Or maybe they do but can’t bring themselves to admit what every sane, informed and intelligent American knows intuitively. On the other hand, they ARE Brits, and Great Britain is today one enormous gun-free zone in which criminals and terrorists - both of whom seem to have no problem accessing firearms - are making everyday life oh-so interesting for a disarmed people.

What I find amusing is the reporter’s gullibility: he interviewed the president of Smith & Wesson and took everything the man said on face value - oblivious to the fact that no firearms manufacturer in his right mind would ever say publicly what all Americans know privately.

Mike Golden, chief executive at Smith and Wesson, is sceptical about the so-called Obama effect on gun sales, believing that his company’s booming revenues have “nothing to do with the administration” and everything to do with the economy.

“People are worried about personal protection with unemployment and crime on the rise,” he said in a presentation to investors, adding that 30 per cent of customers who had bought the company’s guns in the first half of this year were “first-time gun owners”, up from 9 per cent nine a year earlier.

Randy Williams, industry editor at Hoover, the research firm, agreed. “As an example of the personal safety and terrorism aspect, Smith & Wesson’s hunting rifle sales in 2009 dropped about 33 per cent at a time when the company’s other gun sales — revolvers, pistols, Walther imports, and tactical rifles — grew 33 per cent,” he said.

I can almost picture comedian Jon Lovitz in his Tommy Flanagan character in the role of Mike Golden being interviewed by a reporter from the Times On-Line:

Times On-Line: Mr. Golden, there are many people attributing the recent enormous surge in the sales of handguns, shotguns and tactical rifles to fear among the American populace that the Obama administration is attempting to transform your republic into some sort of fascist oligarchy where private ownership of guns is forbidden. Do agree?

Mike Golden: Absolut— I mean NO. Not at all. Why, just look around you. The Ft. Hood shooting, for example. People are afraid.

Times: That may very well be, Mr. Golden, but the Ft. Hood shooting took place only a couple of weeks ago. Gun sales have been surging ever since President Obama got elected.

Golden: Uh……yeah. Well…uh….they’re psychic. Yeah, that’s the ticket….the American people are psychic. They foresaw the massacre a year ahead of time.

Times: Um, Mr. Golden, if the American people were all psychic as you propose, they would not have elected Mr. Obama, would they?

Golden: Of course not. What a silly idea. Of course they’re not psychic. I meant forward thinking. Yeah, that’s it…forward thinking. Besides, crime is always a problem and criminals possess thous—milli—-TEN BILLION hand guns. Yeah, that’s ticket. In the face of that kind of firepower, the American people have no choice but to ammo up.

Times: According to the most recent statistics, crimes committed with firearms have more or less leveled off between 2006 and 2008 and there does not appear to be a statistically significant upswing in 2009.

Golden: (wipes sweat from brow) Oh yeah? Well what about reports of all those awful shootings this year, huh?

Times: Most of them were committed by people who legally owned their firearms.

Golden: Of course they were. I’m not a dummy. I knew that all the time. I mean all the crimes committed that aren’t reported. Why, there has to be hundre—thousan—MILLIONS of those kinds of crimes.

Times: There are no reports of them.

Golden: My point exactly. No one reports them. Yup…that’s the reason folks are arming up. It has nothing at all to do with fear of tyranny or the possibility that the administration will try to disarm the population. It’s all about crime and terrorism. Because everyone knows a well-armed populace is the best defense against a nuclear or biological attack.

I agree with Randy Williams’ assessment, however. People are purchasing fewer hunting rifles because fewer people are willing to spend hundreds of dollars on a bolt-action weapon when they can purchase a pump action shotgun or, for a few hundred dollars more, a semi-automatic assault weapon.

Let’s dispense with the diplomatic bullshit and cut to the chase: Mike Golden had no choice but to say what he did and the president of any other firearms manufacturer would say the same thing. The whole “personal protection and game hunting” spiel has become the standard song and dance routine trotted out by the manufacturers as well as the NRA because in this age of tender emotions, fragile psyches, political correctness and abysmal historical ignorance no one dares utter the REAL reason the Founding Fathers incorporated the Second Amendment into the Constitution.

They did not go to great pains to ensure that Americans would be guaranteed the right to keep and bear arms for sake of self-protection and deer hunting - although those reasons do place a distant second and third in the order I wrote them.

The real reason for the Second Amendment has everything to do with their fears for the distant future of the new nation. As I pointed out in Part 3 my epochal three-part post titled “The Last Bulwark of the Republic,”

The great men who created this republic had a deep intellectual and intuitive understanding of both history and human nature. They understood that just as a chain is as strong as its weakest link, the strength of a republic depends on its greatest weakness - in our case, human nature.

The Founders knew the day may come when the virtue, self-reliance, education and unity of the American people would be compromised and the principles of the republic pushed aside to accommodate the vulgar appetites of political power. They knew if this ever happened, the American people would be in danger of subjugation to tyranny - the very thing they pledged their lives, fortunes and sacred honor to oppose.

To forestall that possibility, they incorporated into the Constitution the right of every American to keep and bear firearms.

Simply stated, the Founding Fathers believed that governments should be afraid of the people, not the other way around and to ensure the stability and longevity of that arrangement, that the people should remain armed, as nothing serves to keep a government in line quite like a heavily armed populace.

The later history of the world vindicates their foresight. Even a cursory examination of the record demonstrates this. Every despotic regime seeking totalitarian power always preceded such a move by disarming its populace.

Those Americans who are not completely clueless, drunk on Obama Kool-Aid or awash in the tide of liberalthink understand this intuitively and great numbers of them are purchasing firearms and ammunition. It is conservatively estimated that between 65 and 70 million Americans own anywhere from 300 million to 350 million firearms of varying types and configurations - and those numbers are increasing with every passing month.

The Obama administration is aware of this and is therefore anxious to side-skirt the Second Amendment at every opportunity. Hence its effort to use the activities of Mexican drug cartel gang members here in the U.S. as a pretext to reinstate the assault weapons ban.

Just yesterday Robert C. Bonner, the former head of the U.S. Bureau of Customs Protection under both Bush Presidents, testified before Congress that a ban on assault weapons would slow down the Mexican drug war currently ravaging many parts of our country.

This, as I so eloquently observed in a previous post, is nothing more than a smokescreen.

Aside from the fact the overwhelming percentage of arms, ammo and munitions that find their way into Mexico do so from other countries, there remains the  fact that the violence creeping into the U.S. from Mexico could be very quickly and very easily stopped if the federal government did what it’s supposed to do: secure and protect the nation’s borders from foreign incursions while enforcing the immigration laws it created.

Amazing isn’t it? Congress spends its time doing what isn’t authorized anywhere in the Constitution to do while not doing what it is expressly authorized to do in both the preamble and Article I.

Why isn’t it focused on enforcing existing immigration laws? The answer, of course, is simple: the Democrat Party needs more voters to offset the numbers that Obama is costing them each and every day as more and more Americans wake up to the fact they were sold a bill of goods on November 4, 2008.