When President Trump became the new American president, many (including me) thought the appetite for new gun sales in the USA would decline significantly. However, gun sales are remaining very strong in the USA as private American citizens seem to have an insatiable appetite for more guns. On “Black Friday,” the day after the Thanksgiving Holiday in the USA, Americans set a record for the number of new guns purchased on one day…ever. On that one day, the FBI processed more than 200,000 background checks for new gun purchase requests (first link). Since each request can be for a single gun or for a few guns or for many guns by each buyer initiating the request, no one knows how many guns were bought in that one day, but it safe to say that the number was significantly higher than just 200,000 guns. [If you think this post is just for Americans, you will see by the end of this post it is for people in many nations.]
The background check system was apparently initiated in late 1998 as the second link offers monthly numbers of gun purchase requests from December 1998 through October 2017. It shows that 278,483,454 gun purchase requests were made during that time by American civilian gun buyers (these totals do not include military purchases). Having grown up in America from boyhood until now, I can attest that the USA was awash in guns prior to December 1998. The above total is just the number of new gun purchase requests during the last 18 years, so there could easily have been 400,000,000 or more new guns purchases by American civilians in that time. Add to that all the hundreds of millions of guns that were in private hands prior to December 1998 and it can be very conservatively estimated that American civilians have over 600,000,000 guns at present. Allow me to give a personal perspective on gun ownership and use. Readers in other nations which do not allow civilians to own guns may marvel at the information below.
In the region of the USA where I grew up in a prairie state, guns were so common that they scarcely drew any attention. I can recall at age 12, going to my public school where the NRA had gun-instructors to teach us kids how to safely and accurately use shotguns (which I promptly used when shooting pheasants at age 12 with my little .410 gauge shotgun!). At age 12, my father also thought that it was important for me to know how to shoot rifles accurately so he hired an NRA instructor to give me private tutoring with a variety of rifle calibers. The instructor was an ex-military man, and he was a good teacher. I can still recall him teaching me how to field clean a gun in a farm field and tutoring me how to hit targets with a long-distance scope at hundreds of yards away. He would set up a test for me with the rifle and scope positioned on sand bags for firing stability and I’d shoot at targets he had pre-positioned at considerable distances. It was great fun for a 12-year-old! I passed his test with flying colors. If I told you how difficult the final test was, you might not believe it…so I’ll tell you anyway (readers in non-American nations might marvel that boys and youth are receiving this kind of weapons training at very young ages). When I was age 12, chemical farming was rare and there were all kinds of gophers and critters running across rural roads. My instructor had me sit on the hood of his car and he drove at a very low rate of speed on a rural gravel road. My assignment was to shoot two gophers with two rounds and both had to be “head shot kills.” I passed the test on my first attempt, and the instructor went wild with cheering. He then told me that no one had ever passed his “final test” before as he deliberately designed it to be frustrating for his students. Later, in secondary school, it was common for teachers and students to pop open our car trucks during recesses to compare the shotguns we’d all be using to hunt pheasants or ducks after school. Guns on public school property was not only permitted then, it was routine. That is just my personal early history with firearms. I was hardly alone. Many fathers arranged for their sons (and daughters) to be very competent with firearms. By the time many American youth in our southern, prairie and mountain states reach mature adulthood, they can fire weapons with an accuracy that, I believe, would amaze military drill instructors in many foreign nations. I truly believe that.
Readers in Australia are aware that that government has virtually disarmed its citizens via gun confiscations and gun buybacks. British and Canadian citizens have no right to own guns. Many nations in Europe either forbid civilian ownership of guns or restrict it heavily. You will all find the third link to be so amazing that you better be “sitting down” while you read it. The government in my state, South Dakota, is auctioning approximately 300 firearms to citizens who offer the highest bids. One gun to be sold by our state to some private citizen is a .50 caliber semi-automatic rifle (pictured with a scope). It appears to be a bolt-action rifle from its photo so this is essentially a military-grade sniper rifle. Has anyone “out there” fainted yet? Many readers are surely in nations where they cannot purchase even a puny .22 caliber rifle at a public store. Yet, in my state, the government is selling a military sniper rifle at auction to the highest civilian bidder! Even that is a very small issue here. In much of America, you can enter a gun shop with hundreds (if not thousands) of new and used guns for sale to anyone with a clean criminal record (that is what those FBI gun purchase requests keep track of). I’ll admit I’m glad I live in the USA which has an iron-clad, civilian gun-ownership right in our Constitution. I think all nations should have similar gun-purchase rights.
