Today is Gun Appreciation Day.
We aren’t following it the way we did with Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day or Empty Chair Day.
But a reader did to go the Jacksonville Gun Show today, and sent in the following comment, photos and video.
One hour wait to get in the gun show!
Also, we talked to a guy who said that he was only there because he wanted to go to a local gun shop called “Shooters”, but when he got there he “couldn’t get in the parking lot”, so he decided to go to the gun show.
Note in the video how far the line stretches towards the building on the far left beyond the parking lot:
Update — That same reader has followed up:
Decided to go to Shooters — place is packed/nuts.
One customer told me was mad because gun he wants is now $150 more than it was a month ago + store has two box of ammo limit per customer because they are running out.
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Is this another sleeping giant who is awake and filled with a terrible resolve?
I sure hope so!
Just came from our informal local celebration; a TEA Party morning at the range. Besides some training by former police and military instructors, we practiced with our EBR’s [Evil Black Rifles] and introduced some patriots who had not taken up the Second Amendment to the joys of burning powder in the morning.
The celebration continues tomorrow with a gun show in a nearby city, and some cartridge reloading to replace what was consumed today.
And starting next week, classes for beginners.
Subotai Bahadur
Katie Pavlich tweeted this pic of the world class shooting expert who put on a shooting exhibition on Hannity last night.
Who’s against guns now?
http://twitter.com/Jessie_Duff/status/281116403522760704/photo/1
We celebrated this morning at the range. I dusted off the vintage mid-1960s AR-15 of which I’m so proud. I went through six full
NY Felonieshi-cap magazines of .223, and my daughter went through two more. My son and I also fired a similar amount through the AKs (one Czech, one Finnish and one Chi-Com), two mags each, which is always fun. We also shot pistols and a couple of old long guns, one of which is a 100-year old Winchester .30-30.The downside to this much shooting is all the reloading we need to do. Plus, with ammo getting scarce, there’s some reticence to blowing through a lot of 9mm, .40 and .45ACP.
The upside is that there was an electricity in the air at the range. It was a feeling that we’re defying an out-of-touch government and their enablers. It’s a feeling that we are exercising free, God-given rights in the face of a nascent tyranny. We spat in the eye of the tiger… and it felt fantastic.
Go to your local range and see if this is everywhere. I’d guess that it is.
Imagine if we were Syria.
Imagine the thousands of kids Obama would’ve had on stage surrounding him.
This being Race Card Day, I decided to give the NRA a diversity inspection.
They’ve made a start, but could do more. Put Allen West on the board; Mia Love might be interested. Where are the Hispanics and Asians? For that matter, an urbanite or few wouldn’t hurt.
To be clear: I’m not talking about filling PC quotas; I’m talking about attracting voters.
To be clear: I don’t buy the Left’s demographic BS about the election. Nevertheless, I recognize that the ethnic composition of the country is changing: more slowly than the race hucksters would have us believe, but it is changing.
http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/media/set/?set=a.10152454138870195.968278.221849125194&type=1
Pictures from Albany,NY. The local paper, Albany Times Union is reporting thousands of people went.
I just got home from that Rally. It was nice, no troublemakers or weird stuff happened. Decent turnout especially for such short notice.
The speakers were great, but as is the usual case for these gatherings the acoustics left a LOT to be desired. If you were far away, you could hear, if you were close up you could hear, in the middle you got echos off of the two buildings.
As we were driving out past the rally to go home I saw that someone had run a small white and black flag halfway up a flagpole – “come and take it” with a silhouette of a long gun, LOL.
I hope that the folks there go on to work against this law after they go back home.
The flag you saw was an updated version of the Gonzalez Flag of the Texian Revolution. The Mexican government, not trusting the Texian settlers, told them to turn over the small cannon used to defend the Gonzales settlement from marauding Indians. Knowing that the government troops were little help in defending their homes, they refused to turn over the cannon. When the Mexican troops showed up to take it, they saw the “Come and Take It” flag. They didn’t get the artillery.
There are a lot of updated versions of this flag featuring an AR-15 silhouette.
Here you go: http://www.gadsdenandculpeper.com/arcoandtaitf.html
Neat, thanks for the info. I have my photos of the Albany protest up now in a post, just photos, no text. I felt that was more appropriate. I wanted to grab a pic of the flag on the pole, but the traffic behind us wasn’t very patient. 🙂
http://myveryownpointofview.wordpress.com/2013/01/20/the-protest-in-the-park-ny-gun-law-rally-albany-ny/
To be honest, I can’t take a decent picture no matter how hard I try, so my Husband took these. Not as good as his photos from Rome, but pretty darn good.
Cabelas in AZ was funny this morning—many people were driving in all morning—-walking quickly to the store like it was Black Friday morning or Christmas Eve shopping….very hurried.
They were all crowded into the gun section of the store—-loading up on remaining long guns, hand guns and ammo of all kinds…..while the rest of the store looked like a ghost town.
Also noticed a lot of women buying—on their own without boyfriend or husband around—-they are taking the intitive—and noticed a few asian and hispanic women buying pistols and ammo…..something that was not usual before.
Obama really is gun salesman of the century.
Yet we lose at the ballot box? Something is off here.
Perception. As well as men and women who dream of instant (or immediate) gratification. These are immoral individuals with whom compromise is mostly impossible. There is, however, a minority within this class, and their needs and demands can be tempered with moderate dispensation.
