Gun shop owners say the increase in gun sales is related to consumers who fear the possibility of future restrictions or bans on weapons.
David Willis of EJW Outdoors Inc. at 4667 Arendell St. said Tuesday his store has seen a marked increase in gun sales for every caliber across the board. — Morehead City, NC
The 4,166 criminal background check requests for gun deals Virginia State Police received last Saturday, the day after the Newtown, Conn., shooting massacre, was the highest volume the agency’s registered since the state began running checks in 1989 …
Even so, a 42 percent increase in transactions — they represent the number of checks requested, not guns sold — the day after a gunman killed 20 children and 6 adults at a New England elementary school is attention-grabbing. — Richmond, VA
Sam Bishop stood Tuesday at the counter of Sharp Shooting Indoor Range and Gun Shop. He was looking at a gun for home security while he felt he still could, he said. “I want to be just one step ahead of everybody else,??? said Bishop, who was checking out the Spokane gun store’s selection of pistols
Spokane gun stores are reporting increased sales since the Newtown, Conn., school massacre Friday, which has sparked talk in Congress of potential gun control legislation. Sales already appeared to be up in 2012 before the latest tragedy. — Spokane, WA
Dobson and other local gun shop owners said fear of gun control has fueled sales since a school shooting Friday. Meanwhile, legislators and advocacy groups such as CeaseFirePA call for tighter gun restrictions and some retailers suspend sales of an assault rifle similar to one used in the Connecticut massacre.
Dobson, who owns West York Sporting Goods, said his store has been busy with customers who are “concerned only criminals will have guns” and they’ll be defenseless. It takes more guns, not fewer, to make a safer society, he said.
“(Lanza) could’ve used gasoline instead of guns,” Dobson said. “He would’ve had another way to kill people. He could’ve driven a car through the school or run over them in the parking lot. What happened is really terrible. It does bother me. [But how comes it doesn’t sound like it really bothers you?] But gun control is not the answer.”
Dobson said he’s afraid the massacre was an opportunity for President Barack Obama and those in favor of gun restrictions to push their agendas. — York, PA
At Staudt’s Gun Shop in Harrisburg, owner Joe Staudt says he sold out his usually large stock of semi-automatic weapons by Wednesday …
Sheriffs around the state report a sharp increase in applications for permits to conceal a handgun or carry one in a vehicle. — (AP) Harrisburg, PA.
Greg Apple is selling a lot of semiautomatic rifles …
The guns on display at the Portland Expo Center are various models of the AR-15, the military-style rifle that one gun lobby says is “among the most popular firearms being sold.???
The 41-year-old Apple sips a Pyramid beer and urges people to buy now. The state of Oregon or President Obama, he says, could ban these guns in a matter of days.
But the national cascade of grief has had an inverse effect on buyers at the Portland gun show: The more horrified the nation became as news spread about Friday’s shooting in Connecticut, the more heated the sales of guns—especially the AR-15. [Portland, a few days before the Newtown massacre, had another multiple murder by a white man with an AR-15].
Customers are buying Bushmasters so fast that stores have trouble stocking it. “We sold 14 yesterday,” says Ross Meyer of Gunworld & Archery in Elko, Nev. “That’s way up. All of our suppliers are out of them.”
According to CBS4 news partner the Miami Herald, gun stores across South Florida are reporting record sales in the wake of the mass murder at a Newtown, Connecticut elementary school last Friday.
The move by some gun owners to buy up as many weapons as possible may accelerate Wednesday when President Barack Obama will announce his plans for new gun control initiative …
He said ammunition has been “at an all-time shortage for the last three or four years, since the President was elected the first time.
“We all have ammunition to sell but we don’t have all the ammunition we would want to buy,??? said Demicco. “Ammunition companies are operating a full tilt and people are stocking up on ammunition not knowing what potential legislation may be in the offing.
“There is tremendous fear of the unknown,??? he said. — Hookset, Connecticut
“Leave us the hell alone,” blurted Ted Nugent on Twitter. But he and his kind won’t leave us, the hell, alone.
As with most things, the cure to this mess begins and ends with the family. Traditional family values have been under siege for decades by our culture of contempt. In the absence of a solid family, the whole thing slowly unravels and rots.
