Florida father with assault weapon forces wife to watch as he kills two sons

[krispos42]

182. Frank Luntz would be proud

The penetration of the term "assault weapon" as an arbitrary, pejorative, and emotional term in our lexicon is complete, apparently. The screaming headline of the story is the fact that it was committed with an "assault weapon".


Now, probably at least half of the people reading my remarks though an AR-15 or AK-47 was used, and were surprised to find out an "assault weapon" handguns. It also covers shotguns of a certain type, too.


So yeah, despite the fact that "assault weapon" pistols have a shitty layout that the handgun-shooting community has pretty much universally rejected for about a century (heavier, clumsy handling, difficult to holster, hard to conceal), they were banned.


And the fact that the man had, and used, a much older technology gun, the steadfast .38 revolver, in the brutal crime described above in the screaming headline, the focus is on the guy had somewhere in the house a gun that had the magazine in a place that politicians found unacceptable and that the shooting community found stupid.


And those same politicians, having secured the emotional and subconscious reaction in the American psyche, now are trying to expand the definition to include even more guns based on cosmetic features because, hey, it gives them something to run on in 2014. "Standing up to the gun lobby" by banning rifles with pistol grips is surely worth millions of votes and tens of millions of dollars, right? Right?

And it's a welcome distraction from what they didn't do... like regulate the banks, or fight for union rights, or net neutrality, or reforming the campaign finance system, or any of a half-dozen other things they work quietly behind the scenes to subvert. Things they "compromise" with the Republicans with.

I wish they took on the pharmeceutical lobby, or the banking lobby, or the health-insurance lobby, or the carbon lobby, or the prison lobby, with a tenth of the zeal they've spend on banning rifles with protruding pistol grips, or handguns that have magazine mounted outside of the grip.

ANY ONE OF THOSE would save FAR more lives and improve the quality of American life than Feinstein's proposed ban on assault weapons. But... same old story. Follow the money, Lebowski.

The entire firearms industry in America has about $12 billion in revenues (guns and ammunition), and makes about a billion a year in profit.

Bristol-Myers Squibb: $19 billion in revenues, $11 billion in profits.
Astra-Zeneca: $33 billion in revenues, $10 billion in profits
Pfizer: $67 billion in revenues, $10 billion in profits.
Abbott Labs: $39 billion in revenues, $5 billion in profits.
Eli Lilly: $25 billion in revenues, $4 billion in profits.


Follow the money.

Manufacturing jobs that paid decent but not spectacular wages and created decent but not spectacular profits, but jobs that actually created wealth from raw materials, were shoved aside for the sake of high-wage, high-profit industries that produce money but not wealth. Gun makers are the former; pharma and financial services and health insurance... those are the latter. And that's why their precious, precious profits are unmentioned and untouchable by our congresscritters.