How A Maine Businessman Made The AR-15 Into America’s Best-Selling Rifle

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This article was originally published at ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1474350
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“Guns made people feel safer”
Just the stupid ones.

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Anything for a buck. And nothing this guy did (or the results it produced) has ever furrowed Suzy’s brow.

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FSM bless that scorpion. The arachnid, not Collins.

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They make me feel so safe that I have to lock them up because I’m afraid that those other people who don’t feel safe will steal them.

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Off topic, but part of the same general problem, toxic individualism.

[The Tony Starkification of Elon Musk]

The Elon Musk we meet in Walter Isaacson’s biography posts selfies of himself as Marvel comic character Doctor Strange – the “Sorcerer Supreme” who protects the Earth against magical threats. Musk is so fascinated with figures such as Iron Man that he gave a tour of the SpaceX factory to the actor who plays him, Robert Downey Jr, and the film’s director, Jon Favreau.

[The Economic Injustice League]

Billionaires, or their equivalents, have been around a long time, but there’s something different about today’s tech titans, as evidenced by a rash of recent books. Reading about their apocalypse bunkers, vampiric longevity strategies, outlandish social media pronouncements, private space programmes and virtual world-building ambitions, it’s hard to remember they’re not actors in a reality series or characters from a new Avengers movie.

[Delving out a gigantic “Technowarren” under New Zealand is more macho than a building a big house with multiple chimneys]

Unlike their forebears, contemporary billionaires do not hope to build the biggest house in town, but the biggest colony on the moon. In contrast, however avaricious, the titans of past gilded eras still saw themselves as human members of civil society. Contemporary billionaires appear to understand civics and civilians as impediments to their progress, necessary victims of the externalities of their companies’ growth, sad artefacts of the civilisation they will leave behind in their inexorable colonisation of the next dimension. Unlike their forebears, they do not hope to build the biggest house in town, but the biggest underground lair in New Zealand, colony on the moon or Mars or virtual reality server in the cloud.

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Goddamn Dick Dyke, and “Billy” Cohen, and Susan Collins.
Everything Dyke Touched Died–EDTD
Money over morals (and mortals). Eternal shame on them all.

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Hi! To find out what I can do, say @discobot display help.

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GD discobot, too.

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If there’s a HELL, he deserves to go to it directly.

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Sorry. There is no Hell. Greed and power are just two more obstacles to Humanity’s success in a continuing evolution structure. Given an individual’s possible consolidation of power and, out species’ inherent assholery, we might very well have a self-limiting fate.

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Math is hard I guess

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If Karma was on their game, this guy would have lived long enough to have been having dinner in Lewistona few weeks back

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Conflating safety with a feral fascination with gun violence reflects the art of advertising directed toward human gullibility. It seems we are encouraged 24/7 never to love God and neighbor as ourselves. Still, some habitually resist with acts of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self control. Against such, the good book reminds, there is no law.

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That, and small dicks.

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I think you can be completely SURE of it… The earth will survive (unless a huge meteor or comet knocks it out) and some organisms will take over, but not humans. Greedy humans blew it for all of us.

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Except for the God part, I agree. We can be great, moral humanists, while also atheist. I think we can understand that, or can’t we? I don’t have a fight with God, or with believers, many of whom I really respect, and know how much good they do, and have done. I just don’t want to be told what any of us have to believe, and certainly not to deify our governments. In Science and Humanism I Trust.

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Nothing like military fetishism to sell a line of crap. Every bar in America had a guy lying about his service, but that was 20 years ago. Now 3 times that many at least: half the Oathkeepers were mailmen.

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Our grandson is also fascinated with Marvel action heroes, but he just turned 10. There’s probably a good explanation for the commonality, and it isn’t monetary wealth.

Also off, off topic, cuz it’s Saturday:

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I should have put the Adirondack chairs in the garage last week, but it was sunny and in the 60s.

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and it’s still snowing. again. :roll_eyes:

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