“What ails us is a spiritual bankruptcy of cultural values,” Nugent writes.
Here’s the man of cultural and traditional family values, sampled from only two DD blog excerpts over the past two years:
What followed was the mother of all tirades against the mayor of Chicago, President Barack Obama, most Northerners, gun-haters and every “Chairman Mao motherfucker in the White House.??? We don’t remember hearing this sort of language directed towards Dubya during his tenure in office, at least with not this much volume and hate.
Shit is getting real. He’s preaching. Fuck this and fuck that. He’s railing. It’s awe-inspiring.
When he shares his political views? That’s entertaining, too, in a borderline frightening way.
He railed on government in general and the president in particular. He invited his audience to storm down to Springfield and take it over. Right after an f-bomb-laced barrage, he remarked that it was nice to see children in the audience …
Next, his bandmates – all in helmets now – recreated the famous photo of troops raising the U.S. flag on Iwo Jima. It was a strange thing to tag on at the end of a concert. But in true Nugent fashion, they triumphantly waved their machine guns …
Freedom and guns, enough to gag on. This show was canceled by Discovery, yesterday. Nugent has long been a scoundrel who often benefits in the catering to the worst aspects of US society. It is good for everyone else when he has a bad day.
Corporate America liked WhiteManistan only insofar as its not a public relations nightmare or liability.
From the wire, the giant investment brokerage that holds much of the US domestic firearms manufacturing base in a consortium called the Freedom Group is bailing on it and Bushmaster.
A major private equity firm has decided that putting its clients’ money into a company that makes assault-type weapons isn’t a wise strategy.
At the same time a large sporting goods chain has said that, at least for now, it would not sell those types of weapons.
The decisions came as pressure rises for the government to do something about the proliferation of assault-type weapons that have been used in several recent mass shootings.
Cerberus Capital Management said Tuesday, after discussions with investors, that it would sell its stake in Freedom Group, a major weapons producer whose portfolio includes such well-known gun brands as Remington and Bushmaster Firearms.
“Separately, Dick’s Sporting Goods also said Tuesday that it would temporary stop selling guns at a store near Newtown and suspend the sale of ‘modern sporting rifles’ for all stores nationwide,” the piece adds.
However, that is trivial in comparison with a partial display of Walmart money-makers.
It’s possible to see how the gun lobby and its corporate backers can be beaten. Lacking the numbers of a genuine multicultural majority, allow them to loudly defend the right to purchase assault guns and high capacity magazines and to blame the horrific on other causes.
They became paranoid ogres over the years and the political will and interest was not there to show people what precisely it was they were up to. Now that everyone has been shocked by the tragedy in Newtown, let the ideological monsters of the gun right and NRA show the country what they really care about — still being able to buy Bushmasters because it’s right wing white guys and, damn it — leave us the hell alone, you’re trying to victimize us!
Shunning is a viable strategy. Cultivation of national revulsion toward an unacceptable sporting hobby and a covetousness toward horrendously inappropriate weaponry is a legitimate thing to do.
That how you make people lose in the voting booth. You tell their story, just as it is.
People may lose interest. It may fail. But it’s certainly worth attempting.
“Leave us the hell alone,” tweets twit Ted Nugent. The angry blurt of the white super gun nut, another one of our ogres, who thinks he’s being victimized. Not a shred of human decency. (Keyword Twitter. Inspirational for new Twitter hoax user: DrunkTedNugent.)
Reality tv for the Psychopath Vote. Or to paraphrase Paul Fussell, catering to the audience of shallow pocket that gets erections dreaming about shooting or shoving a bayonet into someone foreign or liberal, preferably smaller and not white.
The more indecent and infamous Nugent gets, the more atrocious television he makes. Like a perpetual motion machine of BAD — that which is puerile, odious or both, publicized as if it is the opposite, a defiantly burning example of freedom and liberty.
A show devoted to showing how tricked up semi-automatic long range assault rifles and machine guns to shoot antelope, pop mannequin heads and blow up vehicles. In case you’re attacked by zombies or, uh, real people. What a pitch that must have been.
