Bill Ruger (courtesy tacticallife.com)
Previous Post
Next Post

The New York Times has decided that now’s a good time to revisit Bill Ruger’s pro-gun control position, starting like this . . .

When Devin Patrick Kelley took a Ruger AR-556 semiautomatic assault rifle to the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Tex., last November, he brought 15 high-capacity magazines that each contained 30 bullets . . .

If William B. Ruger Sr., the co-founder of the gun maker Sturm, Ruger & Company, had had his way, Mr. Kelley’s firepower might have been much diminished. In 1989, Mr. Ruger proposed a ban on high-capacity magazines, which led a smaller rival to call Sturm, Ruger “the Benedict Arnold of the gun industry.”

In 1994, he said his company would only sell a high-capacity magazine to police officers.

“Someone who is not a police officer can buy one made elsewhere, but we can’t do anything about that,” he said. “What we can do is be a responsible firearms manufacturer ourselves. And we believe we are.”

The article points out that no one in the Ruger clan has a say about what happens at Ruger these days. But implies that America is worse for big Bill’s departure.

Twenty-six people died in the Sutherland Springs shooting, including the pastor’s 14-year-old daughter and a pregnant woman, while another 20 were injured by a gun bearing the Ruger name. If he were alive today, America’s most outspoken gun maker would likely have had something to say.

I wonder what that would be. Meanwhile, does the American firearms industry have a moral responsibility to try to limit firearms-related crime?

Previous Post
Next Post

121 COMMENTS

    • Does the auto industry owe a duty to prevent drunk driving?
      Or, stated in more legalistic terms, does anyone owe a duty to prevent third persons from committing criminal acts? The short answer, absent a special relationship between them, is “no.”

      • No but the auto industry already has regulations designed to reduce the injury’s to pedestrians. Rear bumpers heights are set on trucks to prevent drive under.
        What we need to keep in mind is at some point someone is going to shoot enough people and the public is just not going to care about what was written on a piece of paper 225 years ago. Right now all the tools are there to do that without so much as a single 4473, all legal in the majority of the states right up to the point were someone pulls the trigger.

        • and then we’re going to have a little civil war and beat some respect for the CotUS back into them.

        • pwrserge, the government have been doing end runs around the Constitution the moment the ink dried. The NFA was the result of gangsters running around with BARs and Tommy Guns. What do you think is going to happen when someone kills 300 people with a SAW? The writing in on the wall with Vegas. The only reason it is not raining shit was the range was 4-500 yards and the rounds were petering out. If he had a better setup I really don’t think there would be any debate at all, and we would be lucky to keep 30 round magazines.

        • You greatly overestimate our willingness to comply these days. A gun ban would result in lots and lots of dead politicians.

        • So you think that a law stating that “any firearm that uses the energy from the firing of the firearm or from a external source to assist in the operation of a trigger is classified as a machine gun” is going to start a revolution? OK I have a bridge you may want to look at for a new income source.

        • I think, at least under the current state of affairs, manufacturers are considered to have some duty to prevent accidental injury from normal use of their product.

          So; bumper heights to minimize pedestrian injury and to prevent drive unders fall well within that mandate of “some duty.”

          What no manufacturing industry that I know of has is any duty to prevent the criminal misuse of their products to intentionally injure others; that goes for cars as well. In some cases changes to a product to minimize accidental injuries may also minimize injuries due to criminal misuse, but that is a happy coincidence, not a mandate.

        • “What no manufacturing industry that I know of has is any duty to prevent the criminal misuse of their products to intentionally injure others” When was the last time you saw law darts in the store.
          There are a bunch of ways the AFT could have classified bump stocks as machine guns. And it would be in all out interests to do so. Because, like I said, if at one point people just will NOT care and we hopefully will not lose more than bump-stocks. If you somehow think the Constitution is going to protect your “gun rights” explain how in the hell the safe school act that was declared unconstitutional managed to get put back on the books by invoking the commerce clause? How did the original AWB ever pass? And we still have the federal excise tax on firearms.

        • None of what you mention protects against deliberate criminal misuse. Much more akin to drop safe reqirements.

        • Most Americans own guns and more Americans support keeping current or rolling back gun control that support more gun control.

          The younger you at the more likely you are to OPPOSE bans on semi autos, assult rifles etc

          EVERY polling group, Gallup, Pew, CBS, ABC, WSJ, NYTimes and Wa Post polls show that over 40, 30, 20, and ten year trend, you pick, that POSITIVE attitudes toward gun ownership and negative attitudes toward gun control are growing.

        • binder the analogy you are trying to make with the auto industry has been debunked as idiotic so often that the gun control lobby doesn’t even try to do it any more.

