The Best Gun Salesman is Barack Obama

Just eleven days after San Bernardino, guns were selling like hotcakes at a gun show near San Diego

“CHECK & CLEAR ALL GUNS HERE” reads the welcome booth at the Crossroads of the West Gun Show in Del Mar, California. It’s a beautiful Sunday in December, less than two weeks after 14 people were mowed down just 100 miles to the north in San Bernardino. The booth is manned by two security guards in matching khaki uniforms and a Crossroads employee. Their job is to prevent loaded guns from making it into the gun show, but they’re not entirely vigilant about it. There are no metal detectors, pat downs or body scanners — this gun check booth runs on the honor system.

About 15 feet away is the box office, where tickets to the gun show cost $14 (no identification needed). Ticket in hand, the only thing standing between me and an armory’s worth of guns and ammo is 50 feet of pavement and a 20-something blonde woman. She rips my ticket and thanks me through a huge smile.

It’s bewildering. I imagined a gun show would have TSA-level security — perhaps a stern woman would demand my documentation while her colleagues rifle through my bag and wave a wand at my crotch. Instead, the vibe is family-friendly, like a suburban block party.

Couples walk arm-in-arm. Food tents sell tri-tip and artichoke sandwiches and “gourmet” coffee. A group of teenage bros ramble the show floor like they’re at the mall. Merchants hawk model planes and military history books while friends discuss their respective fantasy football teams. A dad pushes a stroller with his left hand while his right caresses a display of AR-15 barrels, and a vendor selling hoverboards jokes they’re “the best way to get away from a gun!”

But for now, there’s no escaping this cache of heavy weaponry. It’s unnerving for a guy like me who gets anxious around guns — whenever I know there’s a gun in the area, I imagine the owner will have a sudden, psychotic break and murder everyone in sight.

Gun owners often have a similar daydream, only their version is a fantasy — and it ends with them exercising their Second Amendment right and dropping that motherfucker dead in his tracks.

“The best gun salesman in the world is Barack Hussein Obama,” Paul Witty, a gun safety instructor, tells me from a booth inside the show.

Just a week ago, the president responded to the terrorist attack in San Bernardino — a mass shooting planned and executed by a radicalized Muslim couple — with an impassioned plea to Congress to enact tighter gun laws. The American public has responded by buying guns in droves.

Gun sales hit a record high in 2015. The government conducted 23.1 million background checks for gun purchases and gun permits, a 10-percent jump from 2014 and the most since the background check system began in 1998. Wall Street rejoiced with the news that December was the best gun sales month ever — all of which was a month before Obama’s tearful pledge to impose gun restrictions by executive order.

Mike Cerda, CEO of San Diego-based gun shop Team Big Shot, tells me he sold more guns yesterday than he has in his past two gun shows combined. Other merchants sold out of inventory altogether, Cerda says. “You and I wouldn’t have even been able to hear one another [yesterday]. That’s how crowded it was,” Randy, 57, explains from across his table of gun clips.

“A LITTLE GUN HISTORY” titles an orange flyer on Witty’s booth. “In 1911, Turkey established gun control. From 1915 to 1917, 1.5 million Armenians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.” The flyer goes on to list similar historical examples: Stalinist Russia, Hitler’s Germany, China under Zedong.

To these guys, every call for gun control is a signal guns must be purchased immediately — before the government bans their sale altogether. The underlying fear is that curbing the right to bear arms is just the first step toward a government-backed genocide.

So when an anti-gun President says he’s willing to circumvent the legislative process to impose restrictions on gun sales … well, that’s a a gun owner’s greatest fear realized. Gun advocates distrust the government, except when it affords them the right to bear arms.