As said previously, I grew up in a community of hunters. But there came a point where excess became celebrated simply because it was excessive. And now all the straining white flab in too-small camouflage clothes, all the paramilitary gear, the creepy obsession with private ownership of heavy weapons by men who rant about tyrannical government, just shows the rest of the world how psychotic much of this country has turned.
Like it or not, the Newtown massacre has exposed (in a very horrid context) one of this country’s more astonishing and frankly nauseating fetishes — getting hard over assault rifles if you’re white. And it’s not all white people, not anyone I know, and I’m pretty pale.
But in the last couple of years, [Newtown] residents began noticing loud, repeated gunfire, and even explosions, coming from new places …
Yet recent efforts by the police chief and other town leaders to gain some control over the shooting and the weaponry turned into a tumultuous civic fight, with traditional hunters and discreet gun owners opposed by assault weapon enthusiasts …
“Something needs to be done,??? said Joel T. Faxon, a hunter and a member of the town’s police commission, who championed the shooting restrictions. “These are not normal guns, that people need. These are guns for an arsenal …”
“It was like this continuous, rapid fire,??? said Amy Habboush [of the sound emanating from a private unregulated outdoor firing range], who was accustomed to the sound of gunfire but became alarmed last year when she heard what sounded like machine guns, though she did not complain to the police …
Mr. Faxon, the police commission member, who is a lawyer, said he wrote [a] new ordinance, which would have imposed additional constraints on shooting, including limited hours, and a requirement that any target shooting range, and the firearms that would be used there, be approved by the chief of police to make sure they were safe. This was no liberal putsch …
A modest proposal to curb the gunfire failed.
Anyway, “liberal putsch” is what I’d call an unfortunate choice of words by a writer striving to be interesting and colorful.
Hitler, who was not a liberal, or even remotely like anyone in Newtown, installed a machine gun in the Munich Bier Hall to control and intimidate an assembled crowd in the famous event from pre-World War II history that popularized the word ‘putsch.’ The next morning Hitler and his paramilitary force marched out to try and take Munich. Twenty people were killed in the skirmish that ensued, 16 of them Nazis. Hitler was sent to prison where he wrote Mein Kampf.
The Times piece also mentioned the enthusiasm for using semi-automatic assault guns to blow up propane tanks and Tannerite-packed targets at private gun ranges. It’s a sporting activity almost unavoidable if you’ve been paying attention the last few years. (A mind-rotting collection of homemade YouTube videos are here and here.)
“One of great strengths of the NRA has been its bipartisanship,” said Jeremy Mayer, a political scientist at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. “Now it’s almost all Republicans and it will be harder for the NRA to deal with a bunch of united and angry Democrats.”
It is expressed a bit too lightly.
The NRA, the leadership, if not the majority of its 4 million members, is a right wing extremist organization. It’s not rational.
I would imagine that most people who are not members have not actually read what its leaders have published in the past year.
Two columns, on the presidential election, are entirely motivated by a desire to frighten membership into contribution by describing a hidden Barack Obama conspiracy, one to be carried to its final nefarious end when he gained a second term.
This is the graphic used to illustrate one of the pieces. Do read the two at the links provided. They go right to the heart of a certain right wing white minority’s obsession with and coveting of heavy weapons.
It’s tin foil hat material, single-minded in the desire to instigate fear and paranoia.
The National Rifle Association is not a respectable or reasonable organization although many of its members (not its brain-trust) may be. And it is certainly not bipartisan in even a minor way. They’ve made themselves into ogres.
An Austin-area gun store owner is joining the gun rights debate with a controversial offer for teachers in light of the tragic shooting in Connecticut.
Crocket Keller of Keller’s Riverside Gun Store says if educators want to get a concealed handgun license, he’ll give them a discount. …
“We need to start thinking out of the box and deal with this violent culture,??? said Keller. “We need to lobby our various state governments to allow teachers to be armed.???
On gun sales, yesterday:
Customers fearful that assault rifles may soon be made illegal are buying now, before sales could be cut off.
We popped into 21st Century Firearms, a gun store in Bluffton.
