Gun sales have spiked over the last couple of years and it’s not difficult to understand why. It started with fears regarding the pandemic followed by weeks of rioting and then our current lawlessness. It’s not shocking that people bought firearms.

However, some have tried to argue that those firearm sales are the reason why we’re seeing increased crime.

Over at Fox News, experts say that’s not the case.

Violent crimes like murders have plagued the U.S. over the last two years, and many experts blame the fallout from the pandemic and 2020’s summer of protests and riots following the death of George Floyd.

The New York Times recently argued that 2020’s skyrocketing increase in legal gun purchases has also contributed to the spikes, an explanation experts are pouring cold water on.

“First off, let’s go back 30 years,” the Heritage Foundation’s Charles Stimson told Fox News Digital in a phone interview this month. “For the last 27, 29 years, our country has had a dramatic decrease in violent crime. Violent crime peaked in 1992-93, and it has been on the wane ever since then — until recently.

“That and that alone rebuts [The New York Times’] argument that increased legal gun ownership has contributed to this spike in crime. What, they didn’t do it for 30 years? Even though they bought tens of millions of guns between 92 and now.”

It’s a valid point.

While gun sales are soaring right now, they haven’t exactly been slack over the last few decades. Plus, guns don’t really expire, meaning each firearm purchased is another in circulation with almost none coming out of use.

If gun sales were the problem, we’d have seen it long before 2020.

Yet, as Cam noted earlier today, the American people don’t seem to be buying it. Of the potential causes for our spike in crime, guns are dead last. They just don’t see lawful gun sales as contributing, and why should they?

The truth of the matter is that you’re looking at, maybe, 10 percent of all criminals using guns they bought retail. Many of those are people who bought the gun years earlier, then decided to take up a life of crime for some reason, so the number who go out to buy a gun in a gun store, then commit a crime with it are probably single digits, at best.

As such, how could that alone account for such a massive surge in violent crime?

It just can’t, but why bother with facing that fact when you can advance a narrative? That’s all the New York Times managed to do.

It’s funny, too, because we’re told so-called ghost guns are the criminals’ preferred firearm, yet do you know what doesn’t come up in firearm sales figures? If you guessed unserialized kits, give yourself a cookie.

Now, that claim is total BS as well, mind you, but the two positions are at odds with one another. Why would criminals who are so willing to build a weapon go to a store to buy one instead? It makes no sense.

Then again, this is the New York Times we’re talking about here. They don’t have to make sense. Their readers not only don’t expect it, but generally don’t want it.

But when they talk crap, they need to be called on it like they are this time.