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“When it comes to holiday consumerism, guns aren’t much different than any other trend. People are easily whipped into a buying frenzy, even when they’re not entirely sure why. CBS News Los Angeles reported a conversation with Vince Torres, owner of Bullseye Sport in Riverside, California. ‘We had a lady [who bought an AR-15] for each one of the kids and one for herself. A lot of people are saying ‘I want to buy one of those ARs’. I would say, ‘Do you know what you’re buying?’ And they would say, ‘no, just want one of those ARs.’ Who needs Hatchimals when you’ve got AR-15s, I guess.” – Dan Abrams in Looks Like Santa Left Plenty of Guns Under California Trees This Holiday Season [via lawnewz.com]

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74 COMMENTS

  1. Supply and demand.

    California’s legislature and governor have just set one term in that equation to zero, just about. And it wasn’t on the demand side.

    • Most people are born with a strong sense of self-preservation. This woman also demonstrated another common trait of most mothers – a desire to see her offspring survive in an often cruel world. No amount of legislation will ever extinguish these two basic human instincts.

    • I caught a glimpse of the local news last night, where a gun store owner was being interviewed about the new bullet button ban. The wall behind him was full of ARs with Thordsen stocks, i.e., a bunch of rifles that will be perfectly legal “featureless” rifles that are saleable after the first of the year and do not have to be registered as “assault weapons.”

  2. what a cool mom, she better get something good for mother’s day. Not some dumb kid’s hand print in plaster. She’s getting her kids his and hers ARs!?!?!?!? AWESOME!
    #momoftheyear!

    • To borrow from Firesign Theatre:

      Why did the short-hair cross the road? Because someone told him to.

      Why did the long-hair cross the road? Because someone told him not to.

      There are plenty of people who will want something when their “Betters” tell them they can’t have one.

  4. I sort of agree with him but for different and more rational reasons. If I lived in California I would be selling off my semI automatic rifles, not buying more of them. It is obvious that they are going to be banned so why would you buy something that you cannot use. This would provide cover for the one I buried in the back yard. I would take the money from the sale of my semis and buy a couple of revolvers because revolvers will be the last handguns to get confiscated in the not to distand future.

      • I guess you missed the part about the backyard.

        I follow the Buffett rule. Buy when people are selling and sell when people are buying.

        • That only applies if you’re making a profit. You’d need to wait until supply dried up and sell at a premium.

        • My rather robust portfolio would say yes. Here is another one for you. “Bulls make money; bears make money; hogs get slaughtered.” You buy when people are selling because there is excess supply and prices are low. You sell when people are buying because there is excess demand and prices are rising. What you don’t do is follow the herd and try to time the market.

          Californians are panic buying which make it a good time to selloff your extra ARs, etc. And when they come for the guns the most recent buyers will be at the top of the list.

      • While I really like percussion revolvers, and it IS true that they are NOT firearms, and thus not regulated by BATFE, which makes them legal even in NYC, they are not very suitable for self defence(which, I’m sure, has a great deal to do with WHY they are still ‘legal’)
        Having been shooting them for many, many years, I can tell you from experience that no matter how carefully you load them, they are just never reliable. Between the occasional misfires, chainfires, and cap tie up the cylinder, I would not consider them for self defence, unless I had no other choices.
        But there are always choices. I would just carry a black market real firearm, illegally, if I lived in one of those areas, but first I would leave that slave state for somewhere at least slightly free. Thank G-d(you might want to research why I might spell it that way, even though I’m not Hebrew) I have never had to make that choice, having always lived where I was at least a little bit free. At least enough to bear arms.

        • Since the letters ‘G-o-d’ do not form the ‘name’ of God but rather a conceptualization it makes no sense to start mucking around with it. If you were avoiding using the name ‘YHWH’ it might make a little more sense. But you are simply replacing one non-name concept, ‘God,’ with your own non-name concept, ‘G_d’ which is the exact same thing except you get to show everyone how pious you are even though literally no one asked.

