There’s been an unending debate about how to curb gun violence so that we won’t experience more massacres like Sandy Hook. Whether it’s expanding background checks, or banning hi-cap magazines, or adding mental health data to NICS, there’s no end to the proposals, strategies and solutions.

But let’s be honest, the truth is that what the gun control folks really want is to get rid of the guns. Yea, yea, I know that everyone supports the 2nd Amendment. But the 2nd Amendment’s guarantee of gun ownership is about as important to Michael Bloomberg as the 1st Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom is to an atheist. Not that Bloomberg with his billions or Obama with his press conferences have been able to accomplish anything. But Mike the Gun Guy has a way they could get rid of all the guns without spending another dollar on campaign contributions or infringing on the 2nd Amendment at all.

Take a look at the monthly NICS totals published by the FBI. The highest monthly number of NICS background checks ever recorded since the system went live in 1998 was December, 2012, when the FBI phone bank received 2,783,765 calls. The previous month, November, was the first month that the system ever logged more than 2 million calls. Remember what happened in November, 2012? Someone named Obama got re-elected. Recall the date of Sandy Hook? December 16.

Within a six-week period the most liberal, anti-gun President got to sleep in the White House for another four years, and then a mass killing took place that sparked immediate calls for more gun control. From January 1 until March 31, NICS received another 7 million background check requests, and from November, 2012 through March 2013, total NICS calls almost hit 12 million. No wonder Smith & Wesson announced record revenues for the quarter ending April 30.

But a funny thing began to happen as the gun industry marched along. In May, following the defeat of Manchin-Toomey and other gun control schemes, NICS checks fell to 1,435,917 and in June dropped even further to 1,281,351. The June figure was the lowest since July 2011, and from what I hear and what I see in my shop, the figure for July will be lower still. In other words, since the high-point of last December, the drop is more than fifty percent! Please don’t post a comment about how NICS numbers can’t be trusted because so many guns can be sold without a background check. NICS obviously doesn’t cover all transactions, but it does cover virtually every new gun sold for the first time. So the NICS number may not be absolutely correct, but it’s a very good gauge for understanding sales trends in the gun industry.

If the decline in NICS continues, the FBI will conduct less than a million monthly background checks within the next several months, and by year’s end we could be back down to the pre-9/11 days of George W. Bush. Boom and bust is typical of the gun industry because spikes in sales are invariably the result of gun owners believing they won’t be able to buy more guns, rather than consumers entering the gun market for the first time. Surveys seem to indicate that the number of households with guns keeps declining, while the number of guns owned by Americans keeps increasing. Get it?

Gun sales have doubled from 2006 to 2012, but what the gun control crew should do to reduce the number of guns coming onto the market is to keep their mouths shut. No more Dianne Feinstein press conferences, no more Michael Bloomberg “straw sales” videos, no more Joe Biden playing Joe Biden. If gun owners stop worrying about “attacks” on the 2nd Amendment, they’ll stop buying guns. Less guns out there, less guns get into the wrong hands. The market can be a much more efficient way to regulate gun behavior than any government plan.

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