We aren’t having an evidence-based debate about guns – Vox dances around the fact that the Dickey Amendment only blocks federal funding for firearms-related research designed “to advocate or promote gun control” . . .
But there is more or less a federal prohibition on government dollars being spent on public health research about firearms.
It is known as the Dickey Amendment, first approved by Congress in the 1990s. Its effective ban on federal taxpayer money being spent on research that could lead to gun control has since spread from the CDC to the NIH, the federal agencies primarily tasked with protecting the public health.
How Defective Guns Became the Only Product That Can’t Be Recalled – When you think government is the answer (no matter what the question) the fact that gunmakers can be sued for defective products (i.e., Remington for the 700 trigger) is an inconvenient truth. Oh, and a Democrat done did it! . . .
To understand how firearms makers escaped government oversight of the safety of their pistols, revolvers, and rifles, you need to go back to 1972, when Congress created the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Four years earlier, President Lyndon B. Johnson had signed the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, which regulated several aspects of firearm sales, and advocates of gun control hoped to give this new agency oversight of defective weapons.
Representative John Dingell, a Democrat from Michigan and a hunter with an A-plus rating from the ascendant NRA, blocked them. In 1975 he did it again, when a colleague introduced a bill making a second run at giving the CPSC firearms authority. “We put in there an express prohibition against them getting their nose into the business of regulating firearms and ammunition,” Dingell said in debate in Congress. The issue has never been seriously considered again.
Wilson Combat grips on your non-Wilson Combat 1911? Like an M-Badge on a plain BMW? Just askin’ . . .
Thanks To ‘Trump Slump,’ Shops Have More Guns Than Buyers – Austin’s KUT included a sound bite from yours truly re: the Trump Slump. Word on the street: I spoke too soon. AR sales are back to brisk thanks to post-Parkland push for civilian disarmament.
All is not well in the firearms market. Gun companies have recently seen a sharp decline in sales something many refer to as the “Trump slump.” Robert Farago, a gun enthusiast and blogger for the website The Truth About Guns, says gun companies made a critical mistake during 2016.
“The gun manufacturers ramped up production,” he says. “They figured this is it – the motherlode we are gonna get another one just like we did the Obama surge. We are gonna get a Hillary surge. It didn’t happen.”
“So you put those two together, you have a 40 percent increase in production and a 20 percent decrease in demand and you have sliding prices and you also have people buying guns who say ‘I’ve had enough now, I’ve bought enough guns,’ so the market has gone down because of that.”
Guns could have saved Jews from the Holocaust, Alaska congressman says – That depends on when they would have had guns and what they would have done with them. In this, Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is instructive . . .
“How many millions of people were shot and killed because they were unarmed? Fifty million in Russia,” says Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska on a recording made by a Democrat running for Young’s seat. “How many Jews were put in the ovens because they were unarmed?”
The Anti-Defamation League, however, has called the claim outlandish.
“It is mind-bending to suggest that personal firearms in the hands of the small number of Germany’s Jews (about 214,000 remaining in Germany in 1938) could have stopped the totalitarian onslaught of Nazi Germany when the armies of Poland, France, Belgium and numerous other countries were overwhelmed by the Third Reich,” Jonathan Greenblatt, national director of the Anti-Defamation League wrote in a 2015 opinion piece for the Huffington Post.