President David Fillers says since Saturday, the shop has seen a huge uptick in sales of semi-automatic modern sporting rifles, handguns, ammunition, powder, primer, and even holsters.
Fillers says after he heard President Obama speak Sunday night of the need for changes in our approach to gun violence, he’s convinced a big battle could be brewing over possible bans to certain types of weapons.
He’s adamant that assault style rifles should not be outlawed.
” If you read the Federalist papers, our forefathers wanted to protect the same type of guns that our military had. They were concerned about tyranny, they were concerned about a government out of control,” Fillers said. — in Bluffton, Indiana
“You have other people say ‘My goodness, these schools can’t protect us, we’ve got to protect ourselves. We’ve got to buy guns.’ And you have other people who say, ‘They’re going to pass [tougher gun] legislation. I don’t want to be the only one who doesn’t have one. I’d better get mine now,'” says Hyatt.
Kay Duncan, the owner of Brass Balls Pawn Shop on South Main Street, said two customers who came in Friday said they were afraid of what President Barack Obama might try to do on gun control.
“That’s the first thing that came out of their mouths,??? she said.
She said the country has a lot of hunters who wouldn’t take kindly to the federal government trying to take their guns away.
“I just don’t think it would be wise for any gun law changes to be made,??? she said. “There are too many people who are armed. If you count the number of hunters who are licensed in each state, you have an army larger than our (U.S.) army.??? — Winston Salem
“We set a record for this store,” said Greg Burge, the owner of Beech Grove firearms as he straightened the inventory after a record number of buyers jammed the store this weekend. Many of those customers were buying in reaction to members of Congress calling for a renewal of the assault weapons ban. — Beech Grove, Indiana
Keep in mind that the president did zero on gun control in his first four years. But the NRA, and others, peddled this inaction as a hidden conspiracy in which, behind the scenes, coordinated forces in the Obama administration were moving to set the stage to take away America’s guns during his second term.
And now, with a massacre pointedly carried out with an assault rifle, a certain demographic of Americans — all in WhiteManistan — are rushing to buy even more, some of whom would probably say they are now utterly convinced that everything the right was saying about the president during the last four years on the Second Amendment was absolutely true.
They’ve made themselves into ogres (continued).
WhiteManistan is not all just Republican. It’s full of white libertarian kooks, too. Libertarians are right wingers who believe themselves too posh to be lumped in with run-of-the-mill GOP proles.
[Enthusiasts] describe the rifle as a gadget geek’s dream — the “Barbie doll??? of firearms …
The average person can change stocks, they can put lasers on them, they can put locks on them,??? said Tony Dee, the chief gunsmith at The Gun Store in Las Vegas. “It’s just endless. It’s like building a custom car. You can just accessorize it to your own personal taste.???
Mr. Dee said his wife owned a pink, chrome-plated AR-15. “It’s blinged out pretty good.???
But the beamish glint of crazy-in-WhiteManistan is clearly seen in the closing graf:
Yet even some gun sellers acknowledge that some of their customers choose AR-15s for reasons that have little to do with plinking cans or hunting prairie dogs.
The optional grenade launchers offered on some models have a particular appeal, one gun salesman said. He added that although he did not want to make his customers sound crazy, the different types of ammunition available for AR-15s made them attractive to people “who want to be prepared for an Armageddon-type situation.???
What is really meant is FREEDOM from standards of a civil society, FREEDOM to shop for and stockpile ridiculous weapons, FREEDOM to be marketed into coveting something atrocious.
Today starts with Ted Nugent because he is so emblematic of the twin problem of WhiteManistan and the gun lobby. In his many public statements and columns Nugent has never shown even the slightest basic human decency. And this weekend was no exception.
Nugent showed no believable sorrow over the Newtown massacre in an interview for the crazy right wing website, Newsmax. He just went off, with his usual horrible inappropriateness, delivering the gun lobby script that more people need to be armed to defend themselves when the shooter arrives.
Indisputable statistics show clearly that gun free zones around the globe are always where the most innocent human lives are slaughtered,??? insists Nugent, who is on the board of the National Rifle Association.
