For eight years, gun sales continued to increase as many felt concern over their right to keep and bear arms would come under attack by a vehemently anti-Second Amendment Obama administration. While Obama did make a few anti-gun moves, he didn’t have a complicit legislature that would go along with his whims. The best he could do were some executive orders.

With the threat of a Hillary Clinton administration looking like a certainty, manufacturers dug in and tried to get ahead of the potential demand that they only saw increasing…

…only to see Donald Trump be elected president.

Demand crashed and crashed hard.

However, it seems Virginia Governor Ralph Northam is ready to step in and take the crown as gun salesman of the year.

Firearms sales skyrocketed in Virginia and also increased nationally in February, according to new data from the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF). The NSSF’s adjusted National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) data shows that Virginia performed nearly 66,000 background checks in February alone, a 63.4% increase from the roughly 40,000 performed a year earlier. Virginia’s numbers have increased over the past four months, dating back to last November, when the most recent elections took place. The rise coincides with a newly elected legislature that is increasingly hostile towards the Second Amendment and the right to keep and bear arms. Multiple pieces of legislation, including a limit on handgun purchases, a red-flag law and much more, advanced during the state’s 2020 Legislative Session. “It’s a trend we’re seeing in Virginia. What that’s telling us is that Virginians are voting with their wallets. The Virginia legislature and governor are not listening to their citizens,” Mark Oliva, NSSF public affairs director, told America’s 1st Freedom. “We defeated probably the most-egregious bill, still, some very bad ones went through. [Virginians] are buying the firearms they want while they can before their rights are infringed.”

The debate about guns in Virginia and the potential for civil unrest stemming from those laws has also managed to spur a nearly 17 percent increase in gun sales across the nation.

While some of the national increase is because of Virginia’s huge bump in gun sales, it doesn’t account for it all.

Instead, a lot of people are looking at Virginia and trying to buy up guns just in case. After all, Northam’s antics have sparked many to be worried about a civil war beginning in the Old Dominion State and then spreading across the nation. It’s not a completely unreasonable concern, either. After all, Northam’s proposals are downright draconian.

Couple that with the Democrats push on guns and the media’s warning that public opinion supports them on this–something I’m not really convinced of, to be sure–then it’s a perfect storm to effectively kill the so-called “Trump Slump.”

That’s a win for manufacturers, at least in the short term, but less of a win for us.

After all, as we’re seeing now with the Covid-19 scare, people are ready to go out and buy guns and ammo to the point that we’re starting to see shortages reported. It ain’t just toilet paper being hoarded, folks.

That’s likely to help the gun manufacturers’ bottom line as well.