As gun sales surged in early 2009 the going joke among employees of gun manufacturers was that President Barack Obama was the “greatest gun salesman of all time.” The trouble with this backhanded complement, however, is Left-leaning news outlets have since used it to avoid something that really scares them.

As ABC put it, Americans are buying more Glocks and Berettas simply because they fear “a second Obama administration might restrict gun ownership.” Their reporting conveniently stops right there.

Before getting into why, I should note they’re partly right. For example, in December 2011 there was a record number of background checks (1,410,937) called into the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). According to the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) this was an increase of 24.5 percent over December 2010. (For those who don’t know, NICS was started in late 1998 to instantly determine whether a prospective buyer is eligible to purchase firearms or explosives. Not every NICS check results in a sale. A small percentage of people are denied for various reasons (keeping criminals from buying firearms is why we have this system), some simply decide not to purchase the gun and so on. So NICS checks statistics are like exit-poll data, they’re a pretty good indicator, but have margins of error.)

Now though the December 2011 number was a record there were actually slightly less, but still over 1.5 million NICS checks, in November of 2011. The only other November to break 1.5 million NICS checks was November of 2008—when President Obama won the presidency.

But the thing is the surge is gun sales didn’t begin in 2008. To understand what’s really going on, check out my column in Forbes.