This.  Even before the Patriot act the US was already turning into a surveillance state way back into the 1980s when it started to become practical to build databases of information on people.  The Patriot Act just meant that a lot of things they were already doing no longer had to be kept so secret.  Back in the 1980s up until the Snowden leaks, the government steadfastly denied spying on US citizens.  Now we know they were lying all along.  But up until they were outed, anyone who suggested that the NSA was recording even meta data from large numbers of US citizen phone calls, text messages and emails was ridiculed as being a tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist.

We've also seen Democratic regimes using the FBI and IRS to harrass anyone who is identified as a Republican or a conservative.  That goes back a long time.  And even though Democrats like to characterize anyone to the right of Chairman Mao as a fascist or Nazi, it is consistently the Democrats and their more left comrades that are the ones infringing on democracy.

I have no opinion on 80%arms, but you just described the furniture store business model.
Sell stuff that hasn't been made yet for twice what you can order it for and take a 50% deposit to secure your cost of ordering from the factory.
But, the way it worked in practice was you had net30 terms with the factory, so the first 50% was your profit and what the customer paid upon delivery would pay the factory. So you'd spend the deposit as soon as you got it.

Then if you go out of business before the stuff is delivered, suddenly the customer is an unsecured creditor when he never realized he was putting himself in that position. The store's broke, customer's money is long gone, and he has to start over with ordering his furniture somewhere else.

I pay with a credit card-based gift card and have John Smith at my address activate it.

This is a shit thread that belongs in GD. Didn’t bother reading all of the nonsense but 80% Arms is good people and do their part to fight for the 2A and stand up against the red coats. Some of the baseless accusations here reminds me that a portion of the 2A base is dumb as a bag of  hammers.