From the home of UGA as reported in the Athens Banner-Herald (via Jim Galloway):
A local gun shop that used Barack Obama’s name to hawk weapons has backed down, saying the message was meant to champion gun rights, not threaten violence.
Georgia Outdoor Sports owner Carrie Mentel said she advertised an “OBAMA SALE!” – on “GUNS AMMO ARCHERY” – outside her Hull store Wednesday morning, hours after the election, because firearms enthusiasts are worried the new Democratic president soon will step all over their Second Amendment right to bear arms.
But some passing motorists interpreted the sign as a call for violence against the country’s first black president.
I couldn’t find a photo of the sign. The one above is a billboard on the road to Athens from my town. We’re not alone here in Georgia. The NYTimes reports from Denver:
Sales of handguns, rifles and ammunition have surged in the last week, according to gun store owners around the nation who describe a wave of buyers concerned that an Obama administration will curtail their right to bear arms.
“He’s a gun-snatcher,” said Jim Pruett, owner of Jim Pruett’s Guns and Ammo in northwest Houston, which was packed with shoppers on Thursday.
And from Virginia AP reports:
When 10-year-old Austin Smith heard Barack Obama had been elected president, he had one question: Does this mean I won’t get a new gun for Christmas?
That brought his mother, the camouflage-clad Rachel Smith, to Bob Moates Sports Shop on Thursday, where she was picking out that special 20-gauge shotgun — one of at least five weapons she plans to buy before Obama takes office in January.
And from Wyoming last week All Things Considered had a story that gun sales had already spiked there. They interviewed sixty-eight-year-old Bill Tonicliffe(ph) hurrying to buy his Uzi:
I’m very concerned that this election goes the wrong way. There’ll be – they’ll find some way to attack our Second Amendment rights…
I’m not going to use it for hunting. It’s self-defense. But I guess we’re entitled to that also, aren’t we?
They also had a marketing guy from Smith and Wesson remembering that sales spiked “a good 20 to 30 percent” when Bill Clinton was first elected president.
The NRA poured $2 million into ads opposing Obama. Still, he was endorsed by the American Hunters and Shooters Association, a fact doesn’t make it in any of today’s stories. (The group may be a hotbed of gun liberalism; the top story on its website is about a gun maker losing his job for supporting Obama.)
Association president Ray Schoenke had this to say on NPR last week:
It’s manufactured distortions, misrepresentations, and outright lies… You know, this whole issue of guns being taken away is over. That dog doesn’t hunt anymore.
Maybe so, but gun shops see dollar signs.