          If it made sense, than the knife industry would be heavily regulated, insuring knives were dull and never pointy.

          it is a sophist argument.

        • The NFA was the result of gangsters running around with BARs and Tommy Guns. What do you think is going to happen when someone kills 300 people with a SAW?

          Gangsters going around with BARS and Tommy guns were the result of Prohibition.

          What do you expect gangsters will do if stricter gun control laws are enacted?

      • FOR REQUIRED SAFETY FEATURES, AUTOMOBILES limited to 30 miles per hour,( GUN magazines ,to 10 or less,) —–BUTCHER KNIVES, to 3 inches or less.—– DRINKING DRIVERS TRAVEL limited to BUS,CABS, or STREETCARS.— CAR FREE ZONES at shopping centers, churches, ball games, SCHOOLS, MUSIC CONCERTS, RECREATION CENTERS, ETC.ETC. SEE HOW STUPID IT QUICKLY BECOMES????

        • Hmm, from my New York loft this all sounds quite reasonable. Says the person who does not own a vehicle, rides a taxi or subway everywhere they commute, has groceries delivered and relies on their 40k deep police department to save them from any and all threats.

        • “…and relies on their 40k deep police department to save them from any and all threats.”
          Tdubbs, my responses to that would be “so far” or “they don’t (and don’t have any responsibility to) protect you, you just think they do.”

          Each of us is our own first responder.

      • The same failed logic demands that we put speed governors on cars so that willful, otherwise free people, can’t drive “too fast”. The real subtext in both Ruger’s suck-up plea to authority and the Times article is that, because it allows people to occasionally do bad things, freedom is too costly to have in a modern society.

      • The auto industry does not but the alcohol industry should definitely stop putting alcohol in their tasty adult beverages.

        Mag capacity laws are kinda like requiring stores to only sell “airplane bottles”. The time it takes to open the next bottle may be just enough for someone to stop you!

      • Well yeah but how would gun companies enact that kind of thing?

        That’s my beef with this. The whole premise if flawed. What is, say….. Winchester going really going to do in terms of “being responsible” that would affect my use of their products?

  1. The truth about Bill Rug er is that he brought up the capacity limit in response to proposals to ban weapons, including the Mini-14/30. His logic was that once the weapons themselves were banned they’d be gone forever, but a mag ban could be reversed with little long term effect. This turned out to be correct. His decision to only sell the mags to law enforcement is a little less defensible, but his actions were that of appeasement not betrayal.

    The auto industry could easily put an end to the epidemic of drunk driving by simply installing a breathalyzer in every car and forcing the consumer to blow in it before the car would start. Do they have a moral obligation to do so?

    • The problem with the breathalyzer issue is one that’s well known in the industry but not to the wider public and is as follows:

      1) Most breathalyzers are too sensitive. They will pick up things like a passenger who’s been drinking or is wearing perfume. This negates the possibility of a DD and means that in many cases the car will either not start or will cease to function (after a warning and timer) if you pick up someone who causes the thing to go off.

      2) Lot’s of things the driver might do will set this thing off and prevent a car from starting. Mouthwash is a good example. If you use something like Listerine you’re not starting an “inflatable car” for at least 30 minutes. Shitty way to start your day if you ask me.

      3) Related to 1 & 2. There are a lot of emergency situations where these things would be a serious problem. Or these problems could create the emergency situation.

      4) These things are EASY to bypass/remove. For DUI convictions that’s illegal but for everyone else it *wouldn’t* be and there would be YouTube videos on how to bypass the unit in about five minutes. Hundreds of those videos would be up within hours of the time the first set of “inflatable cars” hit the roads.

      This would be expensive, time consuming, lawsuits waiting to happen and ultimately pointless since anyone with a couple butt splices, the interesting in doing so and two brain cells to rub together could bypass the unit. The only people affected would be those who are too lazy/stupid to bypass the unit and they would eventually have problems that would probably lead to a lawsuit against the auto company.

      • Pretending for a moment that I was making a serious proposal…

        The breathalyzers could be tuned to be less sensitive. The ones that are mandated for people with DWI convictions are set for zero tolerance. They could be tuned to kick in at around 0.08%+/-.

        I can’t seem to find a way (and I’ve searched You Tube) to permanently disable the ‘auto-start-stop’ so that I don’t have to push the stupid button every time I start the truck and they’re now in their 4 year of production. I would assume that a breathalyzer could be made just as difficult to disable if it was installed at the factory.

        The biggest problem is that they would have to be mandated by law, since absolutely nobody would buy a vehicle with a breathalyzer of their own free will.

        • Having them less finely tuned would negate the problem of other people…. maybe. It won’t negate the problem of mouthwash. I had to sign a sworn affidavit over that shit when I went to start my buddy’s truck after his DUI and blew 0.244 due to mouthwash.

