Josh Sugarmann:
"Assault weapons—just like armor-piercing bullets, machine guns, and plastic firearms—are a new topic. The weapons' menacing looks, coupled with the public's confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons—anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun—can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons. In addition, few people can envision a practical use for these weapons." (just google it)

"Americans are ready to hate somebody -- and it's going to be the gun industry." (google this too)


Charles Schumer:
"All we ask for is registration, just like we do for cars." (google this as well)


Michael Bellesiles:
https://www.nytimes.com/books/first/b/bellesiles-arming.html
"An examination of more than a thousand probate records from the frontiers of northern New England and western Pennsylvania for the years 1765 to 1790 revealed that only 14 percent of the inventories included firearms; over half (53 percent) of these guns were listed as broken or otherwise defective. A musket (there were only three rifles mentioned) in good condition often drew special notice in the probate inventories and earned a high evaluation. Obviously guns could have been passed on to heirs before the death of the original owner. Yet wills generally mention previous bequests, even of minor items, and only four mentioned firearms. That was the beginning of this project, a ten-year search for "a word that isn't there."

America's gun culture is an invented tradition."

"In two scholarly articles, law professor James Lindgren of Northwestern University noted that in Arming America, Bellesiles had

- purported to count guns in about a hundred wills from 17th- and 18th-century Providence, Rhode Island, but these did not exist because the decedents had died intestate (i.e., without wills);
- purported to count nineteenth-century San Francisco County probate inventories, but these had been destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and fire;
- reported a national mean for gun ownership in 18th-century probate inventories that was mathematically impossible;
- misreported the condition of guns described in probate records in a way that accommodated his thesis;
- miscited the counts of guns in nineteenth-century Massachusetts censuses and militia reports,
- had more than a 60% error rate in finding guns listed as part of estates in Vermont records; and
- had a 100% error rate in the cited gun-related homicide cases of seventeenth-century Plymouth, MA."