Police chief defends gun rights, forced to resign

FPI / June 26, 2020

The police chief of Lowell, Michigan has resigned amid pressure over a Facebook post in which he upheld the Second Amendment.

Chief Steve Bukala mentioned how some people were going to "open carry" following riots in Grand Rapids on May 30.

Lowell city leaders said they did not object to Bukala writing about the people open carrying. What the chief wrote immediately after that is what offended them.

Bukala wrote: “We at the Lowell Police Department support the legally armed citizen and the Second Amendment.”

Saying that Bukala took a “political” position,” Lowell City Manager Michael Burns said that the police chief's support of the Second Amendment was “hostile.” Bukala was going to be fired if he didn't resign, Michigan Live reported.

Bukala had been with the Lowell Police Department for more than 24 years and became chief in 2013.

"If politicians and social justice warriors keep it up, law enforcement will be run by the bottom feeders of society," Travis Yates wrote in a LawOfficer.com post. "We are now cancelling the careers and character of police chiefs because they actually support the Bill of Rights? This is the only profession where you can do nothing wrong and get destroyed!"

But there was more to the story. It involved a photo of Bukala not wearing a face mask while in public, as mandated under Democrat Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's draconian coronavirus lockdown order.

Bukala had posted a photo on his personal Facebook page that showed he and his wife in front of a Home Depot. His wife was wearing a mask but Bukala had his mask on his elbow.

Burns included it in his disciplinary report on Bukala.

"That’s right, Burns couldn’t stop there. After all, every coward needs a smoking gun," Yates wrote.

"You know, a little bit of extra to attack good men and women behind the badge just in case the first thing doesn’t stick when you need it. And for this, cowards always take the easy route which is to search everything they have ever said at anytime to anyone on any platform, remove the context and find that little 'outrage' that can put the cherry on top of that cancelled career."

Gun, ammo sales surge among calls to defund police

Sales of guns and ammunition are surging nationwide amid the leftist mob and many Democrat politicians' calls to defund or abolish police.

National Shooting Sports Foundation figures show that the surge in gun sales has been marked by a high volume of handguns. In fact, “semi-automatic handguns outpaced shotguns by a two-to-one margin as the weapons of choice among first-time gun buyers.”

Breitbart News Second Amendment reporter AWR Hawkins noted: "The purchase of handguns over other types of guns indicates self-defense as a purchasing factor."

Southwick Associates’ Rob Southwick noted, "Anything that can cause people to feel unsafe in relation to possible physical crime to self, others, and property can drive firearm sales."

Breitbart News reported that the number of firearm background checks conducted in May of this year shattered the previous record for the number of background checks conducted in the month of May. FBI numbers show 3,091,455 NICS checks were conducted in May, easily surpassing the previous record of 2,349,309 checks set in May 2019.

And May came on the heels of April's record-setting number of background checks, as there were more NICS conducted in April of this year than in any April since background checks on gun sales began being conducted in April 1999.

Free Press International