          The rest of it is just wires and switches which can be bypassed. I don’t know exactly what you mean by “auto-start-stop” feature but you can always pull the wiring diagram for it and bypass the switch. Bypassing an interlock device is even easier. It’s just a switch connected to a sensor which is attached to the ignition wire(s). Cut the wire on either side, remove the device and connect the wires with a butt splice. Then throw the interlock device on the floor of your garage. Done. It’s essentially the opposite of wiring in an anti-theft kill switch.

          Of course the ones they put in for DUI register when power to the unit is cut which means they know if you do this. Or if you change your battery… another sworn affidavit and a receipt are generally needed for that. Having a friend/roommate with a DUI fucking sucks. Of course there are ways around that whole losing power thing…

          Again, even if the thing were to be “standard equipment” wiring diagrams make getting rid of it pretty easy.

        • Auto-start-stop. It turns the engine off when you come to a stop and starts back up when you lift your foot off the brake. I don’t like it because a) it’s stupid, b) it kills the air conditioning, heater, etc, c) it kills the engine when it’s no where near fully warmed up, and d) one new starter (or battery) will negate twice as much as you’ll ever save on gas. The best way I could find (on You Tube) to disable it permanently is to tear your dash apart and install a jump wire on the switch to fool the computer into thinking you’re holding the button down all the time. I decided it was easier to just push the button every time I start the truck. Give it a few years and you won’t be able to buy a new gas vehicle without it.

          Anyway, breathalyzers now are installed retroactively and their function is to prevent the vehicle from starting. If they were installed on every vehicle at the factory, the computer would require confirmation from the breathalyzer or it won’t start. (New vehicles don’t have a direct connection from your ignition to the starter anymore, the computer dictates everything.) So clipping a wire would prevent the confirmation and ensure that the car won’t start. You’d either have to figure a way to send a false signal to the CPU or to just fool the breathalyzer into thinking you’re sober. Or to reprogram the CPU.

        • Question for those who have experience with said car breathalyzers; What keeps someone from using canned air or having a non-drinking person from blowing into the breathalyzer ? Does said breathalyzer require that you blow into it continuously to keep the car running or is this a once-to-start it deal? Can I go to the package store sober, get a 5th of hootch and go parking someplace and get plastered without turning the car off?

          Most all technology can be defeated giving enough thought and the will to do so. We have a saying in the engineering world; It’s almost impossible to make something idiot-proof, because idiots are so ingenious….

        • There are ways around it Gov. Trust me. And those ways ain’t hard. Electronics really are not that difficult.

          Rednecks, bangers and methheads can steal brand new Mercedes. I’m sure they can figure out a way around a OEM installed breathalyzer. With a wiring diagram all things are possible because they’re telling you how they built the damn thing and what the voltages are on the wires. Worst case you also need a diagram of the board, again, they’re telling you how they built it.

          David:

          A can of air doesn’t work. They have various methods to defeat this. Some have a temperature sensor others require that you suck on the thing at certain times or make noises while blowing to prove that a human is blowing into them. When my buddy got a DUI it took me at least 10 tries before I could start the damn thing because of all the “make sure it’s a human” shit on his breath test unit.

          Another person can start your car but these things have a random schedule after the vehicle is started, varying from 5 to like 90 minutes where they require a retest. If you don’t retest within the “window” they then give you a set time to pull over before they shut the vehicle down for 30-60 minutes. Every time you successfully retest the unit resets it’s timer for another “random” amount of time. (IME it’s never more than 10 minutes) The cords on them are short enough that another person would have to crawl over the driver to do the retest. The one my buddy had was so short you had to put your head below the dash to blow into it, while driving mind you (super safe, that). A guy in TX just killed a girl due to this. He took his eyes off the road to bend down and blow and clipped the poor girl. (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2017/11/20/texas-woman-18-killed-non-drunk-man-taking-breathalyzer-test-while-driving/879990001/)

          As for defeating the things… there are ways but they’re not really worth it. The unit is wired into Hot At All Times and the ignition wire. The install “tech” cuts both wires and butt splices the unit onto the wires. You can bypass the ignition wire pretty easily but the court makes you go to the business that installed the thing and get a printout of what it’s done/registered every 30 days. If they see time without any use of the unit but the odometer reading has changed or the tech finds the bypass then you are seriously fucked for tampering with the thing.

          Really, it’s just easier not to drink.

        • ‘Really, it’s just easier not to drink.’

          Of course there would be ways around it, but they could make it so that it’s just easier to blow in the damn tube and drive. Still, those determined to drive drunk would find a way, just that if they made it a federal law to mandate the breathalyzers in the first place they’d probably also make it a federal offense to tamper with them. So getting busted driving drunk would probably involve a few years in a federal prison.

