Bang-ruptcy

Even the well-oiled National Rifle Association cannot stem the tide of financial malaise that infects the American purveyors of powerful poison-packing pistols… and military assault rifles… to the paranoid public. Guns are durables that really don’t upgrade that significantly, usually made of steel that lasts forever if even marginally cared for. And once that niche is filled, for most, there is no need to buy another weapon. To me there are five categories of civilian gun-buyers (outside of the dealers themselves): hunters/sportsmen, collectors, paranoid members of the public, criminals/terrorists and maniacs.

Unlike 18^th and 19^th century rural America, guns are not generally a basic household necessity, and for every justifiable gun homicide, there are roughly thirty homicides that do not meet that criterion. We’ve come a long-way from breach-loading, single shot muskets, but since the revolver and magazine-loading pistols and rifles, the “improvements” in available guns have generally focused on increasing numbers of more powerful bullets fired faster and faster.

So the gun-makers focus on two important marketing vectors in pushing sales for an item that does not wear out: 1. getting those who collect multiple weapons to add one more “cool” gun to their collection (and one more, and one more) or 2. to buy a weapon that was never permitted to civilians before, a lean, mean, super-efficient killing machine: a semi-automatic assault weapon, usually with a large magazine and often with enhancements (like a bumpstock) that virtually mimics a fully-automatic weapon. The NRA, functioning as a well-financed lobby for gun manufacturers, has to emphasize these two soft-spots to the gun-buying public just to stimulate increased sales. It is interesting, then, to see who really owns guns in America.

NRA efforts have all-too-successfully imbued a “gun culture” – without seeming limits – into every nook and cranny of American society. The New York Daily News, February 18^th, provides this very disturbing example: “Children in Missouri are selling raffle tickets for an AR-15 — the same weapon used by a Florida gunman who killed 17 people at a high school — to raise money for their baseball team… The Neosho-based team consists of players who range in age from 7 to 9, and the fund-raiser was planned before the Parkland school massacre Wednesday, team coach Levi Patterson told the Kansas City Star.” Are you surprised? You shouldn’t be; signs of this pervasive elevation of guns-as-America are everywhere.

And there is a mythology about who actually owns the guns. Although there are hundreds of millions of civilian firearms in the United States, the overwhelming majority are not owned by inner city gangs and criminals. Most gun owners are in fact while males that came by gun ownership quite legally. Here are some facts from USA Today (9/22/16):

Despite steep declines in violent crimes, an estimated 70 million firearms were added to American arsenals the past two decades, according to a new landmark study on gun ownership.

Overall, Americans own an estimated 265 million guns [some more recent estimates place the number at well over 300 million] – more than one gun for every American adult, according to the study by researchers at Harvard and Northeastern universities. Half of those guns – 133 million – were in the hands of just 3% of American adults, so-called ‘super owners’ who possessed an average of 17 guns each, it showed.

The survey, the most authoritative since a 1994 study posed similar questions to gun owners, is under peer-review for publication in a trade journal. Summaries of the study were released this week to the Guardian and The Trace news outlets… The findings include:

·   An estimated 55 million Americans own guns.

·   The percentage of the U.S. population who own guns decreased slightly from 25% in 1994 to 22% last year.

·   Between 300,000 and 600,000 guns are stolen each year.

·   Gun owners tend to be white, male, conservative, and live in rural areas.

·   25% of gun owners in America are white or multi-racial, compared with 16% of Hispanics and 14% of African Americans.

·   There are an estimated 111 million handguns nationwide, a 71% increase from the 65 million handguns in 1994.

The recent penetration of semi-automatic assault rifles into civilian America has exploded in unit sales. The most infamous of those weapons, the AR 15 (such as the one used in the recent Parkland, Florida Valentine’s Day school shooting) is the primary assault rifle used by American mass murderers. USA Today estimates that in 2015 alone, 2.7 million AR 15s were sold to the American public. And no, no matter what some politicians may tell you, assault weapons are not for traditional hunting. Unless you mean the human kind. Scary, huh?

