The gun industry has deliberately enhanced its profits by increasing the lethality -- the killing power -- of its products...The industry might have chosen to develop safer firearms, but gun-industry executives deliberately chose to take exactly the opposite direction.
It's an area of writing that is superbly uncritical. It's hypermarketing, and Guns & Ammo is the 500-pound canary.
It's an assault pistol. It was designed and basically advertised and used for exactly the kind of thing that was done in Littleton: It's to spray a lot of bullets over a wide area very quickly.
My book argues that the gun industry is purposely making guns sexier in terms of their killing power in order to rejuvenate the market. What I'm saying now is that in terms of our country, and in our times, there are guns out there whose harm far outweighs their utility. And I want somebody in government to say: 'Don't make them. Don't have them.'
You have drastically increased the ability to inflict death and injury. That means you can shoot more rounds faster and easier, what they call spray and pray.
The gun industry offloads tremendous costs onto people who don't use its products, like a polluter dumping on a city, so it's good to force people to realize what these costs are.
Given the development of a whole sniper culture over the past 10 years, it was almost inevitable that some deranged person or a terrorist was going to be drawn in to acting out the sniper mentality. The sniper's motto is, 'One shot, one kill.' That's what this guy has been doing right here around our nation's capital...In order to rejuvenate its sales, the gun industry has gone out and marketed sniper rifles.
I was shocked at what I found. The sniper's motto is 'one shot, one kill.' There are schools that teach civilians how to do this.
This is not just a gun control issue. It's a national security issue.
These are ideal weapons of terrorist attack.
If you wanted to create a system that is basically legal but designed to facilitate gun trafficking, you couldn't have a better system than you have here.
Enhanced lethality, that's what we are talking about. Lethality increases when you have larger bullets, more ammunition and the guns are easier to operate. That's the contribution Glock and others have brought to America.
It's clear that the militarized stuff is the stuff that sells and is defining the industry.
What the gun industry has done is sort of appeal to the inner soldier, the insurrectionist feelings and high-tech desires to market these military-style guns. Now, they don't call them assault rifles. They have a couple of terms they use. They call them tactical rifles. They call them modern sporting rifles. I personally don't care what you call them; they are basically assault rifles, and their purpose is to kill people.
The people we’re talking about, once they get into ‘I want to kill a lot of people,’ it’s not a leap for them to see that these guns are made and designed for war. And if you look at the industry advertising, that is a consistent theme.
They translate the industry's needs into less crass, less economically interested language -- into defending the home, into defending the country. The industry needs a veneer of respectability.
When the military switched over to this assault weapon, the whole context changed. The conversation became, ‘Is this the kind of gun you want in the civilian world?’ And we who advocate for regulation say, ‘No, you do not.’
It speaks to the fact that there are a lot of young men in the U.S. who will never be in the military but feel that male compulsion to warriorhood. Owning an assault weapon is a passport to that.
Those design features in a civilian market have horrific consequences. So you can call it whatever you want — tactical rifle, black rifle, assault rifle, modern sporting rifle. It has the capability that the military wanted for warfare...It's just a fact that hunting has been in serious decline, so those kinds of guns just don't sell as well. Well, you're in business, you got to sell something. These assault rifles — these military-style rifles — appeal to a broader range of people.
It's just a fact that hunting has been in serious decline, so those kinds of guns just don't sell as well. Well, you're in business, you got to sell something. These assault rifles — these military-style rifles — appeal to a broader range of people.
I think that in the long term, the nation is going to reject this unbridled kind of gun culture. But I think it's going to take a long time. Colorado is a true test for those actually in the trenches, but it might also be a wake-up call -- nothing is easy, and pouring money in from Bloomberg is not a magic solution.
The industry has changed. In terms of what sells and what is marketed most successfully, we’re now talking about guns that are derived directly from military design.
If you wanted to know how many Bushmasters have been used in what kinds of crime for the last five years, that information is in ATF’s files. But it can’t be released because of the Tiahrt Amendment.
There is not a middle ground with the NRA.