incite irrational fear of law-abiding gun owners:

By supporting the rioters (which is different from the peaceful protestors) and excusing their violence, Democrats and their gun control advocates are repelling people from their position:

Businesses that closed their doors and suffered these past three months under brutal lockdowns are being repaid for their sacrifice with Democrats simply releasing rioters that burned their storefronts and ransacked their livelihoods:

And law-abiding gun owners, people who for so long have been smeared, maligned, and abused see violent rioters given more grace than they — we’ve — ever been given:

To the gun control advocates and activists: Good luck getting people to disarm in favor of your position that only the police (whom they’re currently protesting) should be the sole people to bear arms. Good luck shaming good people into defenselessness so you can virtue signal as protestors burn houses and block fire fighters from rescuing the children inside. People won’t forget how local governments, run by the party you support, filled their skate parks with sand and threatened to cite the teens who shoveled them clean — but stood down as violent rioters beat women in the streets and set fire to churches.

You have no right to demand that people live in fear when their localities can’t and won’t protect them.