As demon weapons, before Ghost Guns, we had Assault Weapons. Before Assault Weapons, we had “undetectable” Glocks and before that we had Saturday Night Specials.
According to politicians in New York and Chicago, these Saturday Night specials were the scourge of the ghettos, single handedly responsible for the mass killings of innocent (and not so innocent) black people.. because they were cheap and thus poor people could buy them. Now digest the obvious racism of that.
The Media ran not inches, but I daresay miles of columns denouncing and demonizing this guns. They were the new extermination tool, a genocide wand swathing a path of destruction inside the inner city. Something needed to be done! For the children!
The Gun Control Act of 1968 put a big dent ion the importation of such guns and depending on states, laws were enacted to curtail the use of such evil firearms including quality control minimums and the such.
On my last post I showed a tweet from the NYC Special Narcotics Prosecutor displaying guns, cash and a vest.
Shooting brother Michael in Facebook asked if the little revolver was actually a starting pistol. It looked bad enough to be one, but I went back to the source picture and looked.
I did some look around in the web and found out it is a Harrington & Richardson (H&R) Model 900 in .22 LR.
H&R handguns and also Rohm, were the epitome of the Saturday Night Specials. The Model 900 was manufactured from 1962 to 1973. Again, this particular model stopped being produced in 1973 or 47 years ago, almost half a century. What it was supposed to be a triumph for the unopposed Gun Control activism of the times suddenly turns out not to be but a fool’s dream destroyed by photo of items collected by Law Enforcement in the 21st Century.
If that does not scream Gun Control failure, I don’t know what else could it be.
Always remember that “Saturday Night Special” is an abbreviated form of “Saturday Night N****rtown Special”, an old racist term intended to suggest depraved revelry going on in certain minority neighborhoods.
As you and others have pointed out many times, there’s a very large component of blatant racism in victim disarmament (not “gun control”).
That’s what _ I _ was going to say! Correct, Sir/Madam/Undecided 8>)
Yeah, I remember the pearl clutching about “Saturday Night Specials.” And yes, the news media were pretty much in the open about keeping affordable, i.e cheap, handguns out of the hands of minorities (or sometimes referred to as “low income” people). Many pro-gun advocates (including the NRA) supported the “Saturday Night Special ban” because they felt it would only affect those who bought junk guns and not the high quality i.e. expensive) handguns owned by the elites. It turned out that not only didn’t the cheap guns spontaneously self destruct at the first shot, but drug dealing became so profitable that gangsters could afford to buy Berettas, S&Ws and Colts on the black market. Eventually Glocks became the iconic gangsta’ gat. GCA ’68 effectively also banned the importation such “cheap” hand guns as the Walther PPK, Browning(FN) Model 1910 and a number other iconic and historical handguns at a time when European nations were modernizing their Military and Police inventories.