NRA bankruptcy lets critics peer into gun lobby’s inner workings

If first-time buyers made up 40% of sales, a net increase in gun ownership is likely. If it’s much lower, maybe not.

That's not true. Because people who own guns can stop being gun owners, too, both through giving up gun ownership—volintarily or not—and death. There's always some share of gun purchases that go to new gun owners, but the trend in gun ownership for at least 50 years has been:

1. Smaller number of households with guns.

2. Smaller number of individual adults with guns (though not by as much as #1, as the average number of adult gun owners per gun owning household has gone up.)

3. Larger number of guns per gun owning household.

4. Larger number of guns per gun owner (though not by as much as #3, for pretty similar reasons as the relationship between #2 and #1.)

Gun ownership is becoming a narrower subculture, and within families within that subculture gun ownership is becoming more universal, and to involve more guns per owner. Guns have become the “bling” of a shrinking subculture.

And remember it's not binary, a lot of people are indifferent and many want more gun restrictions and some want less

Back to my original point is the average american does not own a gun

So you're saying that it is correct, because the combination of the two categories constitute the large majority of firearms deaths.

Suicides by themselves are the large majority of firearms deaths, granted. And accidental deaths would generally fall under the same "the purchaser would have passed the background check" issue.

The point was that people would expect the policy to make a difference in homicides. But the large category of homicides where background checks would be expected to be useful, i.e. career criminals, are the place where they don't happen, because career criminals are members of criminal organizations that can provide access outside of legal channels.

I’m not sure what you mean by this.

In 2008, the law was amended to require that semi-automatic handguns stamp identifying marks on shell casings in certain ways that researchers later determined to be more or less impossible. This provision of the law, however, was not to go into effect until the Attorney General of California certified that the technology was commercially available. In 2013, Kamala Harris falsely made that certification and no new model handguns have been added to the roster since. As manufacturers improve their designs, older versions have gone out of production. As a result, the roster has shrunk significantly since.

I wouldn't go as far as to say it's a handgun ban. I think Glock, for example, is perfectly happy to continue to manufacture their Gen3 models as long as the California market exists. But it does lead to a situation where the selection for enthusiasts is extremely limited and will become even more so over time.

In the military you are accountable for every round you fire, and you better not shoot something you don't see.

> does not make it more deadly since you can always fire more rounds if you miss

More rounds on-target is the definition of more deadly.

> Pistol grips are simply easier to manufacture than weird shapes of wood or plastic.

I don't follow. A hollow pistol-grip is not only more plastic, it also requires a much more complicated mold.

There's a reason every modern, light, self-chambering rifle system uses a pistol grip. If it were simply a matter of ease of manufacture, or of comfort with zero tactical advantage, nobody would care if AR-15s were banned because they'd be perfectly happy with their Mini-14.

Not in the United States since 1986 according to that list.

Tactical maneuverability when discharging rounds at a rapid rate can come from maintaining the stock in-line with the bore of the rifle as-with a pistol grip, which allows for better control of rapid fire. It is also easier to pull the rifle into the shoulder quickly, which allows you to re-sight more quickly when firing rapidly, and transitioning from running to a shooting position. If you look at a standard, factory wood or synthetic-stock Mini-14 (not a side-folder), the bore is elevated over the stock. The fractions of a second needed to re-sight the rifle would create a disadvantage when rapidly discharging a weapon in close quarters. This is especially important for someone who has not received extensive training in handling weapons in these situations, such as the people who go postal in schools and nightclubs and such.

> At that range, the AR-15's greater difference between bore axis and line-of-sight becomes a disadvantage compared to the Mini-14.

This seems like a weird example, since I don't believe any modern, well-funded urban combat operations team uses the factory Mini-14, or any similarly-configured rifle with a more horizontal-grip stock. The prototypical close-combat rifle, the MP5, most definitely uses a pistol-grip, and SWAT teams in the United States seem rather fond of the AR-15-style platform.

Although I do not have evidence to support this, I would also make the argument that a pistol-grip offers advantages in quickly swapping mags in a high-pressure situation, as the mag release button is nicely situated with the wrist in a neutral position, and the ability to bring the rifle back-up to shoulder using the pistol-grip as a lever following a mag swap would be easier, especially for someone who is inexperienced, moving quickly, and prone to fumbling.

Plus, people are tired of seeing mass shootings on TV, and just don't want to have to worry about lunatics running around with these types of weapons. The definition of 'these types of weapons' will evolve, and typically correlate with what people see being used in mass shootings on the news.

I don't know that people's negative reaction to these weapons is particularly unreasonable in this context.

It's a lever attached to the bottom of the rifle.

It allows:

1. The stock to remain in-line with the bore of the rifle.

2. Additional leverage to control recoil.

3. Quicker and more intuitive return of the weapon to-shoulder after running or changing magazines.

4. The wrist to remain in a neutral position when depressing the magazine release button.

The Sten, BAR, and the PPSH were pretty much the last generations of fully-automatic rifles to use a horizontal grip configuration, and in both cases, (Soviet and Western) weapons designers converged on the pistol-grip for subsequent designs of the autoloading light rifle, despite substantial differences in design between the M16 and the AK-47.

Why did they make the change? All three of those weapons (Sten, BAR, PPSH) were in widespread combat usage at the time, as were horizontal-grip semiautomatic rifles like the SKS, M14, and M1 Garand/Carbine (as well as a variety of horizontal-grip bolt-action rifles). Why not keep the same configuration for the next generation of rifles so that soldiers would be using the same basic setup that they had originally been trained on? Why did the StG 44, AK-47, Thompson, and later the M-16 all make the switch? Even the Swedes started adding pistol-grips to the BAR in the twenties.

Horizontal-grip rifles just don't seem to be as well-suited for controllability of fully-automatic, or rapid semi-automatic fire.

That the "next step" can be someone's eventual goal or desire is irrelevant to the "fallacy" part.

For a more concrete example, concealed carry has been a large and unambiguous gun rights success story, with shall-issue going from pretty rare in the 80s to near-universal today. What I'd expect an effective gun rights organization to produce is a roadmap for how to convince the holdouts. Illinois passed their shall-issue law with 76% in favor, and Washington has had it for decades; what lessons does this teach us about how to get left-leaning people on board? If a group of California residents wants to convince their sheriff to issue more permits or their assemblyperson to support statewide shall-issue, what should they say? I'd really like to see answers to these questions (please do send me links if you have any!), but as far as I can tell the NRA is wholly uninterested in thinking about them.

A major reason why that shift happened was because if there was a pro-gun Democrat and a pro-gun Republican facing off against each other in a tight race, the NRA would back the pro-gun Republican and claim that the Democrat was going to take your guns away. The net result is that it is always a losing position for a Democrat to be pro-gun.

So over the past 20 years the pro-gun Democrats have almost entirely died off. The NRA is probably the single most significant driver of this shift.

https://faq.sll.texas.gov/questions/44008

That's what the purpose of this bankruptcy is.

It is to transfer the assets and members to a new organization.

Things like the Virgina headquarters and employees can't just be spun back up overnight. That would be a huge loss, if that happened.

Thus, the purpose of all of this stuff is to move all the assets and members to a new organization, so there is as little friction as possible.