Word: handguns
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...long ago, Edward sold crack cocaine for a living. He considered himself a businessman and made businesslike calculations of risk and reward. He was afraid rival dealers might try to rob him of his drugs or the wad of cash in his wallet. So he carried a 9-mm handgun. "Everybody had a gun," he says, "for defense." But now he has a bigger fear: if he gets caught with a weapon while committing a crime in his hometown of Richmond, Va., he faces at least five years without parole in a distant federal prison. That's why Edward...
...from their personal collection without subjecting the buyer to the kind of criminal background check that a licensed dealer would have to invoke if selling exactly the same gun. This loophole has turned flea markets and gun shows--and the Internet--into Quick Marts for anyone needing an untraceable handgun. Guns remain exempt from consumer-product safety regulations, although those rules apply to toy guns. And penalties for crooked dealers still fail to recognize the societal costs of illegal gun sales. Says David M. Kennedy, a Harvard expert on gun commerce: "You can get more time for selling crack...
...sudden decline in the number of dealers contributed to an equally dramatic decline in handgun production. That's significant because street cops and criminologists have long suspected that more guns on the street lead inevitably to more shootings. Between 1993 and 1997, production of pistols, the style of gun most preferred by youthful killers, fell more than 50%, from 2.3 million a year to just over 1 million. The steepest drops occurred in California's notorious "Ring of Fire," a handful of companies that make cheap Saturday night specials...
What effect this had on gun sales is unclear, but there is tantalizing evidence that the disappearance of these dealers contributed to a sharp reduction in handgun sales across America, particularly the cheap handguns sold by Lorcin and its peers in the Ring of Fire...
...opposite versions of the same character. Little Caesar is simply an illegal Lone Ranger, with the added element of success in the free market. In more recent movies, guns are displayed as art objects, people die in balletic slow motion, and right prevails if you own "the most powerful handgun in the world." I doubt that any of this nonsense causes violence, but after decades of repetition, it does invoke boredom. And while I can't prove it, I would bet that gun-violence entertainment will soon pass too, because people have had too much of it and because...