        • Hannibal, please reread that. It is complete and utter gibberish. Nonsense. Makes no *sense*, unless you are already accustomed to believing gibberish.

    • “This would provide cover for the [semi-auto rifle] I buried in the back yard.”

      When it is time to bury your firearms, it is time to use them.

      I wish I knew who started that pearl of wisdom by the way.

      • That pearl of wisdom is wrong. You bury them and wait for the unreliable chest pounders to get taken out and then you dig them up and get down to business.

      • Correct. My standard capacity magazines would be “lost” until such time as someone dared come onto my property to try and find them. He would then find them fully-loaded and ready to be unloaded in his direction.

        The thing about gun grabs is they can pass legislation to make it nearly impossible to buy certain weapons, but they have few real means of forcing you to turn in those you already have. The police might find something while serving a warrant for something else, but those would be rare cases. In order to guarantee compliance, the state would need a determined force willing to go door to door. Do you think those spineless progressives in California would risk their own lives for that cause?

        • “He would then find them fully-loaded and ready to be unloaded in his direction.”

          If you did “unload” on law enforcement, what is your next step ? Once you pull the trigger it’s not as if you can go back into your house and start watching television like nothing happened. For all intents and purposes your life is over and you now must become a fugitive. No going back.
          This is something I’ve pondered myself and the conclusion I came to for my own situation is that I would just have to accept that my armed defiance would mean my imminent…if not immediate…death. The only upside is that hopefully a few of my enemies join me in the morgue never to trouble anyone ever again.
          I always hear about what one would do when the SHTF but I’ve never heard anyone explain how they intend to survive the transition from law abiding citizen to wanted criminal.

        • As you said, at that point your life is probably over. But the point at which an agent of the state came onto my property to enforce an unconstitutional law and remove my right to defend myself is the point at which freedom dies. Might as well die along with it, or at least be the spark that ignites the revolution.

          But yeah, I’d probably go back to watching TV and reload for when they sent the next guy(s).

        • “I always hear about what one would do when the SHTF but I’ve never heard anyone explain how they intend to survive the transition from law abiding citizen to wanted criminal.”

          This would be a possibility for a very interesting posting, if we could avoid all the chest-thumpers.

          I maintain that if Waco and Ruby Ridge did not ignite the war between government and patriots, there will be no third civil war. The few who do attack the government will become “common criminals”.

        • I cannot resist that. After a SHTF confrontation involving shots fired, the next thing to do is wait the 3+ hours for the SWAT team to form up and bring their media with them, then surrender and demand free legal representation, and a trial by jury, no I won’t take a plea. Just a few million people doing that will freeze up the justice system for decades. The government will collapse. If you are a moron, you will be hung, if you are right and rational, you’ll be out in a few weeks.

    • Bfitts,

      I had never heard of a hatchimal either until a couple days ago. They are a children’s toy consisting of a toy bird with electronic innards that pecks it way out of a plastic egg and hatches itself … when it works at least. (That is how I heard about them … some people are reporting that their hatchimal failed to hatch or took several hours to hatch.)

      • Bfitts, you just took me back to when I was a teenager. When we first moved out to the edge of the county, we used to see and hear quail all the time. A few years later, they were all gone. Not sure if it was the coyotes, people’s damned cats running loose, or something else. But my step-dad got this idea to re-populate the quail, and he did exactly what you said. He borrowed an incubator from someone and got about two dozen eggs. I’d say around 15 of them actually hatched. On the day we released them, we made the bone-headed mistake of not locking up the terrier. That fat little dog plucked four of them out of the woods before anyone could stop him! He was so proud of himself, and my step-dad was so pissed!

  6. I am a little surprised that there hasn’t been a bigger exodus of California’s population. I guess the good weather makes people reluctant to leave, even if it’s at the expense of their rights.

    • “I guess the good weather makes people reluctant to leave, even if it’s at the expense of their rights.”