      • Perhaps GM could eliminate the steering wheel from autos and have an infallible computer run things. Delete the unreliable human from the loop. NO?

    • (sigh…) and just when I began to hope most folks had forgotten about Ol’Bill’s not-so-insignificant slip o’the tongue.
      It almost makes me wonder if this reporter didn’t bring it up here just to keep us at each other’s throats…
      Ol’Bill is dead. I’ve gotten over it and I have more room in the safe that needs fillin’ with more Ruger’s.
      🤠

      • In other news, Neville Chamberlain is still unfairly maligned for the Munich Agreement, even though it probably saved England. Hitler wanted to start the war a year earlier but Chamberlain’s appeasement made it impossible to come up with a pretext for it. Meanwhile England spent the year preparing for the war. Hitler admitted to his generals that it was the worst mistake he made.

        And Bill was right, better ban the maga zines than to ban the weapons.

        • “England spent the year preparing for the war. ”

          Doing what? England didn’t even register potential draftees until April, 1939, and even then it was only 20 and 21 year olds, and the English Army remained at less than 1 million men until 1940. Her best fighting ship was The Hood (commissioned 1920) and the Bismarck made short work of it.

          The only country less prepared than England was the US, with only 250,000 men in the military. There was limited conscription in 1940, ramped up in 1941 before Pearl Harbor, and total mobilization after our fleet was sunk.

          That;s the way “democracies” work. They are always behind the OODA Loop.

        • Ralph. England actually used that time to great effect. Most importantly aircraft production was ramped up and pilot training increased to the point that England was able to stand off the Luftwaffe in 1940.

          Radar stations were up and running. Improvements to RAF bases such as burying phone lines in concrete were made, just in time.

          It takes time to ramp up military preps from 20 years of peace and the draw down of the economy resulting from the first world war and the great depression.

          Chamberlins .gov instituted many of these programs and Churchill just had to claim credit for their good outcomes.

        • ‘Doing what?’ – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neville_Chamberlain#Path_to_war_(October_1938_%E2%80%93_August_1939)

          I’m not saying the Brits weren’t horrifically ill prepared at the outset of the war, but they were much better prepared than they were a year before. And since they won the Battle of Britain and much of their rearmament efforts went into the building of Spitfires they likely would have lost a year earlier.

          Also the British were always very proud (as we should be now) of their ‘volunteer’ army. They didn’t employ conscription in the First World War until 1916.

        • Another one of Hitler’s greatest mistakes was ignoring the invention of radar. The Brits put it to good use and also instituted a program of spotters along the coast. The Spitfires were always in the air by the time the Luftwaffe reached London.

        • Munich betrayal not only royally fucked British and French ally Czechoslovakia, it gave Hitler free and undefended access to Czech not inconsiderable industry.

          Czechoslovakia was willing and ready to fight nazis, with chains of fortresses on borders and well armed and already mobilized (albeit smaller) army.
          And make no mistake – the same year England used to build the RAF was well used by Germans to build Wehrmacht too, now with Czech factories help.
          Chamberlain and Daladier gave Hitler nice present complete with a bow and bought couple months of peace. They fully deserve their infamy.

        • ‘…with chains of fortresses on borders…’

          The French had those too. They called it the Maginot line. About a year later they found out what happens when you prepare for the last war. Czechoslovakia would have fallen in days. The Battle of Britain would have been fought right about as the very first Spitfires were rolling off the factory line. No Spitfires, no radar, Britain falls. No free Britain, no D-day. If Hitler’s smart he waits to attack Stalin, but he probably isn’t. Maybe the Russian winter beats the Wehrmacht, maybe not. We’re free to concentrate on Japan, which is good, except we win too fast and don’t have the A-bombs yet, so we invade Japan the old fashioned way. Probably lose a million soldiers in the process.

          Interesting game of what could have been, but Hitler was ready in 1938 and Britain was desperate for time.

        • Guv. I play the ‘what if’ game. Who doesn’t? The way I figure it with England out of the war The US has no option in europe other than to devote all the resources that went to England on the Russians. Which results in all of europe being communists.

          Or Hitler has the time and resources to devote to his wonder weapons, including nukes, and we wind up with a nuclear armed nazi europe.

          Either way europe would not be worried today about a muslim invasion.

