Gun Sales & the Right to Revolution

The number of National Instant Background Checks (NICS) run on Black Friday 2013 was the sixth-most in history at 144,758, according to the FBI...

There have already been 19,051,745 checks so far this year, and Christmas shopping is just getting started. Last year, there was a total of 19,592,303.

Put in perspective, the last year that President Bush was in office, there were 12,709,023. NICS checks have risen by more than 50 percent since Mr. Obama has been in the White House.

A guy from Cato today referred to the right of the people to revolution. At a Congressional hearing:

On Tuesday, Michael Cannon, Cato Institute’s Director of Health Policy Studies, testified before a congressional committee about the dangers of the president’s legal behavior.

“There is one last thing to which the people can resort if the government does not respect the restraints that the constitution places on the government,” Cannon said. “Abraham Lincoln talked about our right to alter our government or our revolutionary right to overthrow it.”

“That is certainly something that no one wants to contemplate,” he continued. “If the people come to believe that the government is no longer constrained by the laws then they will conclude that neither are they.”

“That is a very dangerous sort of thing for the president to do, to wantonly ignore the laws,” Cannon concluded, “to try to impose obligation upon people that the legislature did not approve.”

19,000,000 gun background checks per year X 5 years.... that's a lot of guns, most of which are new and will not wear out in the next 100 years.

We do live in interesting times. I hope they don't get a lot more interesting.