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Americans Stock Up on Weapons after California Shooting

posted by takyon on Saturday December 12 2015, @08:31AM   Printer-friendly
from the smoking-hotcakes dept.

timbim writes in with a Reuters story on a gun surge:

Many Americans agree and are stocking up on weapons after the country's worst mass shooting in three years. Gun retailers are reporting surging sales, with customers saying they want to keep handguns and rifles at hand for self-defense in the event of another attack.

"Everyone is reporting up, every store, every salesman, every distributor," said Ray Peters, manager of Range, Guns & Safes, a company that sells firearms and safes in Atlanta with an indoor firing range. "People are more aware of the need to protect themselves."

[...] Gun sales were already on the rise this year. On Black Friday, the popular shopping day on Nov. 27 after the U.S. Thanksgiving Day holiday, a total of 185,345 applicants were processed through the FBI's National Instant Criminal Background Check System, a 5.5 percent increase from the year before.

The Pew Research Center found last December that 57 percent of Americans say they believe owning a gun helps protect people from crime, up from 48 percent in 2012. The rest said owning a gun would put personal safety at risk.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 12 2015, @09:06PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 12 2015, @09:06PM (#275534)

    Meanwhile there were ~400,000 deaths by gun in that same time period. If you want to get worked up over a cultural problem, focus on the culture that's killing many orders of magnitude more people.

    And in the same period 1.23 million people in the US died due to alcohol. Over 4 million people died due to alcohol in the EU in that same time period. Europe wide that number is two million higher still. Yet I am sure you are going to kick back with some two buck chuck and rant about how dangerous guns are and how wonderful the world would be if we had a prohibition against them.