        • True dat, J-dub. Another ‘what if’ I thought of years ago is that if it wasn’t for the A-bomb there never would have been a Korean War and probably no Vietnam either. After Hitler went down, Stalin declared war on Japan and moved into south-east Asia. He had taken Manchuria and the northern half of the Korean peninsula when Japan surrendered and to pursue Japanese territories any further would have meant war with America. What with a potentially nuclear armed American army already stationed in Germany, that would not exactly be an ideal situation for Stalin. Had we been forced to invade Japan he would have easily had all of Korea and China in his grasp. So no A-bomb no South Korea. Not sure where we’d be today with lil’ Kim though.

  2. No. They don’t cause gun violence they provide tools that are sometimes used for nefarious purposes but they harbor no responsibility for the end user being a maniac. Take cars, hammers, and knives for example. Should these companies try to prevent violence using their products which take more lives on a yearly basis than guns do in a decade?
    Drug companies have half a bazillion warnings on their drugs to prevent intentional misuse and yet we still have Sally Stoner and Hank High outback snortin Percocet, gobbling Neurontin, and huffing canned air. You can PSA this crap all you want but people who want to misuse your product are still going to misuse your product. There is nothing anyone can do to counter a real live human being’s propensity for evil, poor decisions, and stupidity NOTHING I SAY!!! You want to stop all those issues and cure every single one of society’s ills, it’s as simple as this kill every last human you can find. Problem solved, no one will ever die in a mass shooting, overdose, or win a Darwin Award ever again. There will be no more poor, no more illegal immigration, no more of anything.

    Humans will always find a way to do something stupid, to abuse an innocuous substance, or to kill other humans guns, drugs, and other items are just the tools to feed the beast that is mankind’s insanity.

    • ATF BOB— EXCELLENT post and DEAD ON. THANKS. — ONLY problem is, the uneducated, gun haters would readily accept every circumstance you noted, IF ONLY they could RID THE WORD of those AWFUL GUNS.

      • If you put a button in front of them that instantly killed any one that owned a gun – or even disagreed with them on any topic dear to their heart, many leftists would push it before you finished explaining what it did. As a group, leftists are more deranged and bloodthirsty than all run of the mill other mass-murderers combined.

      • True. Still I was hoping the super outlandish “remedy” I proposed would give a few pause in trying to continue to legislate “safety and morality” however, I know it won’t actually work. The problem is that they have already entrenched themselves in the belief that if any of the mass shooters throughout the long storied history of mass shootings had not had a gun then the mass shootings wouldn’t have happened. Now at its base this premise is true but, it does not take into account the possibility of the shooter just switching methods. Maybe one or two wouldn’t have done anything but the rest would’ve been just as happy to use a knife, a car, a bomb, a fire, or poison. This is where they lose the argument and where we cannot win the argument as we cannot prove definitively that the mass murder would have occurred and they cannot prove that it would not have occurred. It’s Schrödinger’s shooting. Where without the gun the person didn’t mass murder children or innocent people yet they still did and you don’t find the true answer until the event occurs. There’s no way to simulate what a total gun ban would do for mass murder.

        • That’s a whole other topic of discussion not covered in my statement. I’m referring to civilian on civilian non state sponsored mass murder (i.e. mass shootings, mass stabbings, and so on). I don’t think pulling guns from the equation will change the answer. Yes, it may save lives since one’s arms wear out quickly stabbing with a knife and medical personnel have gotten good at sewing up knife wounds over the millennia since the first sword battle. Fire drills are common in large buildings like factories, rest homes, and schools and bombs are rather finicky, so there may be lower mortality in events using those as the primary casualty producer. The events however will still occur and as time goes on the various perpetrators will come to perfect their grisly craft just as the IED makers in the Middle East have perfected theirs.

          That’s not where the hypothesis fails though, the hypothesis fails in its very premise as there is no means to actually predict human behavior. Saying banning guns will prevent mass murders is akin to saying banning yoga pants will prevent awkward moments. There is nothing saying that removing guns will guarantee that other methods won’t be used. One can make plastic explosives at home with the right materials just ask isis I’m sure they’ll give you the recipe and possibly even send a guy to teach you how to do it correctly. The real problem with mass violence is that it involves humans and the only way to prevent humans from doing horrible things to each other is to either isolate them and never let them come in contact with other humans or to just eradicate them all and let the furry little woodland critters take it all back.

  3. Yeah, about as soon as the AMA takes responsibility for the hundreds of thousands of doctors who negligently kill each year. Or about as soon as the Pharmaceutical industry takes responsibility for all of the opioid deaths each year.

  4. No. Each person is responsible for their own actions and choices. The great evil of our time is the idea that everyone must control the lives and property of everyone else – and blame someone else for everything.

    The spoon didn’t make Rosy fat…

    I have only one gun that ever shot a person… and it is not in the least sorry. Neither am I… since the man was trying to kill me. Damn, I love that gun. 🙂

  5. The firearms industry has exactly the same amount of responsibility to reduce gun violence as the media industry has.

    Therefore, I insist that all media (film, music, newspapers, books, magazines, etc.) immediately cease glorifying, reporting, commenting, mentioning or even thinking about firearms.

