Even as Joe Biden is tweeting out his support for a sweeping gun and magazine ban, plenty of Sleepy Joe’s neighbors in his home state of Delaware are embracing their Second Amendment rights. On today’s Bearing Arms’ Cam & Co. we talk about the booming gun sales in Delaware, as well as Biden’s inability to move the needle on a state-level gun and magazine ban that’s been percolating in the state legislature for two years now.

The Washington Free Beacon‘s Stephen Gutowski recently took a look at the record-setting surge in gun sales in several swing states and how it might impact the election. While I doubt that Delaware is going to go for Donald Trump in November, we are seeing the same surge in firearm sales that’s leaving store shelves bare and gun store owners struggling to keep up with demand.

According to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, there’ve been 46,084 firearms sold in Delaware since January 1st. That may not sound like a lot, but when you consider that Delaware is only home to something like 27 people, the numbers are actually pretty staggering.

Okay, Delaware actually has nearly 1,000,000 residents, but the 46,000 or so gun sales this year are already more than the number of firearms sold in all of 2019 in the state. In fact, Delaware gun sales are up nearly 100% compared to this time in 2019, when 26,063 background checks had been performed from January through August.

NSSF estimates that about 40% or so of those guns were sold to first-time gun buyers, which means that nearly 18,500 residents are exercising their Second Amendment rights for the even while Biden, the godfather of Democratic politics in the state, keeps encouraging Americans to put down their guns.

Those 18-thousand new gun owners may not be enough to turn Delaware red this year, but they very well could have an impact on state-level gun control laws. Anti-gun advocates have been trying for at least two years to push a ban on so-called assault weapons and high capacity magazines that’s similar to Biden’s proposal to ban the same items nationwide, but they’ve been unable to get the bills out of the Democrat-controlled state senate. Back in 2019 Delaware State News highlighted some of the opposition gun-banners have faced.

In April, gun control supporters scheduled a news conference to announce a package of three bills, following up on measures approved in 2018. In anticipation of the announcement, opponents planned a counter rally to make clear their displeasure. Individuals, many of them members of the Facebook group Delaware Gun Rights and all of them angered by what they saw as an unconscionable attack on their freedoms, turned out in a big way.

Opponents outnumbered supporters by a ratio of at least 3-1, and they were loud.

The three bills ended up failing due to fears of some Democratic lawmakers voting for the proposals would hurt the party at the polls in 2020.

Despite promising he would assign gun bills to a friendly committee, Senate President Pro Tempore David McBride, a New Castle Democrat, ended up playing a major role in the measures dying. Along with Majority Leader Nicole Poore, a New Castle Democrat, he joined the two Republicans on the Senate Executive Committee to block the bills.

“I got a sense that my caucus isn’t interested in doing this. I can tell you that straight up,” he explained in May. “You know, part of my job, I have to read tea leaves around there. And one of the things you do to be successful in this building — you have to learn how to count.”

Influential in the decision to kill the legislation was opposition from union members, a core Democratic constituency.

A couple of interesting bits here, starting with the fact that Democrats in Delaware were afraid that pushing for the gun ban in 2019 would hurt them at the polls in November of 2020. Sure enough, Democrats didn’t even attempt to pass the bill this year, though I wouldn’t be surprised to see it come back in 2021.

It’s also worth noting that opposition from union members helped kill the bill in 2019. Last week, I spoke with union member Jerry Wayne about the fact that many of his fellow union members in Detroit aren’t backing Biden because of his support for gun control, though they may lean Democratic in their political views beyond the right to keep and bear arms.

Perhaps this explains why Biden has been nearly silent on his anti-gun agenda, and why his sycophantic fans in the media didn’t highlight his tweet calling for a gun and magazine ban. Sure, Fox News reported on his tweet, but I can’t find any coverage from CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, Washington Post, or any of the broadcast news outlets. It’s almost like they believe that focusing on Biden’s support for gun control may do more harm than help to his campaign. If they really thought that playing up the Biden/Harris anti-gun agenda would be a benefit to the Democrats, I have a feeling that Biden’s tweet would have been front page news on Monday.