But as successful as the NRA has been in decimating any barriers to these gun sale targets, particularly any restrictions against assault weapons which have no other real world purpose than to kill as many people in the shortest time possible, it simply has not overcome the fact that even the gun-friendly public that votes the NRA ticket is pretty much content just with the gun(s) they already have. As staggering as the above numbers may appear, there just are not enough buyers of these new killing machines to sustain the civilian side of new guns sales. It really is about money, if you haven’t figured that out yet. After all, it was only the gun manufacturers began funding the NRA as their lobby group in 1977 that the Second Amendment slowly got rewritten and vastly more gun-permissive than was ever intended. Yet there’s more financial trouble brewing among gun-makers. It’s not from lawsuits; laws protect gun-makers from any complicity in how their guns are used.

“As the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., stokes the national debate over firearms, it may be easy to overlook another major development in the gun world this week… One of the nation’s oldest and largest gun makers, Remington, said it was nearing a bankruptcy filing… Hit with slumping sales and unable to sell itself, Remington has negotiated a deal with its lenders to cut its debt and keep operating.

“Other gun makers are also struggling. Colt completed its trip through bankruptcy last year, while sales and profits at Smith & Wesson’s parent company have plummeted and its stock price is sagging. All three companies make a version of the AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle, which was used by the killer in Parkland on Wednesday [2/14] and is the weapon of choice for mass shootings.

“The problems demonstrate the paradoxical and tumultuous nature of the gun industry. It has prospered when the prospect of tighter regulations induces people to buy more guns… And it slumps when that threat of new regulation subsides, as it has done during the Trump administration. President Trump, who has called himself a ‘true friend and champion’ of guns, did not mention gun control in his remarks on Thursday [2/15] about the Parkland shooting. And many leaders in the Republican-controlled Congress, where gun restrictions have withered over the years, have shown no change of heart in light of this week’s school shooting.

“‘When people feared there would be increased gun regulation, they went out and bought more guns,’ said Kevin Cassidy, an analyst at Moody’s Investors Service, who covers the gun manufacturers.” New York Times, February 16^th.

Simply, a Democratic administration, particularly after a mass shooting event, is good for gun sales; a Republican administration isn’t. The strongest proponents supporting the NRA tend to be white and older; the majority of younger Americans identify with the school shooting victims and simply cannot understand why the United States even tolerates assault weapons and unregulated guns shows without background checks. Their parents and grandparents, after all, never had to endure “active shooter” drills that are practiced in schools all over the United States today.

The reaction from local Parkland, Florida high school students exemplifies this age-driven schism on gun control: “After a mass shooting left 17 students and faculty dead at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in the Fort Lauderdale suburb of Parkland, many area students — instead of withdrawing into the solitude of grief — have thrown themselves into the spotlight in anger and frustration.

“They’re too young to vote. But in national TV interviews, in viral posts on social media, at protests outside schools, the students have chosen to make a noisy message clear to the politicians who represent them: They want stronger gun control.

‘Stop apologizing. Get to work. Pass legislation that actually saves children’s lives,’ Douglas junior David Hogg, 17, said Friday as he stood outside his school by police tape and pro-gun-control signs reading ‘Make school safe’ and ‘Kids don’t need guns.’

“On Saturday [2/17], young children and teenagers were among the thousands who gathered outside a federal courthouse in Fort Lauderdale to demand stronger gun laws. Douglas High students were among those who angrily, and tearfully, addressed the crowd.

“Many protest signs emphasized the youth of the protesters. One girl carried a sign reading, ‘How dare you push legislation ‘protecting’ us before we’re born but not after the fact.’ Five students, each holding a sign decorated with photos of guns and a single word in red letters, formed a line to spell out the phrase ‘Guns down test scores up!!!!!!’” Los Angeles Times, February 18^th.

Sadly, Donald Trump – who did not use the word “gun” in his condolence speech after the shooting and focused only on mental illness – responded with a “it’s only about me” tweet on February 17^th, blaming the shooting on the FBI, who clearly missed a key clue: “Very sad that the FBI missed all of the many signals sent out by the Florida school shooter. This is not acceptable. They are spending too much time trying to prove Russian collusion with the Trump campaign - there is no collusion. Get back to the basics and make us all proud!” So obvious how little he cares. We are not getting any changes in gun control from our current leadership, but… if there are enough gun manufacturer bankruptcies, perhaps the funding that drives the toxic NRA to encourage unrestricted access to the mass-murdering weapons will simply dry up.

I’m Peter Dekom, and at what point does common sense bring home a choice that saving our children actually is more important than giving folks virtually unlimited access to military assault weapons that can always be secured by anyone craving to own one… even the deeply mentally ill.