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That's what Asa Hutchinson, the Governor of Arkansas, said this past Sunday on Face the Nation.
He was talking about the rise in a certain sort of murder, committed mostly by alienated, and often mentally disturbed, young mean. His "forty year" reference was to the AR15, stating that they'd been around for 40 years.
Hutchinson was wrong on the "forty year" figure. AR15s were first marketed by Colt for civilian sales in 1964. That's not forty years ago, it's almost 60 (sixty).
Something has happened in the last forty years. . . or more accurately, really in the last sixty.
Hutchinson's point was absolutely correct, but he didn't provide the answers to the "something".
I think we have, at least partially.
We did here when we noted what has happened to a certain demographic of young men in American society:
Peculiarized violence and American society. Looking at root causes, and not instrumentalities.
Tolerance and Helplessness.
And we did here when we talked about the glorification of the AR15
Vietnam and the Law of Unintended Consequences: The AR15
Because this is subject to a left/right divide, and part of the culture wars, we're not going to be honest about it. But the essence of this is that you can't drop out the marginal young men of society, ignore all the signs of mental illness until something happens, wipe out jobs due to technological advances, wipe out jobs due to an epic immigration rate, glorify armed violence in video games, keep shilling that everyone needs to be armed against domestic insurrection and home invasion, and probably with an assault rifle, and not produce this result.
The "we've changed" is right.
Fifty years ago, not forty, Salvatore Ramos would have been in a state mental institution since his early teens, and his two criminal parents would have been in jail and the subject of public disgust and scorn.
The Democratic Party made sure that this couldn't happen anymore.
Fifty years ago a local gun store would have been unlikely to have an AR15 on the shelves as they weren't well regarded, and military weapons were the province of collectors. A gun shop in Southern Texas would have had Winchester Model 70s and lever action rifles for hunting, and that would be about it. If anyone had a semi-automatic military rifle, it would have been the M1 Garand or an M1 Carbine at a pawn shop, most likely, and they wouldn't have been big sellers, if even there, which more likely than not, they wouldn't have been.
Endless promotion of the AR and its pals made sure that changed.
How do you get back from that?
Well, doing anyone thing won't do it.
It'll require those with a real interest in firearms to change the current culture of things. You really don't need an M4 carbine to defend your house and unless you are a target shooter, or a real firearms' aficionado, you probably don't need one at all. Indeed, if you are using it in the filed, for hunting, you're better off with a bolt action.
And it'll require a recognition by the public that the mentally ill and the young incorrigible aren't better off being unaddressed. That requires a massive reversion in the law so that people demonstrating behaviors we all know are sick are addressed in a fashion that not only helps them, but is weighted towards protecting society. Right now, under the current status of the law, that isn't even really legal all that often.
And like so many of our current problems, the two political opposites are miles apart as they can't even see the intervening ground.
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