  6. Of course now is the time to revisit gun control. Our elected, so called “Republicans” are showing most of them aren’t very right wing at all. Not to mention the NRA is sounding more and more ready to hand over what little liberty we still have. So yeah if I’m a gun grabbing leftist I’m feeling pretty good about my chances right now.

    • What’s the problem with getting your’s in line/kicked in the ass?

      In Iowa I have Senators Grassley & Ernst and Congressman Blum. Iowa also contributes Congressman King who is one of the best in DC. Congressman Young is spineless but right of center. The only prog send (Peoples Rep of Iowa City) is Loebsackocrap. So one of 6 is pretty darn good.

  7. If the plan is to attack a few dozen people, does it make a huge difference if he brought 15 30-round mags or 20 10-round mags?

    I will always assert the deadliest weapon any mass shooter has is time alone with his targets. The Sutherland Springs killer could have been armed with a bolt action with an internal magazine and had the same toll if everyone is cowering on the floor disarmed for ten minutes. He could have been armed with a belt-fed SAW and no one would have died if he had been plugged by an armed defender the moment he walked in the door. Time to response is the key and nothing is faster than being there from the beginning.

    • The problem with the belt-fed SAW is he can do it from 200 yards. Fired into a crowd and now what kind of a mess do you have? At some point the public just doesn’t care about rights and then you end up with the NFA and AWB.

      • That’s why we have the Constitution. So mob agitated after some a-hole uses a gun to kill bunch of innocent people can’t simply vote our rights away.

        About Sutherland Springs, how hard would it be to kill twenty-six people and injure another 20 with 15 ten round magazines, instead of 15 standard 30 rounders? If the murderer is the only one there with a gun, he can inflict the same damage with a pair of revolvers. Just keeping one loaded while loading the other one to keep the unarmed victims from rushing him.

  8. They totally do have a responsibility to limit gun violence. It’s a moral imperative and should be enforced by law: Members of the industry should not shoot at others or brandish, except in cases of self-defense. Boom, gun violence limited.

  9. And yet Australia did a better job of keeping weapons out of the hands of maniacs and criminals than this country has ever done.

    They’ve suffered no mass killings after the port arthur tragedy and any incidents that do happen are extremely rare versus the numerous incidents that happen everyday.

    How many shootings or mass killings did they have in one month versus the dozens that happen everyday in the US including the most recent mass shooting rampage in florida that this website likes to ignore.

    https://www.local10.com/news/crime/suspect-killed-by-deputy-on-i-95-went-on-shooting-rampage

    Or the dozens of others that happened throughout the whole month of jan and recently this month.

    http://www.gunviolencearchive.org/reports/mass-shooting

    These don’t happen everyday in Europe, Canada, Japan or Australia.

    • “These don’t happen everyday in Europe, Canada, Japan or Australia.”

      Lie.

      Yes, they do. Those countries have their media under the government’s control so they suppress the mass murder happening daily.

      They can’t afford to let the truth out that their ‘gun control’ is a total failure.

      (Hook, cast. Now to reel in very *slowly*… 😉 )

    • Population of Australia is about 24 million people, on a land mass that approximates the size of the continental U.S.

      When people aren’t piled on top of one another like cordwood, they tend to get along better. Violent crime is mainly an urban problem.

    • Oh boy here’s “real American asshole troller”. What do you think you’re going to accomplish here? Nobody here cares about your opinion. Nobody is buying your so called “research.” So do everyone a favor and die of cancer, aids or some other long painful disease. And in your last lonely gasping breaths, while you stare at the ceiling of your hospital room, realize how much of a pathetic waste of life you were.

    • The same old tired copy pasted lies again. ‘Only in USA, never anywhere else!’ ‘Hundreds every day!’
      In Australia mass murderers switched to arson. How is being burned to death better than being shot? In Europe it’s trucks lately (on top of shootings and hand grenade attacks). Is it nicer to get crushed by truck tires than to get shot?

      Why is it only mass killings that interest you? Will you be less dead if there isn’t several more corpses lying around you? Mass murders are so rare they are statistically insignificant even in US.

      Most killings with guns are suicides, rest is retail, not wholesale. Most murders are black and hispanic gang bangers killing other black and hispanic gang bangers. (But you never want to talk about that problem.) How many of those does Europe, Japan, Australia or your home Canada have?

    • Austlais suicde rate did not go down one ipota.

      And its murder rate fell for decades as guns increased (like the US). What it dd in the 1996t was start vastly increasing incarnation rates, austlais murder fell 50% since its gun contrlo, the US murder rate fell 60% since the same time.

