Since the February 14 shooting at a Parkland, Florida high school, the anti-gun rhetoric has flown hard and heavy. Gun owners have been demonized, and the NRA has been labeled a terrorist organization. The left has done everything it can to stigmatize gun owners, making it socially taboo for gun owners to speak up.

Despite that, however, there’s been yet another increase in firearm sales based on NICS checks, a typical proxy for gun sales.

In fact, the 2,767,699 NICS checks from March 2018 stand as the third most of any month, ever. The FBI launched the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) back in 1998. Since then, the FBI has completed 285.5M checks successfully. Granted, not all of those represent firearm sales, the numbers do represent a gauge of firearm-purchase and -permitting activity. Looking deeper into the FBI’s NICS numbers, about 1.4 million of those March 2018 checks came from firearm sales. These include 781,000 transactions for handgun purchases and just shy of 541,000 for long guns.

The anti-gunners have done everything they can to push gun owners to the margins of society. They’ve tried to ostracize us from the conversation, yet gun sales keep surging. Why is that?

Some gun control advocates will claim that the mass shootings themselves spur sales like this, implying that we’re all psychos in the making and want to buy guns just like the killers.

The thing is, if you talk with anyone who buys a gun after something like this, they’re primarily in one of two camps. One is the people who were going to buy a gun anyway. Whatever events happened had no bearing on what they were going to do in the first place.

The other type is made up of those who may have wanted a gun at some point but kept putting it off until the anti-Second Amendment rhetoric started. They rush out and buy a gun because they want to get one before they’re banned. They understand that many gun laws have some grandfather clause in them and they want to have that gun before it’s too late. Maybe they already own guns and want another. Maybe this is their first gun. Either way, they’re motivated by the threat to their Second Amendment rights.

It’s hilarious when you think about it. Gun grabbers are fueling the industry they despise. The irony is thick here.

Meanwhile, gun sales will continue to increase until gun control advocates cool the rhetoric, which they won’t.

That’s good for business, though. It’ll help firearm manufacturers burn through their surplus and have to ramp back up production, making the industry more robust as a whole.

Without a doubt, the anti-gun left will try to spin these numbers to mean something evil. But, then again, these are the same people who want to make owning an AR-15 as socially unacceptable as wearing fur or owning ivory. Their opinions of us and the uptick in sales would be irrelevant were it not for their intense and vocal desire to strip us of our constitutionally protected rights.