Just as everyone else has, I have had anti gun zealots as well as people simply unfamiliar with firearms posting their thoughts on Facebook. When they aren’t informed about firearms they’re not armed with the information they need to comment on the subject so I’ve been taking the approach of not being argumentative, merely pointing out some facts and statistics about firearms and AR-15’s in particular. I do note that I feel licensing is a good thing, but that banning things is not.
People seemed to have a common curiosity as to why so many of these shootings had AR-15’s involved. I pointed out how common they were and drew a comparison to which most would be able to relate, I compared AR-15 production volume to the number of Toyota Corollas made. Everyone sees these common cars out and about during their daily lives, easily dozens per day in a city. I added Wikipedia numbers for Toyota Corolla production volume from 2000 to 2017 and got 5.6 million cars, in the slightly shorter time period of 2000-2014 the production of AR-15’s was 5.67 million. Nearly an identical number but it took 3 years less to achieve. The AR-15 number was from an article that cited the ATF as the source of their statistics, it was a slightly older article thus the ATF #’s ended in 2014 and seemed to be from a publication that was firearms friendly. Interestingly, around the early years covered in the chart, production numbers were under 100,000 but the last 3 years of the same chart production numbers were well over 1,000,000, so it would be fair to add at least another 3 million to the numbers for a total made in the last 17 years of around 8.6 million up to 10 million. If production numbers remained as low (likely lower) as the numbers for the the beginning of the chart for the 3 decades of sales then it might be between 2-3 million, so the first three decades saw less production than the last three years! Source article with some insightful charts:
http://knowledgeglue.com/just-how-ma...are-out-there/
Anyways, take such numbers to which people can relate and then note how many of those Toyota’s will have been scrapped due to traffic accidents, wear & tear, corrosion, etc and stop to consider how few of the AR-15’s made in the same period will have been scrapped....
I also saw some moronic video of a guy proclaiming himself to be a gun owner giving a speech about his thoughts while holding up his pre-ban AR-15. He then runs it through his DeWalt abrasive chop saw, slicing the barrel down to about 4” and going through the hand guard and gas tube, but that rifle would still fire, (it would just need to be cycled manually) and he just made an illegal SBR on video for the ATF to see. A new barrel, gas tube and hand guard and it would still be good to go as he didn’t damage the lower receiver at all. The thing had over 10 million views yesterday.......