According to National Rifle Association Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre, gun owners are uniting in "political spontaneous combustion."
Ouch.
In the most recent edition of the NRA's America's 1st Freedom magazine, LaPierre cites a "tsunami of Second Amendment consumerism" in the wake of the election of Barack Obama and his appointment of Eric Holder as Attorney General. Says LaPierre, "Americans are speaking with their wallets--buying firearms, accessories and ammunition in quantities never seen before," driven by fear of "Obama's hostile gun-ban agenda." The scary part is that most of the gun-shopping Krooks participating in this alliterative buying spree are those simply adding new military style weaponry to an existing arsenal. Over the past few years the gun industry has become increasingly dominated by manufacturers selling only AK-47 and AR-15 type assault rifles (newly christened "black rifles" by gunmakers to make them a little more cuddly and a little less killy), new high-powered handguns ranging from revolvers with the penetration power of rifles to AK-47 pistols, to anti-armor 50 caliber sniper rifles. Don't believe me? Pick up a copy of Shotgun News and compare the number of gun ads for "traditional" hunting rifles (a handful) to those for assault rifles (all the rest). Military-style weapons are the guns that are flying off the shelves and into the homes of people frightened about the "change" that an Obama Administration represents. (Left unstated by the NRA is that this short-lived sales peak will, if history is any gauge, be followed by a predictable sales slump, and gun ownership in the U.S. will continue its steady decline.)
And where some might see this latest sales bump as nothing more than the predictable result of NRA and gun industry fear mongering, LaPierre sees it as more, a whole lot more. To the NRA, there is nothing more patriotic than stocking up on the gun industry's latest and most lethal wares. In fact, the NRA equates the gun-buying binge with the Congressional election of 1994: "The last time we saw such an outpouring of anger and frustration...." Ballot box, bullet box? Tomato, tomahto. Only the NRA could equate buying a gun with exercising your right to vote.
This, of course, ignores the fact that angry and frustrated people might not be the best candidates to own that extra assault rifle.
Political spontaneous combustion? More like cynical spontaneous generation.