Lock and load, America! Less than 20 shooting days to Christmas!
f-ing vultures. “But it’s not our fault for there being so many guns!”
uses profits to buy another congressman who blocks any form of responsible gun ownership
uses profits to start another marketing blitz aimed towards fragile masculinity, and another blitz of 'De Libruls are coming to take your masculinity-reinforcing guns!
We’re not going to be able to escalate our way out of this situation.
If tragedy is good for business, does it follow that extremists on the radio are, too? How about faked Planned Parenthood videos? There are all sorts of creative possibilities for the enterprising company willing to provoke stochastic terrorism!
“Growth Industry”
We already knew that…
You wonder?
Every time, there are loud cries for limiting of gun accessibility.
So whoever wants one (or one more or a specific kind or…) gets an additional motivation to buy while they still can, instead of postponing it to Some Other Time.
I do the same with other things whenever I hear about additional restrictions to come. Had to stock up with toluene, with some other materials, and the only thing I regret is that I did not stock up with dichloromethane on time as I missed that deadline; here goes that vapor degreaser project. Thank you, EU.
Luckily at least the leaded solders stay available without having to ship them from China. The non-banned tin-rich crapola sucks for hand soldering for a billion of little reasons and is acceptable for only special purposes.
So I see this as something pretty much inevitable. Nothing much to see here, move along.
The restrict-everything do-gooders are pretty good sales reps, against their own will.
Every time, there are reasonable requests to consider how to modify gun accessibility to make more tragedies less likely.
But then immediately there are loud cries CLAIMING that what’s really being requested is total limiting of gun accessibility. Oh noes!
Lather, rinse, repeat.
So when people realize that society at large can’t protect them, they take steps to protect themselves?
No, if I state it like that it’ll be too hard to saddle my personal agendas to the issue.
How about “Unrestricted sales of Lethal killing machinery soars.” That’s more like it. Now I can fit my preplanned political position right in there.
Except what’s actually driving all this are the Republican-voting morons who, when Obama was elected, were absolutely certain that he was going to usher in a racial apocalypse, where “those people” would be encouraged into an orgy of raping and looting that required guns for self-protection.* With each shooting, their narrative goes, Obama “the gun-grabber” will prevent them from buying any more, instead of the reality that Obama will make yet another sad, resigned speech and congress will, if anything, loosen gun owning/buying restrictions.
*No, this isn’t a straw-man; these people exist - I know people who said exactly that to others who agreed with them.
If that was the real issue, gun sales would only be up among black Americans. I, for one, feel my country does a fine job of protecting me.
The end result may or may not be true. However, look at the decision matrix (B- - not buy, B+ - buy, R- - restrictions loosened or intact, R+ - restrictions added):
B-R-: no change of status quo, we may get what we want Sometime Later
B-R+: opportunity to buy lost or impaired, we lost the chance of getting what we want
B+R-: we have what we wanted Sometime Later, bought earlier than we’d otherwise
B+R+: we have what we wanted, which we couldn’t get Sometime Later anymore
So only the B-R+ has a negative impact for us. In the B+R- case we incurred an unnecessary opportunity cost of what else we could buy Now (which now has to be postponed) but otherwise we still have what we want.
The B column is what we can influence. The R column is what the Powers That Be (or other factors like market availability, a restriction of accessibility may not be just a law) airdrop at us without any significant way to control it from our end. So in case of looming R+, the B- situation exposes us to a loss while B+ hedges against it.
The matrix works for everything from guns to leaded solder to meds.
(There is another factor, perishability, which influences the usefulness of stocking up. Solvents and solders keep well, flux in the cored solders degrades over many many years, hydrogen peroxide degrades over few years, guns and other mechanics can last for centuries if corrosion-protected, propellants can degrade but last for decades if properly stored, foods perish fast or slow depending on type…)
Every large enough sample will have outliers. These will naturally get overreported, because they fit cozily to the “look how bad the Other Side is” narrative both sides have.
There has been an uptick in shootings so in multiple “somewheres” there are rooms full of people strategizing on how best to use their substantial resources to maximize profit from this opportunity.
If you don’t like corporations profiting off mass shootings, then maybe late stage western capitalism isn’t for you.
I didnt see much “hand rubbing glee.” More like statements of fact that aren’t reflective of what they actually believe: but go ahead and push whatever narrative you want for the heads of sporting goods companies.
War profiteers should be hanged for treason.
Firearms are primitive weapons. Both the “for” and “against” camps overemphasize their relevance. Controversy about them now is as pointless as controversy about bows and arrows in the firearms era was.
What a load of shit. A pile of dead bodies here in California this week disagrees that controversy around them is pointless.
Sure, they are weapons, and weapons can be dangerous.
But why these weapons in particular? Why do people worry about having them / taking them away when they are anachronistic? And how does arguing about them actually help people - compared to society treating people fairly? I can sort of understand why there is such controversy, but it never seems to be very productive.
As compared to what? Lightsabers?
If we don’t talk about it, there will never be a shift in public mindset resulting in a change of laws to ACTUALLY address the thousands that die annually from guns. You have to talk about things in a republic in order to get the laws changed.
