Semiautomatic rifles serve neither recreation nor hunting yet dominate gun manufacturing
Evidence
The gun industry faces a formidable moral challenge in justifying the production and marketing of large-caliber, semiautomatic rifles. They are unsuitable for recreation or hunting purposes. One man who went deer hunting with a semiautomatic rifle ended up killing five hunters and wounding three others (Butterfield, 2004)! In the competition for market share, new models have ever-increasing killing power. The gun manufacturers’ moral evasion of the toll their products take in human life and the fear they engender in society at large requires skillful disengagement of moral self-sanctions. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1042
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
- SHARE: The 2004 incident where a deer hunter with a semiautomatic killed five hunters is a striking, specific data point for anyone following gun policy.
Related
- Gun manufacturers market products whose only civilian purpose is killing people (similarity 0.91)
- Constitutional gun rights do not erase manufacturers’ moral responsibility (similarity 0.82)
- Gun makers shift blame for lethal designs onto consumer demand. (similarity 0.81)
- A gun jam stopped a planned massacre that used a 100-bullet magazine (similarity 0.81)
- Gun makers frame lethal products as rights to defend their most profitable items (similarity 0.80)
- Judging gun laws while exempting the deadliest weapons is a token test. (similarity 0.79)
- A society can limit massacre death tolls by regulating gun design features. (similarity 0.79)
- Claiming regulation is futile absolves the gun industry from moral responsibility (similarity 0.79)
- The people-kill-people slogan functions as a moral-evasion device to deflect industry accountability (similarity 0.78)
- Innovations in firearm lethality were driven by sagging gun sales instead of consumer demand. (similarity 0.78)
- Mass shooting support for gun control spikes briefly then decays until the next massacre (similarity 0.78)
- Regional gun use differences produce conflicting moral self-perceptions (similarity 0.78)