The National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) has informed us that the fastest growing segments for gun ownership are young, urban and female, so it should be no surprise at all that we’re seeing more stories like this one out of Jacksonville, Florida:
More Florida women are choosing to obtain a conceal-carry gun permit, according to the latest figures provided by the Florida Department of Agriculture, which handles the permitting process.
In a breakdown of who is legally permitted to carry, the state statistics show nearly one in four permits are held by women, the highest ever.
In the state, 1.2 million people are permitted to carry concealed weapons.
A Jacksonville businesswoman who did not want to be identified said she recently purchased a gun for self protection.
“It’s scary. All you have to do is sit down and watch the news and there’s a shooting almost every night or more,” she said.
Z Farhat fields calls from women at Green Acres Sporting Goods that on weekends offers the concealed permit class.
“It is over 50 percent (women) now taking our class where it was may be 10 percent a few years back,” said Farhat.
Did you catch what is driving this surge in gun ownership?
A Jacksonville businesswoman who did not want to be identified said she recently purchased a gun for self protection.
“It’s scary. All you have to do is sit down and watch the news and there’s a shooting almost every night or more,” she said.
And there it is. That is the cold, hard truth.
Yes, boys and girls in the media. You are doing far more to sell guns that Wayne LaPierre and the NRA ever dreamed.
The irony is that you in the media are selling these guns using the very “fear tactics” that you accuse the gun industry of using (which they don’t actually use, as anyone familiar with gun industry advertising could tell you).
Day in and day out, local newspaper and television news programs parade armed robberies and murders in your local headlines, and splash police tape and ambulance lights across our television screens. After every tragedy, you in the mainstream media parade out ideologically compromised “experts” that all seem to draw a paycheck (directly or indirectly) from one of a handful of ultra-left-wing foundations, or New York’s angry miniature billionaire, Michael Bloomberg.
You remind us daily about the actions of one evil and mentally ill young man, as if that is a valid excuse to disarm 100 million citizens.
Sandy Hook. Sandy Hook. Sandy Hook.
You promote shrill, self-righteous, and angry little bobbleheads like Shannon Watts of Moms Demand Action, or Bryan Miller of Ceasefire New Jersey, who consider every modern firearm an “assault weapon” to be banned, and who routinely call citizens who want merely to defend their families “domestic terrorists.”
Despite a decades-long national decline in overall violent crime, gun crimes of every kind, and gun accidents across every demographic, you in the media continue to spin, hype, and promote what you view as “the evils of guns.”
Yes, violent crime is down, everywhere, and has been declining for longer than most of your viewers and readers have been alive.
Yes, violent crime is declining, even as firearms laws are being liberalized in most states across the nation. The reality is—and has always been—that societies that competently protect themselves from predators have fewer predators.
But do you target the criminals? Of course not! Do you target the politicians and community organizers that profiteer from supporting poverty, cultural depression, and dependence on government? No way!
Instead you vilify those who would refuse be docile lambs, ripe for slaughter.
Day in, and day out, you equate law abiding citizens to mass murderers, psychopaths, sociopaths, serial killers, and terrorists, merely for choosing the most effective firearms to defend themselves, their families, and their communities.
You do this while all but ignoring the career criminals, a popular culture that you have helped create through glorification and sensationalization of the crass and profane, and you have given a pass to the cultural leaders and politicians that have allowed our culture to fall so far, so fast.
You tell the citizenry that “guns are evil” in your overwrought op-eds and heavily-biased packaged news stories, but media consumers are becoming wise to you, and they’re starting to filter out at least the most important parts of your propaganda.