By: Teresa Mull

Gun sales are reportedly surging in the wake of Joe Biden revealing his gun control plan.

“Gun sales in swing states surge as Biden pushed gun control agenda,” declares a Fox News headline.

The Washington Free Beacon reports similarly:

Gun dealers and activists in Pennsylvania, Florida, and Wisconsin told the Washington Free Beacon they expect the influx of new gun owners to have a significant electoral impact.

“I’ve long said that gun owners become gun voters,” Erin Palette, Florida resident and founder of the LGBTQ gun-rights group Operation Blazing Sword, said. “These mass purchases of guns for self-defense indicates an unprecedented level of distrust by the average American of the government’s ability to keep them safe.”

“The folks already own these guns now and Wisconsin folks are gonna want to use the things they spend their money on,” Rob Kovach, president of Wisconsin Firearms Owners, said.

Swing state dealers and activists have seen a rush on their inventory as Election Day approaches. They are confident that the surge will create new gun voters, but they have yet to see new gun-rights activists. And with COVID, the economy, and civil unrest dominating the 2020 election, it is not clear gun rights will break through as a significant factor despite the stark contrast in policy proposals from Trump and Biden.

GPM reported previously that Biden spoke at a gun safety forum organized by March for Our Lives and Giffords, an anti-gun organization. Before meeting with other Democratic presidential hopefuls at the forum, the Biden campaign released an 11-page gun-control plan that includes, among other things, much stricter regulations surrounding what the left likes to call “assault-style weapons.”

In his manifesto, Biden also proposes universal background checks for all weapons sales (with the exception of sales between close relatives), red flag laws, banning “high capacity” magazines, and removing legal protections for gun manufacturers.

Recently, John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, wrote in Real Clear Politics that “Biden’s gun control claims [are] at odds with crime stats.”

Lott explained:

After two Los Angeles sheriff’s deputies were shot and critically wounded on Saturday, Joe Biden warned, “Weapons of war have no place in our communities.” And within just hours of the attack, Biden tweeted in praise of the original bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, which lasted from 1994 to 2004. “These bans saved lives, and Congress should never have let them expire,” he wrote.

A handgun, not an assault rifle, was used to shoot the deputies. But it seems that Biden never misses an opportunity to deceptively complain about “weapons of war.”

In the past, Biden and vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris have applied this label to AR-15 semi-automatic rifles. But these guns function exactly as small-game, semi-automatic hunting rifles. Though it looks like the M16 machine gun made famous in the Vietnam War, no military in the world uses the AR-15.

Teresa Mull ([email protected]) is editor of Gunpowder Magazine.