2022.0615.0007...

These articles are very disheartening...

How the AR-15 conquered America, as revealed by an industry insider

Sargent: Let’s talk about the assault weapons ban of 1994, which lapsed in 2004. What fundamentally changed after the ban lapsed?

Busse: The social stigma of AR-15s was removed. Then, 13 months after, George W. Bush signed the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act. It essentially says no firearms company or retailer can be sued for the unlawful actions of a consumer using the product, even if they market it irresponsibly.

Now the Daniel Defenses of the world stand back and basically say: “We’ve got 500 competitors, so we need to be really edgy in marketing. They just passed this law where we’re not even held to account if we market in ways that seem egregious.” Then the course was set.

Sargent: Gun manufacturers could market this stuff directly to a whole generation of people who were living in a society transformed by the Iraq and Afghan wars.

Busse: Then, as it got ever more competitive, they’d get the guns into video games. Get the guns into movies. Call the guns ever-more-offensive names. There’s an AR-15 called the “Urban Super Sniper.” How much more suggestive can you get than that?

Sargent: What does an actual policy response commensurate with the problem look like? Are we doomed to being a heavily armed society for the foreseeable future?

Busse: Rittenhouse, Buffalo, Uvalde — these things are warnings of what’s to come. You can’t put 450 million guns in a complex society — with lots of mental illness and covid-19 shutdowns and angst and Donald Trump and insurrections — and not think you’re going to have this.

I don’t believe there’s a way to solve the crisis. We have to start making decisions that make it marginally better instead of marginally worse.

That kid in Uvalde — if we’d had a 21-year-old buying requirement for rifles in Texas, might the kid have gotten a rifle? He could have. But it would have been harder.

Why don’t we have policies that make that more difficult, instead of continuing to make it easier?

We still have cigarettes. We still have lung cancer. We still have chain-smoking. But we have less now. We made decisions to make things marginally better. We could do that with guns.

Sargent: It sounds like our best hope is to incrementally mitigate a situation that appears to be headed for absolute catastrophe.

Busse: Yes. And I think we are headed for absolute catastrophe.

(The above excerpt is the last quarter or so of the article. Emphasis is mine.)


Even the Gun Industry Knew We Would End Up Here

When mass access to guns merges with political fetishization, nothing good can happen.


We ordered the same gun used in Uvalde. Here’s how easy it was.

After Tuesday’s school shooting in Uvalde, Texas left 19 children and two adults dead, we wondered how difficult it was to order a DDM4V7, one of the two rifles the gunman bought a few days after turning 18 years old, according to reports.

The answer: Five clicks.