The bill, backed by President Joe Biden, is not expected to pass the Senate, where it would require the support of 10 Republicans who support the right of Americans to bear arms.
In 1994, Congress passed a 10-year law banning assault rifles, designed to kill as many people as possible, and certain high-capacity magazines. The law expired in 2004 and since then sales have skyrocketed, especially among young people.
AR-15-type semi-automatic rifles “are extremely lethal weapons, designed to kill enemy soldiers on the battlefield,” said Carolyn Maloney, who chairs the House Oversight and Reform Committee.
According to the congresswoman, the Ruger company earned more than $100 million from the sale of this type of rifle in 2021, twice as much as in 2020, and Daniel Defense tripled its profits on the same concept between 2019 and 2021.
“The industry has flooded our neighborhoods, our schools, even our churches and synagogues with these deadly weapons and has gotten rich doing it,” the Democrat added.
Promotion
Maloney also emphasized the profits made through “dangerous marketing tactics” targeting “young people’s insecurities.”
To attract the attention of young people, some ads mimic popular first-person shooter video games, while others claim the guns will put buyers “at the top of the testosterone food chain.”
Those sales tactics are “deeply disturbing, exploitative and reckless,” said Rep. Maloney, a Democrat from New York.
“In short, the arms industry is profiting from the blood of innocent Americans,” he said.
defenses
The directors of both companies, who testified by videoconference, deplored the bloodshed committed with their weapons, but denied having any responsibility for the phenomenon.
“Our country’s response should not be to the type of weapons, but to the type of people who can commit these carnage,” said Marty Daniel, CEO of Daniel Defense, whose model was used by the shooter who killed 21 people in a elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, last May. Of these, 19 were children from 7 to 10 years old and the remaining two were teachers.
A few days before that shocking event, an assailant armed with an assault rifle left 10 dead in a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, whose owners and customers were African-American.
“I am deeply shocked by this horrible act committed by an evil person,” Daniel said in reference to the Uvalde case. But “I fear that the purpose of this commission is to blame the more than 24 million sporting rifles in circulation” and that they were implicated in “only 4% of firearm homicides in 2019”.
Ruger president Christopher Killoy concluded that guns “are inanimate objects.” His company is the main manufacturer of assault rifles in the United States and has 2,000 “well-paying” jobs, he congratulated himself.
Source: Ambito
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