      I imagine large annual incomes (which must not be available in another state) make some people reluctant to leave as well. Such incomes may be tied to the television/movie industry in Southern California. Other possibilities include agricultural operations that cannot realistically happen in other states. (I am not aware of any state that has ideal conditions for growing pistachio trees for example.)

    • Hey, don’t encourage them. Let them all sit there and suffer in the morass they made. A Californian fleeing that failed state is far, far more likely to be someone whose decades of liberal voting history caused their economic, social, and political problems, but who is oblivious to the cause and effect relationships, and simply transplants their liberal ignorance to some other state, than it is to be someone who genuinely recoils at the liberalism directly and flees the tyranny.

      I’d welcome refugees from the latter group. Instead, we get liberals who destroyed their own states with socialism, move to Texas (or Colorado) to escape the oppression, put down roots here, and promptly start voting liberal again, thinking “it’ll all be different this time.” Hell, many of these people are not more than two or three generations away from having fled other countries to escape the inevitable excesses and abuses perpetrated by government. Yet, here they are, repeating the cycle.

      So, no, don’t encourage these people. Don’t give them hope that it’s different or better any where else. These imbecilic little stickybeaks, wherever they presently reside, are themselves the source of toxicity and misery who ruin any place they go.

    • When I lived in Colorado, we saw exactly this. Escaping Californians, flush from having made big profits selling their homes, moved in and bid up housing prices. Next, they started agitating for California-style laws and policies. When things started to go bad–just like back in the CA they’d left–they were stunned at the turn of events. Imagine that.

      • “When things started to go bad–just like back in the CA they’d left–they were stunned at the turn of events. Imagine that.”

        Probably left them blubbering about the locals “clinging to their guns and Bibles”.

  7. Isn’t knowing that the gubmint doesn’t want me having one good enough reason for buy one (or three)?

    • Things the government doesn’t want you to have:
      Cars without seatbelts
      Flammable mattresses and sleepwear
      Lead paint
      Asbestos insulation

      Buy all you want. It’s a free country, right?

      • As the Yankee Marshall likes to say, ‘I am a grown assed man!’ I don’t need the government to fasten my seatbelt or tuck me in at night. I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself.

      • Seatbelt use? Seriously? First off, that was just a scam to pry more money out of people with traffic tickets handed out by traffic cops, aka, tax collectors for the welfare state. As with all such fixed fees–which can run upwards of $500 in California—is regressive, meaning that it hits the poor the hardest.
        The law also tends to be applied disproportionately against blacks. Racial bias? Maybe. Or perhaps it’s just easier to spot non-seatbelt wearing motorists in urban areas where blacks predominantly live, as opposed to rural and even suburban areas where whites are more prevalent. Slower speed limits, more stop signs and stop lights, plus a higher officer-to-citizen ratio, means it’s more likely you’ll get spotted. Howsoever, it’s a disparate impact and cannot be ignored.
        By the way, back in the 1980s, mandatory seatbelt laws didn’t have support either among the public or state legislatures. Seatbelt laws were Elizabeth Dole’s doing, having made a deal with the automakers to enlist their support in pushing state legislatures for the laws, in exchange for the feds not mandating that automakers install expensive airbags. (As with all deals with the Devil, the feds reneged on that and later mandated airbags, too.) That, coupled with federal incentives to states, got them to pass the laws.
        So you have the feds trading, temporarily, airbags for seatbelts, which doesn’t sound very safe to me. Then you the people and their representatives not wanting this, either. There’s also some evidence to suggest that seatbelt laws, while reducing accident fatalities, actually increased accident injuries, by inducing safer-feeling drivers into driving more recklessly. Fundamentally, this wasn’t about safety, but rather it introduced yet another pretext for the government to stop and harass people.

        Now, I could fisk the rest of your examples similarly, but if you cannot grasp the concept that the majority of so-called do-gooder bureaucrats are only out for themselves, their self-aggrandizement, the accumulation of power, and a sense of moral superiority over the masses, and are NOT acting out of noble public service, then you just aren’t seeing the world as it really is and your fairy tales are invulnerable to reason. There’s no education in the second kick of a mule, after all.

