How Do We Stop Mass Shootings?

When I attended the NRA national meeting at Philadelphia in 1980, I had the great pleasure to chat with Gene Stoner, the engineer who designed the rifle which eventually was adopted by the U.S. military and became known as the AR-16.

I can’t imagine how Stoner would have felt had he lived long enough to see this weapon wind up as the gun of choice for young men who enter a school or a movie theater and shoot the whole place up.

In fact, if you walked into a gun shop in the 1970’s, you might see one civilian version of Stoner’s rifle manufactured by Colt hanging on a wall, but anyone who wanted to own a military-style gun would still look to buy one of the reconditioned M-1 rifles which the government began to sell off sometime between Korea and Viet Nam.

The juxtaposition of military and sporting arms became a big business in the gun industry after the Twin Towers came down in 2001 and the U.S. became a combatant in the War on Terror which is still going on.

For that matter, it was after 2001 that I began to notice that camo clothing had become a fashion item and video shooting games with military motifs became a multi-billion-dollar industry, with the internet allowing users to compete with other shooters online.