Virginia Gun Rights

On Friday, I was listening to the latest Gun For Hire Podcast. One of the hosts mentions this article that appeared recently on New Jersey.com that said rising gun sales in New Jersey have been driven by first time buyers.  This contradicts what the gun ban lobby has been telling us since the fall of 2008.

The Brady Campaign also said “the percentage of American households with a gun has been steadily declining over time” and that gun sales are concentrated among people who already own guns.

But according to NewJersey.com, those rising sales are indeed because non-gun owners are becoming gun owners.

More and more Americans are opting to exercise their Second Amendment rights, driving up domestic firearms sales and interest in shooting sports, which is good news for manufacturers and dealers.

Driving these record numbers are thousands of first-time purchasers.

This issue was addressed at the NRA Board Meeting that took place after the NRA Annual Meeting in St. Louis.  Bitter over on Shall Not Be Questioned covered NRA’s take on the increase in sales.

However, an interesting report came out of the NRA Board Meeting yesterday morning. And, no, it wasn’t just the news we broke on Twitter about the record-setting 73,740 NRA members attending the Annual Meeting & Exhibits. Kayne Robinson, Director of General Operations, told the crowd that they have seen a surge of training demands and had to really focus attention on being able to easily sell materials to the thousands of instructors across the country since the early days of the Obama guns sales surge. If you thought things were tapering off with Obama’s first term coming to a close, don’t be fooled.

So far in 2012, Kayne reported that the NRA sales are running about $265,000 above what they expected at this point in the year.

So, despite what the gun ban lobby would try to have us believe, we are seeing people becoming first time gun owners, and, also despite the picture painted by the gun ban lobby, they are seeking training so they can properly use their new firearm.