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March 23, 2020

Are gun stores essential during a pandemic?

By Andrea Widburg

Invariably, when Americans feel threatened at an existential level, they buy weapons. That's because existential threats prove the truth in the saying that, when seconds count, the police are minutes away.

Americans are currently worried that coronavirus will leave America’s normal infrastructure in tatters. Just a few days ago, USA Today reported on that fear and how it’s driving gun sales:

[Ralph] Charette, a military veteran, spent $1,500 at a gun shop in Germantown, Wisconsin, after encountering aggressive shoppers and empty shelves at local grocery stores.

[snip]

"There's so much uncertainty and paranoia but you've got to protect your own," Charette said.

Charette is among a growing tide of Americans who are going to retailers, pawnshops and online to purchase gun supplies and ammunition in the wake of COVID-19, which had killed more than 60 people in the U.S. as of Saturday afternoon. 

[snip]

The [Ammo.com] website reported a 68% spike in sales between mid-February and early March. Online orders were booming most in North Carolina and Georgia. However, ammunition shopping also surged in Florida, which has over 100 confirmed coronavirus cases, and New York, with over 700 cases of the respiratory illness.

At the same time that ordinary Americans want to exercise their Second Amendment rights, government officials in traditionally Democrat enclaves are trying to prevent people from doing so. In mid-March, Mayor Deborah Frank Feinen, of Champaign Illinois, signed an executive order declaring a state of emergency, despite the absence of any coronavirus cases in Champaign. With the order is in place, Feinen has arrogated to herself the ability to ban gun sales.

Just a few days later, on March 16, New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell also issued an emergency order allowing her to ban the sale or transportation of firearms.

In Philadelphia, the police department stopped issuing concealed carry permits, while simultaneously announcing that they would be “delaying arrests for . . . narcotics offenses, thefts, burglary, and prostitution.” However, the police will “continue to arrest people carrying a firearm without a permit.”

In the San Francisco Bay Area, a region notoriously hostile to the Second Amendment, a gun store located in Alameda County (home to the City of Berkeley) tried to keep its two locations open despite the local and state-wide shut-down orders.

Solar Tactical, located in Livermore and Castro Valley, shared a video asking its customers to help keep it open. It’s an excellent video explaining what governments (always Democrat-run governments) are doing and seeking help from people concerned about attacks on the Second Amendment:

The Sheriff's department pushed back, claiming that selling guns was not an "essential business":

By Friday, the Sheriff’s office was using Twitter to announce that Solar Tactical had yielded to the Sheriff’s pressure and would no longer sell guns while California is on lockdown.

Think about what the Sheriff said: Enabling people’s right to keep and bear arms is not “essential.”

The right to keep and bear arms – a right premised upon people's ability to obtain working weapons – is stated in the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution. Admittedly, that’s not first place, but the Second Amendment still has a unique quality, distinguishing it from all other amendments in the Bill of Rights: It’s the only Amendment dedicated to a single concept. The remaining Amendments in the Bill of Rights tend to jumble different ideas together under a single heading.

For those who think that the Bill of Rights is just another set of laws, it is not. Instead, the Bill of Rights delineates rights that are inherent in each person. Absent overarching national needs, in a clash between the government and the individual over these rights, it is the government that most yield.

The Founders, who were less than a decade away from winning a hard-fought Revolution against a nation that was then the strongest in the world, understood how important the Second Amendment is to individual rights and liberty. All the other rights are just words if the people have no way of standing up to their government. In other words, the Second Amendment is an essential right, and those businesses that support the Second Amendment should be kept open during times of potential chaos.

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