THE Gun Thread

[The Grand Nudger]

You may have misread, I don't mean that they're for you, like a present......lol. I mean that the point of the toy guns (and panic buying toy guns particularly) is for shooting you and other civilians. An imagined dystopia where they wander their subdivisions executing neighbors over a can of baked beans and vienna sausages, or less. The firearm industry is quite happy to play along and fuel this paranoia. If you look at the history of their advertising it's actually pretty difficult to figure out who was wagging who - the politicians or the marketers - but..as I've commented on before...they see the domestic market as just about spent. They're working hard to export their weapons to warzones..and since I first brought this to your attention they've gotten every concession they've asked for in an incrementalist campaign to remove all restrictions to that end.

Call me old fashioned, but I think that the only people who ought to be trying to get piles of guns into the hands of foreign militants would be the armed forces. As it stands, firearms manufacturers have to break that market well and truly open because domestic panic buying sprees do not make for a sustainable business model going forward, and they know it. I think they may have fucked the pooch on any ability to pivot and cater to the other side of the divide they created/exploited. How could they market a sporting rifle to you now, after all the shit of these past many years?

I think, in the fullness of time, this whole episode will end up as a case example in business schools of an industry with an exceptional product...that completely fucked itself for no good reason. The same will probably be said of gun ownership in the us.