Charlton Heston said it best in the 7 second version of the video below!!!! (Full version of Heston's speech below the post)
The reasons are twofold. One people are tired of criminals being the only ones carrying guns and citizens want to protect themselves and the second reason is the more politicians talk of gun control, more buy them preemptively.
Massacre occurs in a gun free zone (where only criminals carry guns into the area) Obama, Democrats and liberals start pushing for gun control and lo and behold, gun sales surge all over the place:
The prospect of a renewed assault weapons ban in the wake of the Connecticut school massacre has set of a round of buying, as thousands of Americans head to their local gun store to secure the popular AR-15 -- the model used by the school gunman -- before potential government prohibitions on their purchase.
They are also buying the .223 ammunition used by the AR-15 and the type of high-capacity magazines covered under the last federal assault weapons ban, which Congress let expire without renewing.
"Sales were through the roof on Saturday," said Eaton. "People were buying everything they could out of fear the president would try to ban certain guns and high-capacity magazines."
- The Colorado Bureau of Investigation says it set a new record for single-day background check submittals this past weekend.
- In San Diego, Northwest Armory gun store owner Karl Durkheimer said Saturday "was the biggest day we've seen in 20 years. Sunday will probably eclipse that."
- In southwest Ohio, from dawn to dusk a Cincinnati gun show had a line of 400 waiting to get in, said Joe Eaton of the Buckeye Firearms Association.
The deluge of buyers had officials working overtime. Background checks that normally took 15 minutes in California took more than four hours, Durkheimer said. In Colorado, background checks that normally take minutes turned into wait times of more than 12 hours, said CBI spokeswoman Susan Medina.
"We had to call in extra staff," Medina said. "The wait times were high."
The CBI says it processed more than 4,200 background checks on Saturday, the day after the Newtown, Conn., shooting. That surpassed the previous high of 4,028. Nationwide, FBI data shows 16.4 million background checks were run in 2011. An agency spokesman said Monday it did not keep daily numbers and would not have figures for December until early January.
After the Aurora Colorado movie theater massacre, gun sales surged:
Self-protection is part of the reason. But a bigger factor, say gun dealers, is fear of something else: politicians – specifically, their ability to enact restrictions on gun ownership and acquisition of ammunition.
When a high-profile shooting takes place, invariably the airwaves are full of talk about gun control.
“Once people start hearing about that, they say, ‘Wow I was planning on doing this. I better do it now,’” says Mr. Hyatt.
A gun-store owner in Virginia reports the same phenomenon.
"Normally what happens - and I've been doing this for 30 years – is whenever they start talking about gun control on the news and they start pushing that, people have a tendency to think they're going to take away their right to buy the gun, and that usually spurs sales,” says Paul Decker, owner of Hunters Heaven in Hayes, Va.
After a gunman shot and killed six people in Arizona and shot Democratic Representative Gabrielle Giffords in the head, Bloomberg headlines with "Arizona Shootings Trigger Surge in Glock Sales Amid Fear of Ban."
A national debate over weaknesses in state and federal gun laws stirred by the shooting has stoked fears among gun buyers that stiffer restrictions may be coming from Congress, gun dealers say. The result is that a deadly demonstration of the weapon’s effectiveness has also fired up sales of handguns in Arizona and other states, according to federal law enforcement data.
[...]
One-day sales of handguns in Arizona jumped 60 percent to 263 on Jan. 10 compared with 164 the corresponding Monday a year ago, the second-biggest increase of any state in the country, according to Federal Bureau of Investigation data.
Handgun sales rose 65 percent to 395 in Ohio; 16 percent to 672 in California; 38 percent to 348 in Illinois; and 33 percent to 206 in New York, the FBI data show. Sales increased nationally about 5 percent, to 7,906 guns.
The examples go on and on...... the more politicians talk of preventing citizens from obtaining weapons to protect themselves, the more go out and purchase weapons preemptively because then, the only way Washington will grab our guns and take away our right to protect ourselves from madmen, is from our "cold dead hands."
Charlton Heston; From My Cold Dead Hands. Long Version