Readers of my blog and articles realize that I believe the USA was formed as the modern, “latter day” nation of the Israelite tribe of Manasseh, and that our brother Anglo-Saxon nations are the Israelite tribe of Ephraim (see my free article, The USA in Bible Prophecy as well as my books on this topic available at my homepage). I do not ask anyone to take these conclusions “on faith,” I can prove it with secular facts and biblical prophecy. Other Israelite tribes from the so-called “lost ten tribes” of Israel are found throughout Europe, Scandinavia, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and other nations. In World Wars I and II, the USA became the “arsenal of Democracy” to defend and rescue many nations from oppression and subjugation. At the end of the latter days, Ezekiel 38-39 prophesies that the Gog-Magog alliance (headed by Russia, China and Iran) will launch a surprise attack on all the modern nations of the ten tribes of Israel (and their allies). The God of the Bible clearly exists and is guiding global affairs because he has provably assembled the Gog-Magog alliance right before our modern eyes! Russia is our traditional Cold War rival, Iran calls us the “Great Stan,” and China is rapidly militarizing to defeat the USA in warfare, and these three nations are all allied to each other. When this massive age-ending, global war begins, will your nation have the guns in its citizens’ hands to repel it? Ezekiel 38:21 foretells that when this invasion occurs, God calls on all the people in the modern Israelite nations to fight back against the Gog-led invasion with their own weaponry! The modern nations of Russia, China and Iran know the history of World Wars I and II very well, I’m sure. They know that if the USA is given freedom to industrialize and make weaponry, it will make enough weapons to defeat any foe. This time, they will attack the USA in the opening phase of the war and they will do so from out of the north (Ezekiel 38:15) in an airborne invasion (Ezekiel 38:16). Europe and Scandinavia (all of NATO) will be attacked too, but it is in the USA where the invaders will meet a host of extremely well-armed citizens eager to join the military effort to fight the invaders. In my books, I point out the historic connection of Manasseh to the modern Americans via the Scythian tribes that once lived in South Russia before they migrated en masse into Europe as the Goths, Germans, Anglo-Saxons, Jutes, etc.). The Scythian tribe that I believe is most clearly identified with the modern Manassehites (the Americans) was the Scythian tribe of the Massagetae. The Greek historians record that the ancient Persians under King Cyrus the Great invaded the land of the Massagatae with a huge army to conquer it. The result? The Persian army was annihilated and King Cyrus was killed as well. Ezekiel 38-39 foretells a similar outcome for the Gog-Magog invasion of the Israelite nations. Ezekiel 39:2 foretells the invading hosts from the Gog-Magog nations will suffer a 83.3% fatality rate! Given the gun-ownership in US civilian hands, it helps explain why so many invaders could fall in any invasion of the USA. It may be true that the US civilian population has more personal arms (long-guns and handguns) than are possessed by all the armies of the world. Personally, I think God gave the USA a Constitution with our Second Amendment because he was pre-positioning the USA to have the weaponry to resist the final Gog-Magog invasion that God knew would be in our future.
In World War II, the Japanese did not invade the US West Coast even though it was largely undefended at the start of the war. There is a quote (possibly apocryphal) attributed to Japanese Admiral Yamamoto, that it would be futile to invade America because civilian gun ownership was so high that “there would be a gun behind every blade of grass.” Even if Yamamoto didn’t originate the quote, Japanese military officers were familiar with it soon after World War II ended (fourth link and fifth link). The essential wisdom of that quote was true in 1941, and it is vastly more true today.
It may be that world events will indicate a great climactic, age-ending war is about to occur, and the western democracies will suddenly realize that they have a great need to arm their civilian populations. Where can they turn to to accomplish such a goal than to the USA? There is a precedent for just such a thing to happen. In World War II when the British stood alone against the Nazis after Dunkirk, they had a desperate need to arm their unarmed citizens in a Home Guard to defend the British islands from an expected invasion by the Nazis. It was the US civilian population which sent shiploads of rifles, shotguns and handguns to the British civilians so they could be armed to repel a Nazi invasion (sixth link and seventh link). Maybe modern Americans will be asked to quickly donate some of their weapons to help defend their European, Scandinavian, Canadian and Australian brothers in a future imminent crisis. Given the statistics in the first two links, there will be an abundant supply of weapons that the Americans can give to help other nations prepare for an invasion.
For an in-depth examination of the biblical prophecy in Ezekiel 38-39 and what it portends for our future, please read my article, What Ezekiel 38-39 Reveals about a Future World War III. To understand the evidence supporting the linkage of the modern western democracies to the ancient ten tribes of Israel, I urge you to order my 4-book set on the subject or obtain my downloadable E-book on the subject for just $12.99–both are available at my website’s homepage. Hosea 1:10 prophesied that when the ancient ten tribes went into exile, God would vastly increase their numbers after their exile into their new locations. A vastly-increased population automatically means that the Israelite tribes must be found among the larger and more powerful kingdoms and empires in post-exilic historical times and among the large nations in the modern world. My books reveal the evidence that God’s promise in Hosea 1:10 was kept…on a vast scale.
- https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/11/25/black-friday-posts-new-single-day-record-gun-checks-more-than-200-000/894706001/
- https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/nics_firearm_checks_-_month_year.pdf/view
- http://www.argusleader.com/story/news/2017/11/29/want-buy-military-rifle-state-plans-sell-off-surplus-arsenal-saturday/902489001/
- https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Isoroku_Yamamoto
- https://www.quora.com/How-do-you-feel-about-the-quote-You-cannot-invade-the-mainland-United-States-There-would-be-a-rifle-behind-every-blade-of-grass
- https://www.americanrifleman.org/articles/2015/5/28/throwback-thursday-send-a-gun-to-defend-a-british-home/
- https://www.forgottenweapons.com/vintage-saturday-send-a-gun-to-defend-a-british-home/
