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  • This is the best summary I could come up with:

    The industry’s alpha-male sales pitches promise buyers the power to “control your destiny.” According to law-enforcement records, Card had been haunted by phantom voices — including taunts that he had a “small dick.” The Ruger SFAR, with its thick barrel, is marketed without subtlety as “Bigger and Stronger Where It Needs to Be.”

    Wilson Combat sells the “Urban Super Sniper.” Franklin Armory markets assault rifles in its “Militia Series.” An ad from Patriot Ordnance Factory-USA features a hooded man with an AR-15 standing in the ruins of a city, with the tagline “When corrupt politics fail, our guns won’t.”

    But it doesn’t take many people to execute a military mission, to shatter families and communities, and create national panic and anxiety.” In the case of Card, Koskoff adds, “He’s one person, one weapon — and the entire state of Maine was frozen.”

    (The AR prefix stands for “Armalite Rifle.”) The Pentagon sought an infantry weapon that was light, lethal, and versatile — that could match the “killing power” of the bulky, World War II-era M1 in close combat, but still be capable of “penetrating a steel helmet or standard body armor at 500 yards.”

    But in a quest to make the rifle lighter and more maneuverable, it developed the AR-15, with smaller rounds — fired at extraordinary velocity to create “maximum wound effect.” Though marketed today with a cachet of manhood, the military prized the AR platform because its feather weight and minimal recoil were well-suited for the “small stature of the Vietnamese” allies whose “average soldier,” one document stated, “stands five feet tall and weighs 90 pounds.”

    The department then sent regional law-enforcement agencies a warning that Card “made threats to shoot up the National Guard armory in Saco” and was “committed over the summer … due to his altered mental health state.” It advised that he should be approached with “extreme caution.”

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  • Arms manufacturers pushed more than 24 million assault weapons onto the American streets, one for every 10 adults, each designed with a single purpose — to kill lots of people as fast as possible

    And there's the very first problem, right there. The point of all arms is efficiency. Stone spear points were developed because they were more effective than flame-hardened wood. Atlatls were invented to throw spears farther than an arm. Swords were more effective than clubs. The first guns were more effective than bows. From the first matchlock rifles, we get wheel locks, then flint locks, and then percussion caps. By the time of the US Civil War, cartridges were being developed, and you had revolvers so that you could shoot more people without reloading. Winchester Repeating Arms Co. made the lever action rifle wildly popular because you could 'load it in the morning and shoot all day', and they were widely used by cavalry. When The Great War rolled around, we wanted even more effective arms, and switched to bolt action rifles with five and ten round magazines loaded far more powerful bullets than existed in the era of black-powder lever action rifles. When WWII rolled around, we started using autoloading rifles with stripper clips--the venerable M1 Garand--because bolt actions were just too slow to load and fire. By Vietnam, we'd switched to the detachable box magazine fed M14, only to discover that a full-power battle rifle cartridge in a wooden-stocked machine gun in the jungle was not a winning combination, and adopted a military version of the AR-15 with it's plastic stock and lightweight 5.56mm cartridge. Since the 1960s, the AR-15 has changed very, very little; the rifle of the 60's is still nearly identical 80 years later.

    All weapons in human history have been designed to kill as many things as quickly as possible. All tools are refined to get better at their job over time. The car that I drive now is far, far more efficient than straw sandals, a horse, or even the first cars. It is less efficient than the mass transit systems that are used in many large cities.

  • That American liberals focus on rifles in regards to gun violence more than 1/20 as much as they do handguns or 1.75x as much as the president's recommended shotgun, nevermind the fervor for AWBs, betray the lack of concern and understanding of the issues truly driving America's culture of violence beyond "big ones are scarier".

    All compounded by their laws' universal exemptions for police current and former, on-and-off-the-clock demonstrating no fear of arming the most violent among us as long as they swear fealty to minority oppression and dissident suppression in the name of maintaining capital's status quo, sleeping sound assuming those barrels won't turn inwards towards them. Hell, that the fight against gun violence now includes banning armor to protect oneself from it shows how important it is that we be obliged to let them indulge.

    • The body armor regulations are the real WTF for me. It's just a bold faced admission that they (i.e. the police and government) don't like the notion that maybe the police can't just roll up and kill you whenever they want.

      The other reiteration I'll add to your point about police exemptions is (in case anyone missed the "former") that most of these bans and gun regulations not only exempt the police, they also exempt retired policemen. So if these guys are off the force, why do they need machine guns, switchblades, big magazines, > .50 caliber, etc., etc., etc., exactly?

    • It's the same reason the FAA has such stringent safety regulations for aircraft, while tens of thousands of people die in traffic accidents every year: Mass shootings are huge amounts of death and also rare, compared to crimes of passion or suicides by gun.

      The problem is that to solve any of these problems will involve two things that Republicans hate: Providing social services and confiscating guns from people who shouldn't have them. Both of those are far less likely to pass than a simple ban on a small subset of guns.

      So until Republicans put up or shut up about "it's mental health" nothing will get done.

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