“The document [sic] genocide in Rwanda, Sudan, Germany, Norway, Scotland, England, Canada, North and South Korea and elsewhere prove them wrong again and concludes that people everywhere forced into unarmed helplessness will always be victims of violent crime.???
In the rest of the bit — you can check, if you wish — Nugent essentially suggests schools now be protected with an armed platoon composed of teachers trained to repel attacks. It’s beyond nauseating, an insane recommendation showing a board member of the gun lobby who has no interest in retaining a civil society and zero compassion for anyone in the massacre.
I could dissect the weird insinuation that mass gun ownership could have stopped “genocide” in a number of countries. England? Canada?
Where does he get these?
But Nugent has no grasp at all of the history of how Hitler seized power in Weimar Germany prior to World War II. To argue with someone who thinks that all that was needed was for Germans to have lots of guns is the same as taking up a discussion with a wooden table.
However, this is the story that is coming out of WhiteManistan. For way too long average people have declined to look at, or consider even slightly how we have come to accept as normal, logical and legitimate the paranoid manias concerning weapons ownership and civil rights which simmer in the juices of tribe of extremist GOP right/gun nut.
Apparently, if the principal of Sandy Hook Elementary had an M-4 assault rifle the massacre in her school would have been prevented. Today, an Indiana man was caught with 47 guns in his home and was in the midst of preparing for his own murder rampage at a nearby school. An Oklahoma high school student was planning his own murder rampage and was apprehended on the same day as the Newtown massacre.
The gun is a fetish object. It is also a tool that can be used for good or evil. It has freed countries. The gun has killed dictators. The gun has allowed small numbers of people to control many more than their number on the plantation, in the coal mine, in the sweatshop, or the forced labor camp. The gun allowed one man to kill 20 children and 6 adults in Sandy Hook Elementary School. The gun, in the hands of a teacher or a child in that same circumstance, would have offered no guarantee of their survival.
In his dreams of Call of Duty and other cartoonish video game violence, Texas Representative Louie Gohmert imposes his post hoc counter-factual onto the shooting massacre in Sandy Hook. To him, if more folks had the capacity to effortlessly shoot and kill like a character out of either a bad 1980s action movie, or a John Ford western, then Adam Lanza would have been stopped cold in his tracks.
Devega then goes on to deliver some unpleasant statistics taken from wartime gun battles. And if you read the rest of Devega’s posts he makes the point that “America has an angry white man problem,” one that’s been obvious for a good long time.
On Sunday I wrote the gun lobby, in being part of the DNA of GOP extremism, can be beaten because its numbers — like those of the Republican Party — are in decline. This is partly masked by the staggering number of guns owned in the US, a situation even more distorted by the fact that it is only a distinct minority that is stockpiling arms.
If you want to understand why the gun debate can occasionally feel rigged, this is the answer: the issue is characterized by a conspicuous asymmetry of fervor. The N.R.A. has only four million members—a number that is probably dwarfed by the segment of the U.S. population that feels uneasy about the unbridled proliferation of firearms. But the pro-gun constituency is ardent and organized, while the gun control crowd is diffuse and easily distracted. In the 2012 election cycle, N.R.A. spending on lobbying outranked spending by gun control groups by a factor of ten to one.
What that means in practice is that in the aftermath of contemporary gun tragedies, we don’t see new gun legislation. What we do see is a spike in gun sales. After the shooting last summer in Aurora, Colorado, gun sales went up. After the Giffords shooting, there was a surge in purchases of the very Glock semiautomatic that wounded her. Certainly, the firearm industry and lobby will confront some bad P.R. in the coming weeks, but they can likely find succor in an uptick in business.
And, indeed, this has already happened. Seemingly even before all the blood was dry, white people were rushing to gun stores, as indicated in news stories here and here. (Here’s the astonishing daily collection.)
All for the deadening usual reasons: Barack Obama is coming to take their guns. And, even more laughably, out of fear, the idea being, one supposes, that they will accompany their tots to school today with a couple sidearms under the winter wear, perhaps to stand guard on watch for the next Adam Lanza, ready to fill him with lead.
The ludicrous, but profoundly depressing image, is of white parents making up Ted Nugent’s armed elementary school defense platoons, signaling the complete failure of American society.
