Yep. You read that right. Just a few days after a mentally disturbed individual used a Glock-brand handgun to kill and injure 18 people, including a federal judge and a nine-year-old girl, Glocks have become so popular that Arizona gun stores are having trouble keeping them in stock.
Instead of hurting sales, the massacre had the $499 semi-automatic pistols -- popular with police, sport shooters and gangsters -- flying out the doors of [Greg Wolff's] Glockmeister stores in Mesa and Phoenix.
"We’re at double our volume over what we usually do," Wolff said two days after the shooting spree that also left 14 wounded, including Democratic Representative Gabrielle Giffords, who remains in critical condition.
It's amazing. There are actually people out there who hear about a tragic shooting using a particular weapon and immediately think 'I gotta get me one of those'.
(Although I sort of understand the motivation. For gun collectors - for collectors of any item - a tie to some tragic piece of history is a seductive thing. Consider the poor Hitler beetle (anophtalmus hitleri), now critically endangered because of the depredations of bug collectors, only a few of which are actual Nazis. But I digress.)
But, to be just a little more fair to gun owners (those of you who haven't already scrolled down and dropped a doughnut in the tip jar), the collecting impulse is just one of several motivations driving up Glock sales (and sales of handguns in general).
A national debate over weaknesses in state and federal gun laws stirred by the shooting has stoked fears among gun buyers that stiffer restrictions may be coming from Congress, gun dealers say. The result is that a deadly demonstration of the weapon’s effectiveness has also fired up sales of handguns in Arizona and other states, according to federal law enforcement data.
As it happens, I want the government to take your guns. I also want the government to take your meth labs and keep you from marrying your cousins. But never mind that. What I find hilarious is the idea that gun owners, who control the Republican Party outright, have a majority voice in the Democratic Party, and are represented by the second most powerful lobbying group in the United States, live in constant fear of their right to bear arms being stripped from them. (That 'right', by the way, comes in the context of a 'well regulated militia'. Want to play with semi-automatic pistols? Join the National Guard.)
The gun rights slippery slope (as argued by the NRA) tends to go like this:
- The federal government places some minor restriction on gun ownership.
- ???
- Gun owners are sent to concentration camps and executed.
As such, even the tiniest limitation on gun owner's 'rights' (such as the 'right' to own a 31-shot magazine that can empty a room full of people in a matter of seconds) is seen as a profound evil to be opposed with every fiber of one's being.
It's fear. Fear of losing a prized and emotionally important posession. Fear of the government - as if 'Second Amendment solutions' would do a single goddamn thing to protect you from a genuinely repressive government. Good luck taking out that black helicopter with your Glock, Mr. Real True American. And finally (and maybe most important) fear of one's own weakness, and the belief that a handgun compensates for that weakness.
I call it the 'I'm a hero!' fallacy. The idea that, in some dangerous situation, carrying a gun would give you the power to protect yourself and others. After every school shooting, conservatives yammer about how restrictions on carrying guns at school let this tragedy happen; after every tragic act of violence, they insist that even one armed bystander, transformed into a hero by the Power of the Gun, could have immediately executed the criminal (without harming any innocent bystanders) and saved the day before flying off into the sunset.
Arizona - where handguns are common and concealed carry requires no permit - would seem to be the perfect place to prove this assertion. In fact, there were several armed bystanders at the Giffords shooting. And as it turns out real life is not a John Woo movie:
The new poster boy for this agenda is Joe Zamudio, a hero in the Tucson incident. Zamudio was in a nearby drug store when the shooting began, and he was armed. He ran to the scene and helped subdue the killer. Television interviewers are celebrating his courage, and pro-gun blogs are touting his equipment. "Bystander Says Carrying Gun Prompted Him to Help," says the headline in the Wall Street Journal.
But before we embrace Zamudio's brave intervention as proof of the value of being armed, let's hear the whole story. "I came out of that store, I clicked the safety off, and I was ready," he explained on Fox and Friends. "I had my hand on my gun. I had it in my jacket pocket here. And I came around the corner like this." Zamudio demonstrated how his shooting hand was wrapped around the weapon, poised to draw and fire. As he rounded the corner, he saw a man holding a gun. "And that's who I at first thought was the shooter," Zamudio recalled. "I told him to 'Drop it, drop it!'"
But the man with the gun wasn't the shooter. He had wrested the gun away from the shooter. "Had you shot that guy, it would have been a big, fat mess," the interviewer pointed out.
Zamudio agreed:
"I was very lucky. Honestly, it was a matter of seconds. Two, maybe three seconds between when I came through the doorway and when I was laying on top of [the real shooter], holding him down. So, I mean, in that short amount of time I made a lot of really big decisions really fast. ... I was really lucky."
I congratulate Mr. Zamudio. I truly do. Not for carrying a gun, but for having the courage not to use it. And I'm thankful that he has the intelligence to recognize that it was a matter of luck, not skill or training, that he didn't kill an innocent man.
It makes me shudder to imagine how much worse that situation would have been if, instead of one shooter, there had been two, or three, or five, all waving their guns around trying to figure out which of them needs killing - or worse, shooting at anyone who looks like a threat, and injuring who-knows-how-many innocent bystanders in the process. We can thank our deity of choice that the worst-case scenario didn't occur. And we can thank Governor Jan Brewer - and the gun rights lobby in general - for supporting laws that make the worst-case scenario a potential reality.
Edit: see also TomP's diary, posted while I was writing this.