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Just What Your Kid Needs – An AR-15.

February 20, 2022

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              It figures. Now that Remington has agreed to shell out $73 million because its AR-15 assault rifle was used to kill 26 adults and kids at the Sandy Hook Elementary School, a gun-maker announced that it will be marketing an assault rifle designed specifically to be used by younger kids.

              What makes this new gun a kiddy product? According to the gun maker, it will be the first assault rifle which will have a ‘safety’ feature that allows adults to ‘control’ how and when the gun is used. This feature is a knob on the side of the gun which has to be rotated by an adult in order to unlock the trigger and fire the gun. 

              Why does this safety knob keep kids from shooting the gun without intervention by an adult?  Because allegedly the spring which holds the safety knob in place is too strong to be manipulated by anyone who doesn’t have adult-size hands.

              Otherwise, the gun, which is 80% the size and weight of a standard AS-15, is exactly like the gun that was used in the massacre at Sandy Hook, except that it is chambered only for 22LR ammunition, not for the more lethal .223 ammo which the adult gun fires.

              On the other hand, the manufacturer is going to ship the gun with a hi-cap magazine that holds 15 rounds. Thank God for that.

              Yesterday I was able to get to the gun maker’s website, today the website is blocked. I suspect there have been numerous efforts to hack the site and why not?  This new product may represent the single dumbest and most cynical product launch in the entire history of the gun industry, bar none.

              First of all, the gun is allegedly designed to be used by consumers who aren’t old enough to actually buy or own a gun.  The website had a picture of some pre-adolescent girl shooting what the company says is a product that ‘looks, feels and operates just like Mom and Dad’s gun.” Legally speaking, Mom or Dad would also have to be the owner of this ultra-safe gun.

              Of course, I can just see Josh Hawley introducing a bill in Congress that will drop the legal age for gun ownership down to twelve, or maybe get rid of any age requirement at all, as long as the gun has a safety device that can only be operated by an adult. For sure, the bill will easily get co-sponsorship in the House from Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene.  And maybe the company will run ads on the new social media platform – Truth – owned by Donald Trump.

               Ever since the 1970’s, when the term ‘outdoor sports’ started to mean floating down some stream in a kayak rather than tramping through the woods to take a pot-shot at Bambi, the gun business has been trying to figure out how to get consumers interested in their products who aren’t older, White men. 

              They’ve gone after women, they’ve gone after minorities, they’ve gone after the gun ‘rights’ crowd and they have failed every, single time. The only time that some newbies got interested in becoming gun owners was during the Covid-9 pandemic, an event which happens (hopefully) about once every hundred years.

              Want to know what happened to gun sales in January, which is usually the biggest month for gun sales all year?  They dropped by 50 percent from the number of guns sold in January 2020, right back to the total for January 2019. Oh well, oh well, oh well.

              There’s an old joke in the gun business which says that if you want to make a million dollars in guns, start with two million bucks. If the guy whose company is making this gun doesn’t have two million, maybe he can hire Rudy Giuliani to hit up one of his Ukrainian friends.

              I can see it now. Next week all the faithful will be gathering in Orlando for the CPAC conference to pledge undying to the conservative cause. The usual bromides will be coming out of the mouths of Trump, DeSantis, Cruz and all the other wannabees for 2024.

              After the spiels, the audience can go wandering around the area where displays are set up and buy a Trump-2024 banner, or a Ted Cruz for President hat, or a Mike Pompeo coffee mug. Then they can sign a petition at the WEE1 Tactical booth to lower the minimum age for gun ownership to – duhhh – five! 

              Right now, there are some 60 million Americans between the ages 5 to 20 years old. Talk about a new market for guns.

SIGN THE PETITION!

November 27, 2020

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              Now that the election is over, to paraphrase Richard Nixon, we won’t have Donald Trump to kick around any more. And even though he has some plans to remain involved in political affairs, the last thing the GOP will need in 2024 is a candidate who lost the popular vote in 2020 by twice as many votes as he got in 2016.