There is also a need to address exceptional corruption, but that will be impossible until we resolve fundamental (i.e. cultural or institutional) corruption.
Voter I.D. laws. When 120-180 percent of the registered voters vote, something is as rotten as Harry Reid’s personality.
Hell, when the freaking UN Observers see a problem with “no I.D. voting”, you know something is seriously amiss!
Was at a hunting and fishing show in Omaha today….PACKED!!!!
Noticeable lines at the hunting rifles/shotgun booths.
I didn’t attend a Gun Appreciation Day event, but I did join the NRA today.
I went to that show. Got there a 715, was about number 30 in line, doors opened at 8, everybody thought it was 9. Place was nice until about 930 then it got crazy. Prices for .223 ran up to $1.25/round for 500 rounds, cheapest AR $1700, saw a guy with a sign for a SKS that needed repair $550. And by the way, when I left about 10, the line to get in was 3 or 4 times as long to get in as in the photos. The reloading booths and the ammo booths were severly overrun.
I had some serious offers made at the range this morning for two of my three AKs. They knew better than to ask about my Armalite, which is a collectible, early-model, stock AR-15.
Instapundit has a point:
Gun Rights Rallies in 49 States today – http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2013/01/19/rallies-for-gun-rights-in-49-states/
[…] Jacobson at Legal Insurrection has up a terrific post up on Gun Appreciation Day with video and pics. Good […]
Celebrate Gun Appreciation Day…while you still can.
Just went to a Gun Show in Mesa AZ. The line was way way too long. I saw a couple individuals making deals outside the event. My crew decided instead to go to a nearby shop with a range, but the parking lot there was full and we had to park down the street. There was a long wait for the range. So, we didn’t end up shooting. The guns my father wanted to look at were sold out. But we ran into multiple random acquaintances including my Dad’s boss.
Normally with that kind of service you’d be p*ssed. But I think I’d describe the feeling as gleeful but depressing anticipation.
At least people in my community are armed.
At least no one was shopping at Dicks.
Gee, all these people, and not a single incident of gun violence.
Maybe the MSM can do an investigation on why all these people with all these guns and no incidents?
I went to Academy Sports this evening. You know, it’s really hard to show them appreciation for guns when their shelves are bare due to the salesman of the century.
[…] Wil*liam Ja*cob*son noted the hour-long lines to get into the Jacksonville Gun Show. […]
Home run.
http://www.youtube.com/embed/miEmIfhfxuc
Text from this speech.
The past Monday I decided to visit the Minuteman Park in Lexington and pay tribute to Captain John Parker and his fellow minutemen. A thought came to my mind, that the founding fathers of the United States and Chairman Mao had one thing in common: they all realized that guns are important political instruments. Their similarities, however, ended there:
Chairman Mao wrote: ‘Political power grows out of barrel of a gun’, and he dictated: ‘The party shall command the gun’. James Madison and his compatriots, however, believing that the power of the state is derived from the consent of the governed, ratified that ‘the right to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed’.
23 years ago, I was a college freshman exercising my freedom of speech and assembly in Tian’anmen Square, much like we are doing here today. We grew frustrated by the restriction of personal freedoms and the corrupted Chinese government, and we thought peaceful protest would make the country better. Our young passion and patriotism was crushed by hails of full metal jackets out of AK47’s. (Some AK purists here would argue they were really type 56’s). We could not fight back, because we did not have an inch of iron in our hands, to borrow a Chinese expression: we were unarmed.
Gun owners like us often say: the Second Amendment is the protector against a tyrannical government. Some may argument that a man with a rifle is no match to the military machines of today, so such beliefs are no longer relevant. However, 20 million peaceful Beijing citizens in 1989, sure wished that they had a few million rifles in their hands!
Freedom is not free. Liberty has costs. We recognize that in this free society, criminals or mentally deranged could get weapons and murder the innocents. The answer, however, is not to disarm the law abiding citizens. Not only criminals and the deranged will violate the laws anyway, but more importantly, when a government turns criminal, when a government turns deranged, the body count will not be five, ten or twenty, but hundreds, like in Tian’anmen Square, or millions, counted in the 90-year history of the Chinese Communist Party.
Our constitutional republic may look fuzzy and loving today (if you think so, I’ve got a TSA agent you should meet), but keep in mind that absolute power corrupts absolutely! And when a government has monopoly on guns, it has absolute power!
Do you know that the Chinese Constitution guarantees almost all the nice things we have here? It is written that Chinese citizens enjoy freedom of speech and religion, they have human and property rights, and that such rights cannot be taken away without due process of the law. And do you know what? Chinese people do not have the right to keep and bear arms. I assure you all those nice guarantees, are not worth the paper they are printed on, because when the government has all the guns, they have all the rights.
I was not born a citizen of the United States, I was naturalized in 2007. In 2008, I became a proud gun owner. To me, a rifle is not for sporting or hunting, it is an instrument of freedom. It guarantees that I cannot be coerced, that I have free will, and that I am a free man.
Now suppose the 20 million Beijing citizens had had a few million rifles, how many rounds should they have been ALLOWED to load into their magazines? 10? 7? How about 3?
Never, never, never give up the fight, my friends. It may be a small step that you give up your rifle, or a 30-round magazine, but it will be a giant leap in the destruction of this great republic.
In closing I will quote the words of Captain John Parker: “Stand your ground. Don’t fire unless fired upon. But if they want to have a war, let it begin here.”