Murderous capitalism

This essay by Hunter is mostly a summary of a Washington Post story but I'm sending you there because of the WaPo paywall. It's rather long-winded and repetitive -- you'll pretty much get the idea before you read to the end.  To put it in a coconut shell, the first main point is that the only purpose of AR-15 rifles and knockoffs thereof is to kill humans. They are military rifles that can get off a lot of not particularly well-aimed shots quickly and that cause horrendous tissue damage. They are not useful for hunting or target shooting or any other conceivable "sport." They are military weapons designed to kill lots of people before they can kill you. That's all they are good for.

The reason so many people buy them is because of marketing by the companies that make them. The only way to get people to want to buy a product the only purpose of which is to kill large numbers of humans in a short time is to make people believe that is something they may have a reason to do. As Hunter summarizes it:

The National Rifle Association [which represents firearm manufacturers, not owners] founded its case for the AR-15 and other military-styled rifles not on the invention of some new sport, but on overt bigotry, racism, and paranoia. NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre was insistent upon it. The magazines leaned heavily on courting a specific new kind of gun owner, one whose need for self-defense had escalated from needing to defend against a lone burglar to needing to defend against:

• Organized terrorist attacks in or near your neighborhood

• "Urban" looters invading your town en masse after a natural disaster or "race riots"

• The United States government itself.

Each of these scenarios was presented to gun owners as a reason that a mere handgun or hunting rifle could no longer be called adequate self-defense. It was not that American gun owners might need to defend themselves against individual criminals; the new standard became the perceived ability to "win" in an armed standoff against dozens of attackers.

 

Practitioners of the pseudo-science called economics claim that consumers are "sovereign," that the Free Market™ gives consumers the power to maximize their "utility" by exercising "choice" in the allocation of their resources. In fact the most destructive epidemic in U.S. history, the tobacco epidemic, was caused by capitalists who convinced young people that smoking cigarettes would make them cool, sexy, manly (and later womanly, if they picked the right brand of cancer stick), and that claims that it would cause them to die horribly were fake science. In fact, they knew it was true for decades and they funded their own fake scientists to try to obfuscate the truth. What kind of person does that, and goes home to their family at night? 

The same happened with sugar, and lead, and while fossil fuels didn't really need marketing to become popular,there's still a long history of marketing and science denial and all sorts of perfidy that caused us to burn a whole lot more of them than we needed to and has us stuck in a very hard predicament trying to stop. Credit the WaPo for exposing this particular brand of murderous bullshit, but there's plenty more out there.