              So, like every other former President, Trump is going to have to figure out some kind of legacy to burnish and sustain his memory.  Sorry Donald, but the spaces on Mount Rushmore are already filled. And there really isn’t enough room on the Mall to put up another Washington Monument or a Lincoln Memorial.

              Most Presidents, beginning with Woodrow Wilson, have a library which houses both their papers as well as various gifts and other shlock they collected during their White House years.  Maybe Trump will put together some kind of Presidential museum at Mar-a-Lago that might even contain a small shelf for his papers – uhhh, it’s not as if he was literate enough to produce anything beyond those phony Executive Orders that he kept signing all the time.

              But there’s a movement out there to create what I believe would be the perfect memorial to mark the Trump Presidency, namely, a petition being sent to the U.S. National Park Services to add the Four Seasons Total Landscaping site to the National Archive of Historic Places. The sponsors are looking for 5,000 signers, they already have 4,860 and maybe they’ll increase the number of people who can add their names.

              The highlight of that crazy press conference was when the owner of Fantasy Island, the porn shop across the street, came out of his establishment and told reporters that “We knew there had to be a screw-up somehow, because why would you pick a spot like this?”

              If for some reason the Park Service doesn’t believe that the parking lot in front of a garage door plastered with MAGA posters isn’t an appropriate national historic site, maybe we should start a petition to put a plaque on the 120 miles of wall that was built between the U.S. and Mexico to secure a border which is 1,900 miles long. Or maybe the Service should put a plaque at one of the golf courses where Trump played golf more than 300 times during the 1,408 days that he has been President so far.

              I just signed the petition to designate the Four Seasons Landscaping address as an historic site. I also chipped in a few bucks to get the petition around.

              Please join me and help create a fitting monument to the man who will shortly no longer be President of the United States.

Don’t Forget: Owning A Gun Protects Your Freedom To Sell A Poster Like This.

March 17, 2017

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poster2One of our good friends in the gun violence prevention (GVP) community put a pic of this poster on her Facebook page and said it was for sale at the Trump rally in Nashville. I have no doubt that this was true. Over the course of the campaign, Trump’s rallies, particularly in Southern states, were more like Klan rallies than anything having to do with electing the next President of the United States – the only difference being that Hillary was White, not Black. But this didn’t stop Trump or some of his mouthpieces (ex. Rudy Giuliani) from appealing to the lowest, common social denominator they could find. And what’s lower than someone who tries to make a buck out of pretending that you can craft an effective political message by putting someone’s face behind a target that will be used to sight in a gun?

The strategy of using crosshairs to ‘target’ political opponents wasn’t started by Trump.  In fact, it appeared on Sarah Palin’s Facebook page when she was raising money for her PAC which she actually believed would keep her politically alive. And along with the graphic which has targets superimposed over various states were her usual dopey comments designed to make the connection between her politics and Gun-nut Nation even more real, comments like “this is just the first salvo” or “we’ll aim for these races,” the usual, know-nothing verbal crap.

Palin’s attempt to combine fundraising with allusions to going into political campaigns ‘loaded’ for action turned out to be one, sick attempt at political communication when, several months after she posted this screed, Jared Loughner took her seriously and gunned down Rep. Gabby Giffords who had been identified as a ‘target’ on Palin’s map. Of course leave it to the liberals to defend Palin on the basis of free speech; after all, Loughner was just typical of the basic problem which creates 120,000 gun deaths and injuries each year, namely, that every once in a while a gun gets into the hands of some nut.

Now the fact that a gun gets into the hands of some nut because maybe, just maybe we have too many guns lying around – oh well, that’s the price we have to pay to be ‘free.’  And what’s more important when it comes to defending our freedoms than my ability to walk into a gun shop, tell the guy behind the counter that I’m a law-abiding citizen and walk out with a gun? Please don’t give me all that nonsense about how we need to ‘balance’ out our God-given freedoms with concerns for the rising rates of gun violence in cities like Dallas, Memphis and San Jose.  The answer’s very simple, lock ‘em up and throw away the key.