      All US jurisdictions that share race, age income, education level with the US, including US jurdictions that have 70% gun ownership – the US jurisdictions have LOWER murder rates than Australia.

      Over 85% of US murder occurs in 30 out of 3,000 US counties — not one of which looks like Australia demographically.

      US murder over international averages is driven by one demographic – it is all there at the FBI UCR

    • The comment above by Binder trying to draw an analogy with cars is absurd. NOTHING whatsoever illegal about me putting in a 3,000 horsepower jet engine in a car I make myself in California and keep and drive on my property. But if I make a full auto machine gun the authorities would come for me.

      So stop saying we do with with cars when it comes to gun control, it is silly. Cars would be carry analogy at best,

  10. To a limited degree. They should make it hard for criminals to get weaponry, which is taken about as far as it can be by their adherence to existing laws.

    I also think they should stick to practical products and avoid making range toys that depend on technicalities to dodge the intent of the law. Bump stocks, trigger cranks, pistol “braces” and Shockwave not-shotguns are examples. They’re begging for lawmakers and regulators to cause trouble, which I might consider irresponsible due to the risk to gun rights.

    • If range toys are legal, then so be it. I would not want to not have something perfectly legal simply because somebody else poo-poos it.

      • Fair enough, but the price is an increased likelihood of restrictive legislation or regulation, like the proposed ban on “devices that increase the rate of fire.” Such rules could impact products that are actually useful, like trigger mods. I don’t think the toys are worth the risk.

  11. Meanwhile, does the American firearms industry have a moral responsibility to try to limit firearms-related crime? No, their main responsibility is to arm John Q. Public so that we can protect ourselves from the evil in this world that will never go away until we eliminate our nature of corruption that is endemic to the human race. We will always need to guard against our baser selves using the tools we are handed whether counseling or guns to fight tyranny or physical encroachment by others.

  12. The S&W on my hip will be used to stop “gun violence” of the opportunity presents itself.

    With upwards of a million defensive gun uses each year in this country, it would appear the firearms industry is doing quite a bit to help reduce “gun violence.”

    • And by doing it in a manner that even working Joes can afford to buy the means to protect their family and loved ones. Unlike so many previous eras when only the wealthy and powerful had the means to do so. Oh and at those times, the elites also used their weapons to make sure the rest of us were chained to their plows.

  13. I wasn’t around when old Ruger was alive. I don’t care. I’ll still make my next gun a Ruger(I need more $!)…

  14. HOW MANY PEOPLE HAS “The New York Times” GOTTEN KILLED, OR THE MSM???

    HOW MANY LIVES HAVE BEEN WRECKED BY BULLSHIT REPORTING JUST SO THEY COULD HAVE “CONTENT”.

    WHEN WILL THERE BE AN ACCOUNTING FOR THAT?

  15. It’s a matter of perspective. The firearms industry produces tools that, when used as intended, may limit violence against otherwise innocent victims.

    Said another way, when I carry it is to deter or limit gun violence from being perpetrated against myself and my family.

  16. No more so than the auto industry does with regards to Drunk/Drugged driving or the food industry does in regards to obesity. Gun violence is a behavior. That is in the sole control of the individual performing the action.

  17. Auto von Kahrs told the industry high speed cars would cause deaths and only law enforcement should have go fasters.

  18. Short answer, no.
    A previous analogy was to the automotive industry. I think that’s accurate. Now, does the firearms industry need to produce safe guns? Of course! All firearms should be reliable, able to take a super hot load, and be drop safe. Good engineering should also be taken into account, so nothing overly risky must be done as part of routine maintenance.
    Accidents will happen, guns get dropped or ammo goes wrong, just like a car will be crashed or maintenance put off for too long.
    The difference, is that a car relies on other people as well, and plans for their incompetence. A gun manufacturer reasons that most gun owners are responsible and follow strict rules. Also, one person’s incompetence generally won’t affect another person in the way cars can. You can’t really crash a gun. Unless it’s a smart gun, but those are different altogether.
    Basically, you have much more control over a gun, just by nature.

  19. The Riefenstahls in the Goebbels media have a duty to reduce violence by no longer treating mass murderers and Islamic terrorists like rock stars.

  20. The firearms industry should adopt a “one gun violence per month” policy, which certainly would reduce the number of annual gun violences per perpetrator. I think that would be a great start.

  21. By and large, they already do. Like the automotive industry, and even more so, and in good faith, they make safe and reliable products designed and produced for their intended purpose. And like the alcohol industry, they conspicuously promote safe and responsible ownership, use and storage of their products.