“I’ve got two girls, and actually, I’ve got a five-year-old. So, it really hit home with the age ranges of these kids, and it really haunts me …
“I’m always going to check it at hospitals, banks, schools … I have respect for the fact that, if a friend doesn’t want me carrying it in his house, I won’t carry it. I’ll check it at the door. I’ll of course give my spiel to a friend, but anywhere that law forbids it, I don’t carry.”
“Yesterday was the biggest day we’ve seen in 20 years,??? reads this bit from San Diego NBC, proffered by “Karl Durkheimer, owner of Northwest Armory said Sunday.”
“Today will probably eclipse that,??? he added.
If you dwell too long on the bleak absurdity encapsulated in these beliefs your brain begins to evaporate. Here are white people, stockpiling arms because they say now they are afraid of an Adam Lanza in their neighborhood, who got his AR-15 and ammo from his white mother, who stockpiled arms.
No one I know rushed out to buy guns over the weekend.
This is a response of only a certain segment of US society, one that is not representative of the whole any longer.
But the only way to make change is for someone with the national stage to make the arguments and keep them on the front burner. The President has that power.
He could be a do-nothing as is often his wont. Or he could actually back up the words he delivered Sunday. And that will mean getting after the National Rife Association.
Additional notes: This year Ted Nugent got a famously publicized visit from the US Secret Service after a speech at the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting. The Secret Service visits people who they have reason to believe may harbor a desire to shoot the president or be inciting others to do so. And even if the person interrogated is not charged, the visit is not a pat on the back for good behavior.
Ted Nugent, however, is still a board member of the National Rifle Association. Which indicates to reasonable people that the NRA doesn’t care if its leaders and members run afoul of the US Secret Service because of flirtation with language indicating they might like to, well, see the non-white guy in the White House be shot. (And he hasn’t even done his complete WaTimes column this week yet.)
This is ugly stuff and it is possible to tar the NRA with it. Because it is so ugly, WhiteManistan won’t have it. Expect more paranoia.
This morning a reader also noted that Adam Lanza’s mother had been identified as a “prepper” by The Independent, an English newspaper. That piece is here.
The information is brief and still preliminary. However, if it holds it opens a similar but separate and equally troubling can of worms.
The Herald, a South Carolina newspaper, is facing ridicule and scorn and a barrage of Twitter messages, after it, rather stupidly, allowed a huge three-quarter page advertisement, touting its gun sale offering Christmas discounts on Smith & Wesson assault guns, replete with an image of a laughing Santa Claus, to be placed next to a story of the horrendous school shooting.
The advertisement for a pre-Christmas sale of a variety of weapons, that included handguns and assault rifles, at Nichols Store occupied prominent place on the fifth page of The Herald of Rock Hill, making it hard to accept the editor’ s contention that it was unintentional and unplanned.
“There are many newspapers in the US, that, as matter of principle and business policies do not carry classified ads for gun sales, inspite of being roundly berated by the gun-lobby and gun-owners,” it adds.
What the country faces in terms of dealing with national massacres is a WhiteManistan problem. Gun ownership in the US is decreasing. But the numbers of guns owned, the highest in the world, comes from a concentration of multiple gun ownership among a coterie and it is demographically primarily white. The Lanza massacre is a particularly egregious example. The murdered mother was a gun enthusiast, multiple owner, with a semi-automatic assault rifle taken and used in the slaughter. That AR-15 knock-offs have ridiculously become consumer items some white middle and upper middle class white people covet didn’t happen by itself.
“I am the NRA and I vote” is the belligerent banner slogan. Well, WhiteManistan just lost the vote numbers, and how it goes, so can go the modern NRA. I say the modern NRA is not representative of the country.
One looks at their current board members — all of them — white right wingers, people who for the last four years have campaigned to make their followers believe the president is a socialist Muslim not born in America and in league with the UN to impose tyranny through the taking of everyone’s guns. All of it, toxic mean-in-spirit messaging, completely rubbish, tin foil hat stuff. It is the work of monsters and they do it because it serves their interests. It has resulted in a well-documented explosion in sales of weapons. Indeed, I expect the Newtown massacre to result in yet another surge in stockpiling sales as the NRA further radicalizes its base with grass roots gossip along the lines of: “Now they’re really coming after your guns!”
