Something remarkable happened recently in the pages of The New York Times, a newspaper that has never been friendly to the Second Amendment. In a story headlined “A Divided Nation Agrees on One Thing: Many People Want a Gun,” the newspaper actually put forth a balanced, in-depth report on why so many people have bought guns for the first time in their lives this year.
The Times quoted Douglas Jefferson, vice president for the National African American Gun Association, explaining, “The year 2020 has been just one long advertisement for why someone may want to have a firearm to defend themselves.”
There was also this tidbit: “Across the country, Americans bought 15.1 million guns in the seven months this year from March through September, a 91% leap from the same period in 2019, according to seasonally adjusted firearms sales estimates from The Trace, a nonprofit news organization that focuses on gun issues. The FBI has also processed more background checks for gun purchases in just the first nine months of 2020 than it has for any previous full year, FBI data show.”
What about that data? At the end of September, there had been more background checks initiated with the FBI’s National Instant Check System (28,826,449) than in all of last year combined (28,369,750). Those are raw numbers the FBI acknowledges, “do not represent the number of firearms sold.” Checks are initiated for other reasons. Still, 2020 is going to be a record year for NICS checks.
According to The Trace, described disingenuously by the newspaper as “a nonprofit news organization that focuses on gun issues,” gun sales in September in Michigan were up 198% over the same month last year. In gun-restrictive New Jersey, they were up 180% over September 2019. Incidentally, The Trace is a product of Michael Bloomberg’s billions.
Perhaps equally astonishing to the story’s appearance in the pages of The New York Times was that the Seattle Times — another newspaper not friendly to gun rights — picked up the story and published it almost word-for-word.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/27/us/guns-2020-election.html
https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/nation-politics/u-s-voters-agree-on-one-thing-theyd-feel-better-owning-a-gun