Christmas gun ads from the past

[SteveW]

66. Some corrections, here...

"Want to teach your kid to hunt, I've got no problem. Start buying him handguns and assault rifles...I start to question your intent."

Rather than question intent, please reveal to us what you think that "intent" is. Our folks bought each of his 4 sons a target revolver by the time we had reached 14-yrs-of-age; we had already acquired shotguns.

Please note: "assault rifles" are capable of full-auto fire, and are in any case owned by perhaps 200,000 people in this country, after going through a rather rigorous cost, licensing, letter-of-recommendation, and surrender of 4th Amendment rights. Regardless, there is comparatively little demand for this weapon.

If you have "confused" (the Sugarmann expression) the assault rifle with the term of art "assault weapon," then the number of folks who own the latter type of weapon may reach 20,000,000. But this carbine type is semi-auto, an action type which has been with us since the end of the 19th Century, and is regulated in the same manner as other guns.

Few owned the Thompson for a more prosaic reason than cost: What's the demand and practical use? You could get a semi-auto Remington model 8 semi-auto, which fired a far more effective .35 caliber round semi-automatically (it was around a decade earlier than the Thompson)...and for far less money.

Extra credit: Is the Remington model 8 an "assault rifle?" "Assault weapon?"

Don't you think the Thompson is a poor example for your theory about cost and weapon proliferation? Really. LOL.