The stock market, home prices, payrolls, consumer spending and just about everything else may be down… which of course means guns sales are up!
Several variables drive sales, but many dealers, buyers and experts attribute the increase in part to concerns about the economy and fears that if Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois wins the presidency, he will join with fellow Democrats in Congress to enact new gun controls. […] Gun purchases have also been climbing because of the worsening economy, which fuels fears of crime and civil disorder, industry sources and specialists said.
Yup, because nothing keeps you and your kids safer than a firearm and a chamber full of live ammo:
An 8-year-old boy died after accidentally shooting himself in the head while firing an Uzi submachine gun under adult supervision at a gun fair. […] The boy, Christopher Bizilj of Ashford, Conn., was with a certified instructor and “was shooting the weapon down range when the force of the weapon made it travel up and back toward his head, where he suffered the injury,” a police statement said.
Personally, I loved riflery when I was a kid at overnight camp, and always looked forward to the annual “gun show” when we would get a chance to put aside our 22 caliber target rifles and shoot up some cans with a few handguns and other cool weapons. But the instructors never, ever let us put more than one bullet in the chamber at a time.
An 8-year-old with a loaded Uzi? If this is the type of idiocy we see under the supervision of a “certified instructor” just imagine all the accidents waiting to happen in the wake of this new surge in gun sales.
Hmm… Around a decade ago a woman was killed at a Bellevue indoor shooting range. She had never shot a gun before and someone gave her a .44 magnum revolver. Same deal as the kid, the recoil kicked the gun up and back and she put a round right though her head.
I’ve got an uncle that’s a “certified firearms safety instructor” (he used to teach hunters Ed. classes). I wouldn’t want to be in the same room with that man and a gun.
Unfortunately we’ve developed a culture around guns that says any and all regulations are bad and an effort to end gun ownership, like these folks: http://www.gunbanobama.com/
Apparently the supreme courts recent ruling calling gun ownership a right is lost on the political right.
I believe that gun sales correlate with fear of blacks. It is certain that a lot of pro-gun propaganda uses it.
Well, it is insane to allow an eight year old child to fire a machine gun, whether in fully automatic mode or even in semi-automatic mode. You just don’t put more than one bullet into the weapon at a time — just like the precautions Goldy experienced as a child.
On the other hand, gun control is a legitimate political issue, and Obama’s previous statements and positions will likely cost him a lot of votes. Probably not enough to lose the election. But if he tries to push restrictive anti-gun legislation through, then people will be extremely upset. There are plenty of “bitter” gun owners who are totally disgusted with the Republicans, and will vote for Obama, despite reservations over his anti-gun history.
yeah, well, you can always hock the gun…the dead kid, not so much.
There is a moderate path to gun control .. registration and liability.
Nothing in the second amendment prohibits registration or the use of marked ammunition to be able to trace gun use.
Anyone owning a gun or selling a gun should be liable for any damages resulting from its illegal use. Ammunition sales should also be licensed and the ammo itself tagged.
Finally, we need a cultural change. I have never understood the idea that gun is a protection .. unless one thinks shoot first is a good idea. I wonder whether in the real world, evil doers .. armed evil doers .. are intimidated by the holstered crowd or just motivated to do their own shooting?
Right wingers, conservatives and Libertarians have come to view themselves as victims of yet-to-occur crimes. The victim’s complex runs so deep, they even try to manufacture a state victimization.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories.....4204.shtml
But, if you are going to go and carve a “B” in your cheek…please remember that everything is reverse in the mirror. Got that, Trolls?
That was funny!
This too often followed by “well, how did THAT happen?”
I’ve been over at the hannity site. They are livid and pissed. Liberals gave Bush a grace period, we have him a chance. They are sure as hell are not.
No matter how hard it’s tried, it’s impossible to legislate “stupid” out of peoples lives.
Tragic accident.
“just imagine all the accidents waiting to happen in the wake of this new surge in gun sales.”
Before posting that inflammatory rhetoric why don’t you look for the increase in gun accidents during the last surge in gun sales?
Goldy,
You are showing your ignorance of firearms. You can’t put more than one round in the chamber of a gun short of jamming it.
Ward @ #10: Well, I knew what Goldy meant.
I’ve never fired a full automatic weapon. I have fired an M-14 and a Soviet SKS (?)on semi-automatic mode. But most of the time I have fired bolt-action rifles, which I prefer for target shooting.
As for hunting, if you can’t hit your target with one shot, you’ve got no business being out there. It’s not fair to the game (merely wounding the animal is unnecessarily cruel), and being that bad a shot constitutes a danger to other hunters.
The last time I was in Honolulu, I was amazed at the number of streetside shops offering tourists a change to fire an “Uzi”. They were mostly populated by tourists from Japan, a country which has some of the strictist gun control laws in the world. They all seemed to want to see what it was like to fire a gun in the “wild west”.
Forgot to add a pic of the SKS (that’s why I had the question mark there):
SKS
Don Ward @ 10
I was going to criticize Goldy on that point. But I thought it was pretty obvious that Goldy meant not having more than one bullet in the weapon, as opposed to more than one bullet in the weapon’s chamber.
I’m with Puddy; you can have your guns but if anything illegal happens with them, you’re on the hook (either criminally or a la OJ civilly). I am sick of “it was an accident” when the person hurt (usually a child) had NO business handling a gun but whoever was the adult didn’t secure it and “you can’t stop a crazy person”. No, you can’t stop a crazy person but you can stop them from obtaining a gun.
Accountability and guns should go together and they don’t in this country.
