Can We Ban Assault Rifles?

The first time someone shot their way into an elementary school and mowed down a bunch of kids and adult staff was December 2012, when a 20-year-old took an AR-15 into the Sandy Hook Elementary School and blew the place apart.

I ended up at the meeting in D.C. held a couple of months later by Obama at which time Joe Biden, then Vice President, chaired an effort to develop a new gun law, an effort which ultimately failed.

The effort failed for the same reason that the current effort to pass another law may fail, namely, because there just isn’t any kind of sustained concern about gun violence in the good ol’ U.S. of A.

Every time there’s a mass shooting, the clicks on Google for key words related to guns and gun violence jump sky high. Except the jump lasts, at most, for a couple of days and then the line goes right back down to where It always sits, which is down around the lowest rung on the graph.

Back at some point in the 1980’s, I was invited to spend a day at the Smith & Wesson factory, where a group of S&W distributors were going over a very detailed consumer survey which the company had paid a lot of money to have done. Smith & Wesson took over the handgun market from Colt after World War II, and now thirty years later, they were losing that same market to Glock.