        • I think more blacks are cited for lack of seatbelt because fewer blacks use them. See, when you slouch down in the seat, the shoulder strap is right in your face.

        • ^ I’ve actually thought about this. There must be a cultural issue at play here. Young black males in particular are much more likely not to wear a seatbelt in my experience. Not scientific, but particularly interesting because a lot of times the same fellas who don’t care about the seatbelt law are the ones who don’t care about other laws and have drugs or warrants on them at the time. A smart criminal knows to avoid breaking more than one law at a time, but smart criminals aren’t the usual.

  8. Vince and this lady had better watch out, in Kommiefornia I’m sure that they will be persecuted and prosecuted for a “straw purchase”.

  9. Firearms are pretty damned good investments. They hold value really well. California’s rules banning the resale in the future may or may not hold up. But, I don’t think you will see a whole lot of compliance on the part of gun owners.

  10. Good on mom. I hope you didn’t tell anyone where you live. I remember the near past when a friend(in downstate Illinois) tell me he might have to sell his AR ’cause of Newtown. This from an old guy who still smokes pot quite often…

  13. “When it comes to Christmas shopping, guns aren’t much different than any other trend. People are easily whipped into a buying frenzy, even when they’re not entirely sure why. CBS News Los Angeles reported a conversation with Vince Torres, owner of Bullseye Sport in Riverside, California. ‘We had a lady [who bought an AR-15] for each one of the kids and one for herself. A lot of people are saying ‘I want to buy one of those ARs’. I would say, ‘Do you know what you’re buying?’ And they would say, ‘no, just want one of those ARs.’ Who needs Hatchimals when you’ve got AR-15s, I guess.”

    So…what’s your point?
    In the Guide to Gift Giving it says to give them what they want, not what you want them to have,

  16. “Do you know what you’re buying?”

    “Yes, I’m buying a product that, thanks to government meddling, will soon quadruple in value.”

    What else is there to know?

  17. Oh, that’s just the camel’s nose doing battlespace prep for purchase rate limits. “We don’t want people getting stuff they don’t understand. We *just* want to slow it down a little, so they understand what they are doing.”

    Well, I *just* want people to be able to do what they want, and who are you to stop them? B T W, what makes you so smart about what’s good for them, anyway?

  18. “A lot of people are saying ‘I want to buy one of those ARs’. I would say, ‘Do you know what you’re buying?’ And they would say, ‘no, just want one of those ARs.’”

    I don’t believe you, reporter man.

  19. A lot of people buying those last few “bullet-button” ARs out of sheer ignorance both of what they are buying and what the Law will require them to do are in for an unpleasant surprise. Many will probably register them because they don’t understand how to render them “featureless” and some will end-up being prosecuted for having done neither. The Thordsen Stocks mentioned above are currently largely sold-out from Thordsen Custom, but people have until Jan. 1, 2018 to register them or modify them.
    I expect featureless AR’s/AK’s will go on Sale Jan.1, 2017.
    I smell BS in this report because anyone buying a firearm in CA has to have a Firearms Safety Card to make the purchase, so the story of the Mom and Kids reeks of spurious fabrication.

    • Good story, but I don’t think so! I bought an AR the day Clinton signed the AWB, shot the piss out of it for the entire time the AWB was effective, and never once had anyone question whether it was “pre-ban”, “post-ban”, or whatever the shit. Not. Even. ONCE!!! Bought a different upper, with bayonet lug and flash suppressor, delivered by USPS, without any questions. These rules are ridiculous and unenforceable, all we have to do is *IGNORE* them. Nobody is checking, because they have no way to enforce the stupid laws. You want a jury trial. And you want it NOW! (Right to a speedy trial, not one 5 years from now). Tomorrow would be good. Come on, guys, THINK!

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