Comments on: Guns have changed everything, especially childhood

By: Nate Gillies

Nate Gillies — Tue, 13 Jun 2023 18:41:59 +0000

In reply to Wiley. Eugene Stoner invented the AR-15 for the military before the M-16. The AR has always been a military assault weapon as it was engineered and designed to be. The AR-15 is to men what high heels are to women. A way to get attention and feel powerful and sexy. It rarely works for either.

By: Doni-Marie

Doni-Marie — Sun, 21 May 2023 18:43:17 +0000

Thank you Laura! This is the sort of personal reflection we could all stand to do. Someone once asked me to count all the experiences I had had with guns and more specifically, gun violence. Gun violence? I thought. I hadn’t had any experiences with it. How many people actually had? Then I started with innocent memories like laying on the ground to learn to shoot a rifle when I was all of five. That led me to realizing that actually crawling on the porch floor to miss gunfire at that same age and being held up by gun point at a Dairy Queen when I was a teenager did not not count just because the trigger wasn’t pulled, or the bullets missed my baby brother and me. More and more near misses, rural and urban were counted then. Family members and friends had actually been shot, or shot at others. It has escalated since I first counted, and lost count. Gun Violence? Who actually knows anything about that? If you live in America, you probably do.

By: Wiley

Wiley — Wed, 17 May 2023 20:14:49 +0000

Perhaps folks should be pushing for better and more policing, stronger families and more effective public school education to create stronger foundations for establishing and maintaining healthy society and law and order. If we look past the emotion to the facts, the two areas where progress is most needed are (1) Mental health awareness & support for the suicidal and (2) urban gun violence (mostly semiautomatic pistols). “Assault Rifle Bans” [particular long rifles?] is a somewhat illogical and emotion-based bogeyman of a political slogan designed to stoke passions and manipulate voters when instead they should be telling everyone to get educated. Suicides and urban gun violence are where the vast majority of gun deaths occur. What exactly is an “assault rife”? note: The “AR” in AR15 stands for “Armalite Rifle”, not assault rifle. “Assault” is catchy but is simply an improper, inaccurate term. The M16/M4 is the current iteration of issued military individual weapon and it is different from civilian “AR15-style” models chiefly in that it has a 3-round burst capability whereas civilian equivalents are semiautomatic (a round is fired with every trigger pull until the magazine is empty, like most/many modern civilian hunting rifles, shotguns and pistols)…hence the need for an emotive “Assault Rifle” sobriquet as there would be absolutely no chance of banning the spectrum of semiautomatic civilian weapons commonly used by hunters and others involved in shooting sports and recreation. The 2nd Amendment isn’t particularly vague which is why it continues to withstand all efforts to misinterpret it in the courts: it is rooted in a fundamental right to bear arms that, believe it or not, is one of the pillars that makes America what it is. It is as valid today regarding modern weapons much as 1st Amendment applies to radios, TV and internet and the 4th Amendment applies to video surveillance. Personally, I believe each state should do what it can to deal with its own challenges. What works in Lusk WY or Bettles AK might not work as well in Chicago or Los Angeles and vice versa.

By: Yeoman

Yeoman — Mon, 15 May 2023 14:30:59 +0000

“Humans are good at inventing things, so guns got more militarized as they turned into weapons of mass destruction”

FWIW, firearm technology has not change that much, in real terms, for well over a century. The AR15 itself hasn’t changed much since its first introduction in the early 1960s. Mechanically, and in every real sense, it remains pretty much the same. And for that matter, semi automatic rifles predated it by decades.

What has changed, however, is the marketing and the following atmosphere. Somehow, the marketing went from an emphasis on hunting arms and sporting arms, to an emphasis on “personal defense”. Some of that was always there, going way back, but it became heavily weighted to the concept that you needed to be armed at all times. As this went on, the atmosphere nearly became on in which potential customers were nearly told that they should expect to be involved in the Battle of Stalingrad at any moment, if not in the advertisements, in the firearm’s press. Ironically, a firearm, the AR15, which was regarded as junk by servicemen who were first issued it in the Vietnam War, went on to become a nearly mandatory must have item for thousands of people who purchased it based just on its latter acquired aura.

What to about this now is hard to envision, but one thing can be predicted. If we reach the point where long term firearms restrictions are passed into law it will be ironically the case that it will be in no small part due to those who sold so many people on the concept that they had to have a weapon suitable for urban combat. Had the marketing, and the firearm’s press, stayed away from this in the first instance, this likely never would have been the case.