The Co-conspirator
By Igor Bobic
The HuffPost (11/1/17)
A leading manufacturer of bump stocks, devices that make semi-automatic weapons function like machine guns, told customers on Tuesday it is resuming sales of them in limited quantities.
“We would like to take the time to thank all of our customers for their patience and support throughout this past month!” Slide Fire, the company that produces the devices, said in an email, according to The Trace.
The announcement comes just one month after the mass shooting in Las Vegas ― the deadliest such shooting in modern U.S. history. Law enforcement officials said the gunman, Stephen Paddock, used weapons modified with bump stocks to kill 58 people and injure over 500 others at a country music concert outside the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino.
Texas-based Slide Fire temporarily suspended sales of bump stocks in the wake of the Oct. 1 attack, and demand quickly spiked for the devices across the country amid fears they would soon be outlawed. …
(Commoner Call cartoon by Mark L. Taylor, 2017. Open source and free to use with link to www.thecommonercall.org )
- Trump’s Politicised Reaction To NYC Attack A Far Cry From Las Vegas Shooting – One prompted a sombre tone, quotation from scripture and prayer for unity. The other brought a barrage of tweets, peppered with capital letters and exclamation marks and bent on divisiveness and blame. Donald Trump had sharply contrasting responses to the mass shooting in Las Vegas and the terrorist attack in New York that bookended the month of October. The morning after Stephen Paddock fired hundreds of rifle rounds from his suite on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel in Las Vegas, killing 58 people at a country music concert, Trump was at his most presidential, stating from the diplomatic room at the White House: “In moments of tragedy and horror, America comes together as one – and it always has.” But when it came to solutions, the president offered little more than looking at gun control laws “as time goes by”. … Read the Rest
- The One Response To Mass Shootings You Can Always Depend Upon: Sale Of Firearms Rises – The phenomenon is very much like the reaction of alcoholics whose solution to the stress-inducing trouble, pain, and chaos that alcohol inflicts on their lives is to attempt to remedy the situation by careening into another drinking binge. US Americans are attracted to guns in the same manner drunks are in love with their chosen killer. They are seeking sanctuary from fear. All too many view the world as a hostile place. The remedy, US culture has instructed them, is to dispatch the threat by means of violence. These tormented souls believe they will be provided safety on a weapons-bristling citadel built on a mountain of corpses. (Floridians had to be advised that it would be a less than propitious act to fire weaponry into the fury of Hurricane Irma.) … Read the Rest