On December 4, in a Richmond news publication (I cited an excerpt yesterday), a journalist published the reaction of an NRA representative on the question of ‘having the right to have an AR-15 regardless of whether they really need them.’
This was the reply: “It’s the Bill of Rights, not the Bill of Needs … jst because it’s someone’s opinion that someone doesn’t need it isn’t a legally viable reason to ban them.???
This is the pugnacious mentality of someone who cannot be reasoned with. And now, after years of pushing it, a horrible flock of birds of death have come home to roost and get in our faces.
What has kept change from happening in the US is cowardice and the lack of realization that the NRA, like the Republican Party of which it is part of the DNA, has lost its numbers when pitted against every other demographic it despises. So, politically — which is where this issue lies in its entirety — it is ready to be beaten. We lack only the courage to take it to them.
The 26 victims who were shot inside a Connecticut elementary school on Friday were each hit by more than one bullet, most of them from the high-powered assault rifle wielded by the 20-year-old suspect, the state’s chief medical examiner said on Saturday …
“I believe they were all first-graders,” [the medical examiner] said.
It is the modern National Rifle Association and public figures like Ted Nugent who have worked so that Americans and cowardly politicians sit lamely by and accept the fool’s hall of fame idea that semi-automatic assault rifles are just natural for sporting fun.
We’ve learned Adam Lanza’s mother “liked guns.” And no one can ask ask the woman why on earth she wanted so many, including the assault rifle.
How did she come to be someone who viewed such things as upper middle class consumer items to covet? It didn’t happen all by itself.
This article, written on the 4th of December and entitled “Guns for fun,” is a now unintentional example of a national psychopathy — the fruit of the NRA.
It digs up a UCLA professor of law who explains shooting an AR-15 creates an adrenaline rush, one which is fun. The man dryly adds that a lot of things are “fun” and create an adrenaline rush, but are also illegal, like driving 150 mph or making videos of small animals being crushed to death under someone’s feet.
Point well taken.
Some excerpts:
“Gun control advocates ask, ‘Why does anyone need this particular kind of gun, like an AR-15 (an assault rifle similar to the one used by the U.S. military)???? Winkler says. “The reason people like an AR-15 is because it’s fun to shoot.???
Shooting a firearm, he says, triggers the same chemicals in the brain as riding a roller coaster—endorphins and adrenaline. “I was out at the range two weeks ago, shooting an AR-15,??? he says. “It was a lot of fun.???
“If you look at the cover of a gun magazine today, you’re going to see one of two things: Compact guns for concealed carry, or assault rifles.??? They cater to what [a gun control advocated interviewed by the publication] calls “self-defense freaks, extremely paranoid people, emboldened by the stand-your-ground laws,??? and “hardcore insurrectionists.??? Insurrectionists, [people who says they believe] they need to arm themselves against the government, in particular are the dominant voice in the pro-gun side of the debate, he says.
“They believe they have an individual right to check government by force of arms,??? he says. Insurrectionists are a vocal fringe group, he says, not at all representative of most gun owners …
Bearing in mind that most NRA members, and gun owners in general are either hunters or sportsmen and not crazies, people have a right to have assault rifles like AR-15s, [a representative of the NRA told the publication], regardless of whether or not they really need them. “It’s the Bill of Rights, not the Bill of Needs,??? she says. “Just because it’s someone’s opinion that someone doesn’t need it isn’t a legally viable reason to ban them.???
Backers say the tragedy is the work of one deranged person and shouldn’t cloud the debate in Michigan, and could actually aid in ending the slayings.
Ari Adler, spokesman for Republican House Speaker Jase Bolger, said many “believe citizens who are allowed to carry concealed pistols can act in a positive way to bring a tragedy to a close more quickly” …
Ryan Mitchell, a spokesman for bill sponsor Sen. Mike Green, R-Mayville, said the legislation is “about letting those who are vulnerable and defenseless defend themselves.”