It should be obvious gun sales are up is because Roger Rabbit has been telling liberals to arm. I used to post links to Auschwitz photos but can’t post links anymore because links send my comments to Goldy’s Spam Purgatory. So I’ll put it this way: When Ann Coulter tells cheering and hooting rightwing audiences that liberals should be rounded up, sent to concentration camps, and executed, she thinks she’s being funny — but how many wingers actually have a sense of humor? If they ever take Coulter seriously, I’ll you one thing they won’t laugh at is the business end of a gun on the other side of the door they just kicked down. Unfortunately, the only way you can get some deranged folks to be reasonable is by pointing a gun at them.
@15 (continued) Obviously my thinking on liberals owning guns is influenced by the historical fact of 6 million dead Jews and the unsettling similarities between what Nazis did and the way America’s far right demagogues sometimes talk.
If things go totally to shit, even if the fascists achieve a 1.3:1 kill ratio as the Germans did in WW1, we’ll win because there’s way more of us than them. But there’s no reason why we can’t keep the ratio to 1:1 with a little training and target practice by our side.
Don @10,
Um… I believe my terminology is correct; the 38 caliber revolver I shot at camp had six chambers in the cylinder. (That’s kinda the point of a revolver, isn’t it?) Yet we were only allowed to load one chamber at a time.
Good thing too, because the first time I shot it I was so unprepared for the kick that I was knocked back against a post and hit myself in the head with the gun. Had the gun been loaded with additional rounds, who knows what might have happened.
@12
Your wife know you’re looking at that stuff?
Terminology is still incorrect. Your instructor never let you put more than one round in the cylinder.
@18: Goldy
I believe a round would be an entire chamber (hence the round) – so it would be six shots. You loaded a single chamber not a round.
@18 Geezuz Goldy, what were you shooting, a 105MM howitzer? I don’t get a kick like that. Yeah, a large-bore handgun will jerk in your hand, but it shouldn’t knock you over. And a .38? You gotta be kidding, that’s only a popgun.
Btw, don’t try defending yourself with a .38 unless you’ve got dynamite for backup.
@19 Man, her thighs are tree trunks. Nice lookin’ rifle, though.
@20 When I was a weapons instructor in the Army Reserve one of my colleagues fed 5 rounds in the chamber of an M-60 machinegun. Not intentionally, of course. The Reserve got used equipment and that gun was a piece of crap that had seen better days. That was one hell of a jam and he got it out by shoving a cleaning rod down the muzzle. I still can’t believe that guy didn’t lose his arm.
If this is the type of idiocy we see under the supervision of a “certified instructor” just imagine all the accidents waiting to happen in the wake of this new surge in gun sales.
Yes this is totally typical of the carelessness exhibited at machine gun shoots. That’s why it’s happened precisely one time ever.
I call BS on your story about the .38’s supposedly violent recoil.
Had the gun been loaded with additional rounds, who knows what might have happened.
Um, where you shooting a Webley auto? Unless you were, the answer is “nothing.”
RR @ 24: While we are discussing having multiple rounds in a chamber, perhaps it’s time for a little trivia:
During the civil war, there were numerous reports of the quartermaster corps picking up weapons from the field which were loaded with multiple rounds. (Of course, with a muzzel-loading black-powder rifle, it’s an entirely different operation than with today’s breach-loading weapons using metalic shells to encase the primer, powder charge and hold the bullet in place).
At first the quartermaster corps complained that the soldiers must have gotten too exited to actually fire the rounds, probably forgetting to add the percussion cap or repeatedly dropping the cap in the confusion of the engagement. This theory assumes that the soldiers had so little experience and training with a firearm that they didn’t know what would happen when the rifle actually fired, with the “kick” and the explosion of smoke and flame from the barrell. An unlikely hypothesis, but one which persisted, over the years, even being repeated in Shara’s book which became the movie “Gettyburg”.
But veterans of the war said there was a much more likely explanation. Black powder rifles left behind an awful lot of debris in the barrel, fouling it and making it virtually impossible to load from the barrell after a few rounds were fired. In a fight, nobody was going to take the time to clean a rifle, so they often simply discarded their rifle and picked up the first one they found lying around. With the number of dead and wounded, there often was no shortage of available rifles.
But as the action progressed, they often had to go through several rifles after realizing that they couldn’t ram their charge home. Each time they dropped one, eventually someone else would also pick it up and try to do the same thing, only to realize in the process of loading it that it was fouled, and drop it also. Through the course of the action a rifle might be partially loaded by several men before it was discarded each time, resulting in the several layers of charges which the quartermaster corps found.
Of course, if anyone HAD tried to fire a fouled black-powder muzzel-loading rifle with five or six charges of powder, wadding, and minnie ball in it, the results would have been catastrophic to the rifle, the guy pulling the trigger, and several of his comrades on each side of him. The fact that we hear very few such reports indicates that the quartermaster’s theory probably doesn’t hold water, and the veteran’s explanation is the more probable one.
Michael @ 19: Hey, I just used google images for “SKS”, and that one popped up! It seemed a tad more interesting than some of the others.
Goldy: Funny, the add at the top is now for “Professional Firearms Training”. Is that Google AdSense at work (selecting relevent ads by searching keywords), or did you select that one yourself?
12, 19:
The SKS is a Chinese version of the Kalashinikov AK-47, produced under license. There may actually be more SKS in use around the world than actual AK-47’s. I’ve fired one myself, nice piece of work. I can see why it’s so popular.
BTW, the guy who let the kid shoot the Uzi in the first place needs to go to jail for a very long time.
DoneWithDinoCrats is an obvious NAMBLA plant.