This is a New York Times treat for this Memorial Day:

But beneath the timeworn political cycle on guns in the United States, the country’s appetite for firearms has only been increasing, with more being bought by more Americans than ever before.

The article doesn’t really ask why. The writers seem uninterested, but they do happen on some interesting facts in their analysis:

While gun sales have been climbing for decades — they often spike in election years and after high-profile crimes — Americans have been on an unusual, prolonged buying spree fueled by the coronavirus pandemic, the protests last summer and the fears they both stoked.

In March last year, federal background checks, a rough proxy for purchases, topped one million in a week for the first time since the government began tracking them in 1998. And the buying continued, through the protests in the summer and the election in the fall, until a week this spring broke the record with 1.2 million background checks.

“There was a surge in purchasing unlike anything we’ve ever seen,” said Dr. Garen J. Wintemute, a gun researcher at the University of California, Davis. “Usually it slows down. But this just kept going.”

Not only were people who already had guns buying more, but people who had never owned one were buying them too. New preliminary data from Northeastern University and the Harvard Injury Control Research Center show that about a fifth of all Americans who bought guns last year were first-time gun owners. And the data, which has not been previously released, showed that new owners were less likely than usual to be male and white. Half were women, a fifth were Black and a fifth were Hispanic.

You would think those statistics would give Democrats and the gun grabbers pause. The people who are most negatively affected by gun violence are the very people who are choosing to arm themselves. It’s not just about angry white militias anymore. Count me among the not-angry, Black militia who, not only wants to exercise my 2nd Amendment rights, but to have the means to protect myself and my loved ones. Not only did I purchase two firearms in 2020 and 2021, but I became a part of a national gun group, “The Black Americans National Gun Club” (BANG).

I love it.

From their “About” statement:

The Black Americans National Gun Club or B.A.N.G promotes responsible gun ownership and gun safety in the African American community. While we welcome more experienced gun owners and shooters, our goal is to reach out to those with little experience with firearms. By doing this, we hope to change some of the misconceptions some in our community have about firearms.

I love the three prongs of 1) safety, 2) education, and 3) proficiency. In my own struggles to improve all three, the biggest obstacle is the government that wants to overprice, limit, and outright destroy my Second Amendment rights. Their overreach effectively obstruct my ability to protect myself and my family.

With the current drives to defund the police, and the Soro-backed, criminal-loving district attorneys like George Gascón in Los Angeles and Kim Foxx in Illinois making crime a spectator sport, it is no wonder that the people arming themselves has increased, and continues to rise. Call it the law of unintended consequences, but I am sure the Democrats did not see this as the byproduct of their gun control and criminal justice reform agenda. They built this, and they should be proud. Instead, they are chagrined.

Asian hate crimes have been all over the news, and Democrats have been slathering and virtue-signaling over this in order to make points, while upholding racist admissions standards against Asian Americans, backing proposals to remove standardized testing for colleges and universities, and gifted and AP programs at which AAPI students excel. Hat tip to my Asian friends who see the naked hypocrisy, and are acting on their own to protect their own.

I recently attended a two-day gun training last month, and three of the participants were two mid-30s Asian females, one with their 10-year-old daughter. My colleague Brandon Morse reported on the creation of the Asian American and Pacific Islander Gun Owners (AAPIGO) to train and represent Asian-Americans when it comes to firearms and firearm ownership.

Bottom line: Many Blacks, Asians, women, and other minority groups have finally woken up to the fact that the very freedoms that we have taken for granted are being eroded rapidly, and we see with our waking eyes what effect it has had on us, and our communities. We are saying we will no longer be victims to their social engineering schemes.

Kira’s wrote a very sagacious article asking quite simply, If You’re Terrified of White People With Guns, You Should Buy A Gun:

The completely unsurprising response from the usual suspects is to draft more gun laws and limit access. But isn’t that just making it harder for minorities to protect ourselves from the scourge of white supremacists and their guns? Unless you’re going to repeal the Second Amendment and ban all guns, there doesn’t seem to be much logical point in preventing the oppressed from protecting themselves against the oppressor.

But “the usual suspects” think of themselves as Saviors, not oppressors. They are the ones who need a wake up call.