China seeks to profit from guns they decry :: 04/20/2023

I’ve taken aim at China and the Chinese state-run media’s fixation on seeing gun control passed here in the United States. It’s one thing to have opinions on the policies of another nation. It’s quite another to pretend that the voice of the media isn’t the voice of the government itself.

Yet China also seeks to profit from American gun rights as well.

A prime example came to me when a friend sent me a link to a Facebook posting selling a Life Card, a folding .22 single-shot pistol.

Now, that was reportedly sponsored as an ad, which goes against Facebook’s terms of service. Now, though, it’s dead, so maybe that was how they got around it.

The first, comment, though, was from the same account but included a link to a different site. There, they have the Life Card for just $39.99 “USD.” (All links are archived in case they disappear, for the record.)

While that particular link now says it must be shipped to an FFL, an earlier version of the page didn’t, which made me extremely curious. What statement there is, however, is phrased in such a way that it isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement.

You see, actual Life Cards run about $300 to $400.

How can you sell a firearm for 10 percent of its potential market value? Margins on firearm sales aren’t that good for most retailers.

Plus, since American companies can’t sell outside of the US in the first place, the “USD” seemed a little superfluous to me. So, I did a little digging.

That store’s URL is registered in…want to guess?

If you said China, then give yourself a prize.

Now, this is most likely a scam. No one can sell an actual firearm for that cheap, plus the earlier version that I saw that seemed to lack reference to an FFL was also a red flag.

Understand that private enterprise doesn’t really exist in China. The government has a stake in everything over there. As a result, it’s unlikely that someone is conducting such an enterprise without the government being aware to some degree. Even if they are scammers, the government has a stake in the URL registration company, the servers hosting the site, and so on.

They’re profiting off of it.

It’s not the only example, either. The full-auto switches that have turned regular handguns into machine pistols don’t come from Ikea, after all. While many are 3D printed, still more come via Chinese companies making, selling, and shipping them to the US.

For all of China’s supposedly humanitarian interest in gun control–they’ve actually called our gun rights a crime against humanity–they’re more than willing to profit off the people’s interest in firearms. Especially since China still makes plenty of firearms for export, including export to the United States.

See, the issue here isn’t that China is concerned about the lives of Americans. They don’t see our right to keep and bear arms as some human rights issue, no matter what they say.

They see it as a way to attack the United States.

Their state-run media continues to publish editorial content attacking our gun rights even as other areas seek to profit from them.

It’s why I can’t take anything the say seriously.

While Chinese imports are only a small segment of the lawful gun market and it’s unlikely that they represent a sizeable portion of the illegal gun market overall, they could still show their convictions by acting in accordance with them.

They don’t.

As such, they can write all the op-eds they want. They’re still just a totalitarian regime looking to foster division here in the US. That’s all they are and all they’ll ever be.

https://bearingarms.com/tomknighton/2023/04/19/china-guns-3-n69642