Our friend AWR Hawkins at Breitbart made me smile with his headline, Kroger Profits Up 21 Percent After Refusing To Ban Guns.

In mid-August Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America launched a campaign pressuring Kroger to bar law-abiding citizens from openly carrying guns for self-defense in their stores. Kroger refused to change its policy and in the third quarter–“ending Nov. 8”–Kroger saw a “21 percent increase in profit…compared with the same period last year.”

According to Supermarket News, Kroger’s “net earnings for the quarter were $362 million.”

Breitbart News previously reported that Moms Demand launched their campaign on August 18. On that day Kroger subsidiary grocer Fred Meyer said it would not change its polices and less than two weeks later, Kroger said it would not be changing policies either. Both said they would continue to honor state and municipal laws at their store locations.

Moms Demand Action is primarily a social media and advertising campaign that uses a $50 million investment from Michael Bloomberg to feign the appearance of a large “grassroots” gun control organization.

While Moms Demand has done well online and in favorable local media stories, they have consistently failed to “put boots on the ground” in terms of having actual engaged protesters contributing time and money to their events.

When they attempted to “confront” the National Rifle Association in Indianapolis earlier this year, just 156 people showed up, including the media and the armed security guards and armored SUV driver of Moms Demand founder Shannon Watts. In contrast, the NRA annual meeting boasted a turnout of more than 70,000.

A recent protest of the Kroger’s shareholder meeting yielded just dozens of protesters.

Most lower-level Moms Demand protests draw less than a dozen activists, and these don’t appear to have much local interest, as the same handful of supporters tromps from city to city, forcing people to logically wonder if this “grassroots campaign” is nothing more or less than a small number of paid staffers in each state.

Curiously, while Moms Demand threatens boycotts in an attempt to punish businesses for allowing citizens to exercise their basic human right to self-defense, the more than 57,000 businesses that have declared themselves to be supportive of gun owners are seeing their profits soar.

It only makes sense.

Gun ownership is both more popular now than it has ever been, growing across demographic boundaries. More people own firearms now than at any previous moment in our Republic’s history. Despite spastic contractions in a few deeply anti-liberty states, gun rights overall are expanding nationwide as a result of both favorable court rulings and legislative action by a growing Second Amendment movement.

It seems obvious that siding on the side of rights and liberty is the right moral stance to take, but as Kroger is proving, it’s the right business decision to make as well.