Unless you’re very wealthy you probably won’t be able to buy any of the firearms or high-capacity magazines currently threatened by legislation.
After the election in November an expected rush on guns and ammo had the market stretched to the limit. After the appalling tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut, unprecedented panic buying has taken every last gun and magazine that could possibly be banned off the retail market. You can buy them on the secondary market for multiples of their retail prices, but it will be months before existing backorders are filled and regular consumers can find reasonably-priced high-capacity mags or guns that work with them for sale. Fortunately, some classes of guns that are useful for personal and home defense, like revolvers and shotguns, do not seem particularly threatened by current legislation.
However, there are three things that you can and should do in the meantime to try to avert further infringements on your natural and constitutional rights to keep and bear arms:
1. Educate yourself and others. A great deal of gun control legislation is based on ignorance and misinformation — from firearms and how they work to how they are used in practice.
2. Contact your representatives in state and federal government and let them know that you want them to protect the rights of all competent citizens to keep and bear arms, to include all firearms suitable for defensive and militia use.
3. Get a permit to carry concealed firearms. Even if you don’t own a gun you should have a permit to carry because:
- It’s usually faster to buy a gun, should you need one, than to get a permit to carry it concealed.
- Active permits are a strong indicator and important statistic of pro-gun sentiment. Increasing this number is a good way to show governments and activists that more citizens want to secure their right to self defense. But they’re not the only ones watching: Violent criminals are very wary of encountering armed resistance. Some are deterred as the perceived odds of running into armed citizens increases.