Area Gun Sales Way Up: What Does It Mean?

Fox 59 News had a story tonight about the surge in area gun sales this year. Don's Guns, the city's largest gun seller, reports its sales are up 200% over last year. Don Davis believes the higher gun sales mean law-abiding citizens are arming themselves to protect against the growing crime problem and that's a good thing. I believe the gun sales are driven, at least in part, by people's fear of a complete economic collapse in this country. The sight of the U.S. Marines staging urban warfare simulations in our city this summer fueled concerns among many that our own government was making preparations for an inevitable meltdown. The recent flurry of activity by our government to bail out the banking industry and the unsettled stock market confirms our suspicions. If our banking system collapses and people have no access to cash or credit cards and employers can't meet their payrolls, it is not hard to imagine conditions spinning out of control in a very short period of time. I spoke to an area bank employee who says it has not been uncommon for people to come in and withdraw tens of thousands of dollars in cash and then proceed to deposit the money in their safe deposit box at the same bank. Some people are preparing for the worse.

In 1929, my great grandparents I'm told anticipated the collapse of the banking system. They kept their money in a safe in their farmhouse in rural Marshall, Illinois. On December 30, 1930, assailants broke into their home and shot to death both of my great grandparents but not before forcing my great grandfather to open his safe and turn over a sum of money and bonds thought to approximate $20,000, which was a lot of money in those days. More than 50 years later, my father would learn from a close family friend that the killers who escaped punishment were neighbors. Their parents had visited my great grandfather that very night to pay off a loan of $4,000. The family friend said the two brothers confessed the crime to him, but he kept it a secret all those years because they threatened to kill him if he told anyone. Ironically, the father of the two killers later was elected as the county treasurer. He and his wife attended our church and knew to their dying day the horrible crime their sons had committed. One of the killers himself became a murder victim a few years later in California. My father said the family always seemed to have a lot of extra money to spend. Bad economic times can make otherwise good people do some pretty horrible things.