Once again, it is another indicator of the great polarization in American society, of the civil war between rural right white America and everyone else. It is very much part and parcel with the ideology of WhiteManistan.
“Gun control” and “gun violence,” as usages, have decreased, the former plunged. “Second Amendment” usages have soared, tied almost exactly to the election of Barack Obama in 2008.
Gun-rights advocates say that the answer [to massacres] is more guns: things would have gone better, they suggest, if the faculty at Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Chardon High School had been armed. That is the logic of the concealed-carry movement; that is how armed citizens have come to be patrolling the streets. That is not how civilians live. When carrying a concealed weapon for self-defense is understood not as a failure of civil society, to be mourned, but as an act of citizenship, to be vaunted, there is little civilian life left.
The reporter, Jill Lepore, delivers some statistics. That Americans own the most guns in the world is not surprising.
However, inside that statistic is the sub-data that most Americans do not own guns. Gun ownership, in fact, is falling. The numbers come primarily from WhiteManistan, with some statistically trivial exceptions) where owning individuals have many of them (which agrees with the observation of an astonishing number of guns in the name of Adam Lanza’s mother who cannot now answer questions on why she bought so many).
“Gun ownership is higher among whites than among blacks, higher in the country than in the city, and higher among older people than among younger people,” she writes.
“I asked him how [David Keene, president of the NRA] would answer critics who charge that no single organization has done more to weaken Americans’ faith in government, or in one another, than the N.R.A,” writes Lepore, near the end.
“We live in a society now that’s Balkanized,??? Keene told the New Yorker’s journalist. “But that has nothing to do with guns.???
And, previously, as noted up top: While there is always a lot of emotionalism at the time of an incident, the public is largely unaffected by regular massacres. Views do not shift, although the NRA has successfully reduced a basic interest in gun control over the last decade.
Just a week ago, fighting to make 3-D manufacturing plans for guns, including assault rifles, available on an “Internet redoubt.”
That’s real freedom from tyranny.
UPDATE addition:
I noted earlier today that the NRA and gun ownership is indivisible from the toxin ideology of WhiteManistan. All are intrinsically imbued with outlooks steeped in authoritarianism and pursuit of the destruction of those not deemed to be of them.
It notes the NRA bet big in terms of financial support on Romney and GOP candidates and lost the majority of its investment in 2012. And this shows that while complete freedom of gun ownership is a belief of white men, it’s still the ideology of a minority in comparison to the collective US demographic. In other words, it just lost its numbers.
Paradoxically, the Democratic Party remains cowardly when faced by the NRA. But I would bet that there are results that can be had in attacking the modern National Rifle Association and renewing issues in gun control head on.
I believe it could be be pushed further to the fringes of red white rural USA with not much of a downside for the rest of the voting core. It’s irrevocably attached to white GOP politicians. When the GOP goes down it takes the NRA with it.
The National Rifle Association spends almost all of its time demonizing Barack Obama. The Republican Party spends all of its time demonizing Barack Obama and everyone else not like it. The GOP just lost big time.
Non-white voters already alienated by that party are not going to suddenly vote Republican to stick up for getting rid of assault rifles as sporting fun. It is well past time to attack the NRA.
What’s the worst that could happen? More super-rich people with ties to gun manufacturing will give money to GOP politicians? Oh, wait …
Readers note! “WhiteManistan” added as an official category! Yippee!
My intent is to use it in place of the Extremism and Psychopath Vote categories. It supersedes and includes both. WhiteManistan has become, by definition, where extremism lives in the USA.
I grew up among gun lovers. Today I fail to understand how anyone decent could be a member of the modern NRA and not feel very bad about it. Its image is the most horrid of base instinct, dog crap, psychotic illogic, conspiracy theory and inhumanity. It boils down to “Don’t f— with my guns or I’ll shoot you. And if you don’t, maybe I’ll shoot you anyway.???
History has presented America’s belligerent gun owners and the NRA with a problem. And depending on what their loudest mouths say, it could be one that stains them permanently.
Ted Nugent, a week ago, again:
2 million Americans use guns each year to defend themselves from punks and thugs. Access to guns saves an incalculable number of lives each year.
