You’ve probably heard of the surge in gun sales after Obama got elected. This usually happens after a Democrat is elected president, but it strikes me as unusually short-sight and dim-witted.

For one thing, Obama’s stands on gun control are pretty moderate (not too different from John McCain’s, in fact), and a recent Supreme Court decision has upheld gun ownership rights; the idea that gun bans are imminent is weak at best.

However, far more significantly, any new gun laws that come about would be foreseeable pretty far in advance, especially any laws that outlawed various types of guns–the NRA and the Republican Party would both see to it that everyone knew what was happening well before it got to a vote. Obama won’t even take office for another two months, and the new Democratic gains in Congress similarly won’t take effect until then.

So the rush of gun buyers–in some places, up as much as 60%–is panic-buying by people who, to be quite frank, are not too smart. It seems to speak to their paranoia–that they seem to think that Obama and/or the Democrats will stealthily craft gun bans overnight and will send jack-booted thugs to round them and their weapons up the next morning. I would not be surprised if many of these people bury their guns in their backyards or otherwise try to hide them somehow.

Alternately, one could consider this opportunistic buying–people who had their eyes on such guns anyway, and this simply gave them an excuse to go out and make the expenditure. I doubt, however, that this explains all or even most of it, especially given the nature of the rhetoric out there, and how gullibly many hard-core right-wingers bought into so much of what the McCain campaign fed them.