I wasn’t at that Trump rally in Nashville earlier this week but I guarantee you that at some point during his rambling remarks no doubt #45 got a big cheer out of the crowd by telling them that despite an attempt by a couple of federal judges to make the country unsafe, his administration would ‘crack down’ on the criminal element and put them, along with Hillary, behind bars.

But why waste previous federal dollars on locking up ol’ Hills? Why not just gun her down and, if necessary, take out a few of those ‘illegals’ as well? Our new, tough President won’t let anyone prevent me from carrying around my AR with a magazine that holds 30, 40 or 50 rounds. Then I’ll be armed and ready when the Commander in Chief tells me to go out and help keep America free.

I really believe that the dopes who buy into such nonsense are the same dopes who also believe that the government still delivers food to the Martians who landed at Area 51. And no doubt one or two will read this column and tell me that I better watch out. Maybe Betsy DeVos can figure out how to better educate their kids.

 

Rudy Giuliani Thinks He Understands Gun Violence. He Doesn’t.

July 12, 2016

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When I was a kid, we used the term ‘racist’ to describe the actions or views of people who justified racial inequality because the racial group on the ‘bottom’ didn’t have the intelligence or the motivation of the racial group on the ‘top.’  And while there were always African-Americans who made stupid or hateful statements about Caucasians (think Jesse Jackson’s ‘Hymietown,’) these dopey attitudes didn’t qualify as racism because Whites who were sometimes demonized by Blacks were still on top.

BLM           This rather obvious Black-White interrelation blurred when the legal barriers upholding racial segregation began to collapse.  It blurred some more as African-Americans, some African-Americans, a few African-Americans made it into the middle class or became visible and successful in entertainment and sports.  And of course the idea that racism presupposed inequality became blurred even further when a certain Kenyan-born person moved his family into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, an address from which, unfortunately, he will soon have to depart.

But what has really confused the issue of racism is a conscious and continuous effort by the right-wing noise machine, aided and abetted by the Republican party and Fox News, to pretend that African-Americans are also racists whenever they raise concerns about their own status, as if questioning the behavior of Whites toward Blacks is some kind of ‘proof’ that Whites can be victimized by racism and racist attitudes as well.

This nonsense erupted in response to the emergence of Black Lives Matter following the execution of Trayvon Martin by a neighborhood-watch activist who happened to be walking around with a gun.  “What do you mean, Black lives matter?” thundered Rush Limbaugh, “Don’t all lives matter?’  And since BLM is only concerned about their ‘own’ kind, this is proof pari passu that the organization’s perspective and strategies are racist to the core.

Now the fact is that police violence is endemic to inner-city communities where most African-Americans happen to live. The fact is, the fact is, the fact is, but who cares about facts when you can earn a living by running your mouth off on television and say whatever happens to be in your stupid head?

And the numbskull I am referring to is Rudy Giuliani, who went on Fox and accused BLM of being ‘inherently racist’ because the real danger of a Black kid getting shot was not from a cop but from another Black kid. So why does the BLM movement spend all its time talking about the behavior of racist cops?  Because the cops are White, the BLM movement is Black, and it’s the racism of the BLM movement which keeps them from talking about Blacks shooting other Blacks.

I’m not trying to posture myself as an expert either on politics or race.  My expertise extends only to the issue of guns.  So I’m going to correct Rudy G not from a racial perspective, but from the facts (here’s that damn word again) about gun violence no matter whose skin color happens to be involved.

Gun violence between civilians is overwhelmingly intra-racial, and in eight out of ten instances gun violence occurs because two or more people get into an ongoing argument and sooner or later someone pulls out a gun. With whom do people have disputes?  With people they know because they live together, or they live on the same block, or they go to the same school. And even if it’s an argument over drugs, Rudy’s favorite form of gun violence, the argument erupts between two members of the same gang.

On the other hand, police are supposed to be trained to keep the lid on disputes with citizens so that violence between law enforcement and civilians, particularly gun violence, is kept under control. If the shootings in Louisiana and Minneapolis are part of a wider problem of cops too often using their guns on minorities, than the problem has to be corrected now, and no amount of demagoguery from nincompoops like Giuliani should prevent that from taking place.

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