As I said, I’ve been concerned with the increase in mass shootings over time and of course a lot of that is driven just by the increasing lethality of weaponry. If you look back to the time when there was an assassination attempt on President Reagan, the shooter there, John Hinkley, was using a six shooter, a revolver, and he managed to shoot six bullets, hit four people, and no one died.
By Dan Zimmerman for Shooting News Weekly
Today, the weapon that he would be using would be a much more powerful weapon, potentially with 15- or 17-round magazine and as Hinkley did, and most of these mass shooters do, they usually fire everything in their gun. So, if you’re shooting, 15 or 17 bullets rather than just six, you’re obviously going to hit more people. And the lethality of this weaponry is significantly greater. In fact, there was a really interesting study done looking at who survives getting shot. And it turns out the more powerful the weapon and the bullet size that hit you the greater the likelihood that you will die from being shot.
So, it’s a growing problem and of course the industry is, is trying to do what Apple did for the iPhone, which is to every year come up with a faster shooting, more lethal weapon so that people will go out and make additional purchases.
It used to be that there would be a family gun that would be in the family for decades. Now, every year the industry wants to come up with new bells and whistles, so people will buy new guns. And the fact that they’re getting more lethal all the time contributes to the problem of mass shooting. So I do think at some point, people will step in, maybe now that there is this rise in political violence we’ve seen with legislators attacked and killed in Minnesota, the attempt on President Trump’s life, and the killing of Charlie Kirk, may focus people on this problem and push them to take some of the commonsense measures that can reduce the level of gun violence in this arena.
— Stanford Law Professor Diego Zambrano in Guns, Money, and Mass Shootings
Read the original article in its entirety on Shooting News Weekly.
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At least you got one thing right, the guns are cooler than they use in be. I really don’t like it when individuals with zero gun knowledge write articles about guns.
Really?! What ‘new’ weapons? Most, if or all, of these weapons used by recent would-be assassins have been around for years, including the bolt actions. You sound like a Troll, man…
The lethality of the weapons IS NOT a factor in the number of shootings. The entire premise of this article is blaming the TOOL, not the killer.
Firearms proliferation via
Home theft
Group sales
Financing
Mail order?
Straw man sales