  22. So, Bill Ruger and the NYT would be cool with the Sutherland Springs psychopath killing 10 or 15 instead of 26? They’d say “our job is done, no need for any more bloody shirt waving or inflammatory editorials”?

    Liberals like to comment on the need for national conversations. Those are difficult though when one side is so disingenuous.

  23. remember:

    canada elected a guy to be their leader that just said he wants to reintegrate 60 isis fighters into the canadian culture

    so when you put it into perspective outlawing killing bears the way “peoplekind” did it for thousands of years its really not that big a deal

    next story

  24. No not at all.
    No company regardless of its products. If or legal at original point of sale. Use or possible misuse by an individual or group (end user). Should be responsible. For what it Is, or has been used for after the legal sale of said product.
    Like my legalize here??

  25. They have a responsibility to make firearms people can use to fight government gun violence, which is the worst violence. We must be well equipped to fight, for the state is evil gone wild.

  26. “What do you think is going to happen when someone kills 300 people with a SAW?”

    SAW are not available like 30 rd AR magazines.

    How about are DEMOCRATS going to take responsibility for THEIR criminal class murdering thousands of Americans?

  27. they have a responsibility to produce safe, quality products. That is all. Further, those two standards are set mostly by the consumer and their willingness to endorse with dollars.

  28. Something like 90% percent of violent crime occurs in Democratic dominated voting precincts. Getting rid of them would seem like a no brainer.

  29. The firearms industry has a responsibility for the safety of their products, which are remarkably safe. Given that it takes half a dozen deliberate, correct steps to do violence using a gun, their responsibility is nothing.

    I’ll believe they’re sincere talking about the responsibility of the makers of devices when kitchen knives come with safeties, baseball bats require loading, and cars only operate in one, precise vector. Safety is getting clipped by spew from under your lawn mower’s deck, or not. Violence is someone running over your foot with a lawn mower on purpose.

    Given how many precise, correct steps it takes to harm someone using a gun, it’s weird that Mothers Against Only Some Violence & the rest are more bugged that you can do violence with a gun if you work hard enough at it, than that people choose to.

  30. JWM is the smallest of men, PUNY, he boasts about how he will shoot any government agent who tries to infringe his rights, but when the government told him to kill nearly defenseless people he couldnt obey fast enough

    JWM just another braggart with no moral courage, big hero talking the talk, PUNY moral coward who failed to walk the walk… and naturally this dishonest child takes no personal responsibility for his failure of moral courage, read his reply, his elaborate excuses for why it is everyone elses fault, not his… pathetic and laughable…

    Shame on you JWM you PUNY man

  31. Everything we did in those faraway lands, good or bad, we did in the name of folks like ehren, rob and comrade more dead soldiers. We did it in their names and under their orders. The American military is under the leadership of the American pols and people.
    Here is JWMs embarassing attempt to evade taking personal moral responsibility for lacking the moral courage to refuse to obey the goverment when it told him to kill nearly defenseless people:

    “We did nothing without their approval beforehand. And if they did not approve then they should have had the moral courage to try to stop what they thought was wrong. Refuse to pay your taxes. Renounce your citizenship and move to another country.

    Until they have taken actual steps to remedy what they see as wrong they do not have the right to judge others.

    My service was over 4 decades ago and I’m still proud of the men I served alongside.”

  32. Here is JWMs embarassing attempt to evade taking personal moral responsibility for lacking the moral courage to refuse to obey the goverment when it told him to kill nearly defenseless people:

    “Everything we did in those faraway lands, good or bad, we did in the name of folks like ehren, rob and comrade more dead soldiers. We did it in their names and under their orders. The American military is under the leadership of the American pols and people.

    We did nothing without their approval beforehand. And if they did not approve then they should have had the moral courage to try to stop what they thought was wrong. Refuse to pay your taxes. Renounce your citizenship and move to another country.

    Until they have taken actual steps to remedy what they see as wrong they do not have the right to judge others.

    My service was over 4 decades ago and I’m still proud of the men I served alongside.”

  33. In the long term, a manufacturer develops a reputation and consumer good will from making quality products. Government interference in the marketplace does not guarantee safe products in spite of the mindset of big brother bozos.

  34. Because any after-market AR 15 magazine will fit a Ruger AR 15, Bill Rugers’ desire to only sell 30 rounders to the police is very easily bypassed. Even magazines for Miny 14s and Miny 30s are being produced by other magazine companies. Ban all firearms and someone will still be selling them on the corner.
    The MSM types are grasping for straws when they use arguments like this.

  35. “Does the Firearms Industry Have a Responsibility to Limit ‘Gun Violence?’”

    Does the film industry? Does the video game industry? How about the toy industry?

    … or doesn’t that responsibility rest solely with those who commit crimes with guns?

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here