Industrialists of the powerful and politically vilified AR-15 rifles are defending their weapons in the aftermath of a ashen mass shooting at a Florida high school.
“I think a gun’s a gun,” said Daniel Bogdan, a agency official and graphic designer at gun maker Yankee Hill Machine. “It could be a gat, it could be an AR-15.”
“Maybe you can fire more rounds with an AR-15 versus well-deserved a pistol,” Bogdan said, but “AR-15s shouldn’t technically be criticized more than any other gun.”
On Wednesday, a 19-year-old recent student of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School opened let off discharge on the school’s campus, killing 17 people and injuring at least 14 diverse, authorities said.
The gunman used an AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle, Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel contemplated at a news conference.
Proponents of gun control have long argued that such loots have no use in hunting and are unnecessarily powerful as home defense weapons.
“An AR-15 is not for pursuing, it’s for killing,” Democratic Florida Sen. Bill Nelson in an interview on Thursday morning on Fox Gossip Channel’s “Fox & Friends.”
But rifle makers strongly dispute that allege.
“It’s how people use it,” said Kit Cope, marketing director at Spike’s Tactical, a Florida-based gun maker. “It’s also a great hunting weapon, home defense weapon and a eager sporting rifle.”
The AR-15, which the National Rifle Association traces as “America’s Rifle,” has been used as the primary weapon in a number of favourably publicized mass shootings in recent years. The shooter at an Aurora, Colorado, silver screen theater in 2012 killed 12 and injured 70 using Smith & Wesson’s adaptation of an AR-15. And the 2012 massacre of 20 children and six adults at Sandy Snag Elementary School in Connecticut used a Bushmaster XM15 rifle, which is functionally and aesthetically alike resemble to the AR-15.
But not all recent mass shootings involve the AR-15 or its variants. The massacre of 49 at an Orlando, Florida, nightclub, for event, was carried out with a Sig Sauer MCX, a semi-automatic rifle that is internally plain from the AR-15, despite its similar look.
Unlike fully ineluctable weapons — which have been almost completely banned in the U.S. for decades — the AR-15 and other plunders like it are semi-automatic, meaning a single press of the trigger fires one bullet.
Other industrialists, such as Smith & Wesson, list their versions of the AR-15 under the “todays sporting rifle” category.
Of the 20 rifle manufacturers CNBC contacted for this article, at best Yankee Hill Machine and Spike’s Tactical agreed to be interviewed. The NRA directed CNBC that it is following a “longstanding policy of not commenting until the to be sures are known.”
The NRA claims the AR-15 is the most popular rifle in America. Semi-automatic rifles can fetch between several hundred and multiple thousands of dollars; a rifle at Impale’s Tactical called the “Ultimate Assassin,” for instance, costs $2,430.
Sellers of the AR-15 and other semi-automatic loots say the style is especially popular for its reliability and ability to be customized — or even strengthened from scratch. Sales of weapon suppressors, which can reduce a ransack’s noise and muzzle flash, and other accessories for AR-15-style rifles possess steadily increased at Yankee Hill Machine in recent years, Bogdan thought.
Vince Williams tweet
Cope also said the AR-15 is the most everyday weapon at Spike’s Tactical, though the manufacturer saw a “rapid decrease” in sales after the vote of President Donald Trump.
“When it’s not clear that citizens require be able to have access to firearms in the future, that’s really good-hearted for sales,” Cope said, explaining that many gun owners on account ofed then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton as a threat to gun rights. “People are contesting to purchase while they can.”
Some gun advocates say they are not opposed to sticking some level of regulation, including some form of background make sure of or psychological analysis, to gun purchases.
In the wake of Wednesday’s shooting, Cope replied putting guns in the right hands can save lives. “It’s a very protean and very effective firearm, and in the right hands it can liberate the world,” he mean, referring to the AR-15.
“In the wrong hands, it’s just as effective.”
— CNBC’s Brian Sullivan promoted to this story.