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posted by martyb on Tuesday June 12 2018, @05:03AM   Printer-friendly
from the Flaming-but-Not-Boring-Dept dept.

Six months after Elon Musk raised the eyebrows of sane people everywhere by announcing his Boring Co. would sell flamethrowers for $500 a pop, the first 1,000 deliveries were made Saturday for customers who showed up at the company's headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif.

The flamethrowers went like, well, flaming hotcakes when they went on sale in late January, selling out in just four days. In all, 20,000 were sold, raising about $10 million in revenue for Musk's tunnel-boring startup. The devices, technically called "Not a Flamethrower" to skirt federal shipping regulations, shoot a two-foot flame.

[...] Despite concerns about the wisdom of allowing personal flamethrowers in wildfire-prone California, state legislators last month shelved legislation that would have required them to come with a safety warning.

[...] 2017 was California's most destructive wildfire season ever, with more than 9,000 fires burning acreage the size of Delaware and killing at least 46 people.


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  • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday June 13 2018, @12:38PM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Wednesday June 13 2018, @12:38PM (#692313) Journal

    I suppose the point is that a vehicle has a use beyond murdering people, a handgun does not.

    Sure it does. I've used handguns more times than I can count, but I have never once used it to murder people. I use them for target shooting. Other people use them for home protection. Farmers outside town where I grew up used them to put down livestock with broken legs, or to kill coyotes.

    People use long guns for the same, but also for hunting. That may not be a common use for urbanites, but it's an important supplement to the family food supply in many parts of the West.

    There's also, of course, the purpose for why the Founding Fathers enshrined firearm possession in the Constitution, as a check on government overreach. Many scoff at that idea now, but they conveniently gloss over how busy people in Iraq and Afghanistan kept the history's largest and most powerful military for years with weapons no heavier than handguns and rifles. That is, they had no tanks, or attack choppers, or fighter jets, or missiles, or satellites either.

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    Washington DC delenda est.
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