The opinion over at Salon is unanimous, there is no reason for a civilian to own an assault rifle.

So what happens when you need to be more outraged against guns in order to sand out from the anti-gun crowd?

Easy, you go more extreme.

This is the danger of echo chambers and is how the Democrats got to where they are today.  When there is unanimous opinion that abortion on demand is good, the only way to stand out in pro-abortion circles is to be more pro-abortion, until you are literally defending post-birth infanticide.

So what is more anti-gun than wanting a New Zealand style assault weapon ban?

Having a New Zealand style bolt action sniper rifle ban.

Assault rifles are insane: New Zealand came to its senses and banned them. When will we?
Gun manufacturers are selling military-grade killing machines to the general public. To their fans, that’s awesome

Right off the bat the article starts with the Gun Industry Blood Libel.

You want to know what’s insane? Don’t listen to a liberal wuss Salon writer like yours truly. Go right to the source. Go to Tactical Life magazine, which describes itself as “your source for gun reviews, gear reviews, knife reviews, and military and tactical news and information. Bringing together gear and gun tests from 18 publications, Tactical-Life.com has the most in-depth firearms information.” These folks, in their camo jackets and mirrored shades and “tactical” style boots, well, you can count on them to know what the hell they’re talking about, right? Here’s what Tactical Life has to say about the Victrix Armaments Scorpio, an assault-style rifle its experts recently reviewed.

“Victrix Armaments rifles are insane, and Scorpio might be the best.”

Here is the article from Tactical Life if you want to take a look.

There it is, right there in black and white. The experts in “tactical” firearms at Tactical Life magazine are telling you that this Scorpio rifle, with its “AR-style pistol grip, an infinitely adjustable folding stock and an octagonal handguard with removable rails … chambered in .300 Norma Magnum … sport[ing] a match-grade 26-inch, AISI 416R barrel lapped for accuracy and capped with a large three-chamber muzzle brake” is “insane.” And according to them, it’s just the thing you want for “long range, soft target” shooting.

Actually, it is.

Here is the Scoripo.

Yeah, it’s a bolt gun.  The stock and grip are far more ergonomic than a traditional rifle stock when shooting from a prone position.  The muzzle break reduced felt recoil.  AISI 416R is an industry standard stainless steel, but the lapping is a nice touch.

The downside to all of this is the MSRP of $9,000.

For less than half that I can build a Remington 700 that will shoot just as well.

Take a minute and look at all the military-speak gun-culture nomenclature babble they slap down: “match-grade” and “muzzle brake” and “infinitely adjustable folding stock” and all the rest of that crap. That’s the way they market guns like the “Scorpion,” and you know what it is? It’s insane.

That is the stupidist fucking shit I have ever read.  “Military-speak gun-culture nomenclature babble” like “match-grade” as in for a shooting match or competition?  Really?

Muzzle break?  If he said flash hider, I’d get it, but even the Clinton AWB which banned flash hiders never banned muzzle breaks.

OK, their use of “insane” is a kind of gun-lover-hipster-speak, and the Scorpio isn’t a semiautomatic assault rifle like the ones used to kill 20 children and six teachers at Sandy Hook, or the the 50 Muslim worshipers in Christchurch, New Zealand, or the 17 students and faculty killed in Parkland, Florida, or the 58 concertgoers in Las Vegas.

I’m glad he acknowledges that fact.

But it’s the same style of weapon, with the same style aluminum stock and ventilated “rails” alongside its barrel, and it’s got capabilities far in excess of what would be necessary for any sort of legitimate civilian usage.

Bullshit. It’s not a semi-auto so it is in no way the same “style of weapon” just because it has a free-float rail system for increased accuracy.

Also, bullshit on “it’s got capabilities far in excess of what would be necessary for any sort of legitimate civilian usage.”  There is complete “legitimate civilian usage” for long range shooting for fun and competition.

One of the things I miss about South Dakota was shooting long range.  I didn’t have much of a long range gun because I didn’t have much for money, I was able to put together a heavy barrel 308 setup at Cabela’s for around $800 that would hit a gong at nearly that distance in yards.  It was fun to drive an hour out of town, put up a steel plate and see just how far away you could get from it and keep hitting it with consistency.

But nope, not for Salon, being able to shoot that accurately, that far is just not for civilians.

“Loaded up with the faster 230-grain Berger round, I got hits on a 3-by-3-inch steel target at 2,000 yards,” the reviewer boasted. That is 1.13 miles, folks. This guy claims he hit a target about the size of your forehead from over a mile away.

And…?  That’s only a problem if you assume the worst in people who will go through all of the work of ordering a $9,000 rifle and the background check to buy it.

Who the hell needs to hit something, anything, from over a mile away?

Anybody who enjoys the challenge of it?

More people have died from trying to complete an Ironman than have been killed by a civilian sniper at 2,000 yards.  Maybe we should ban long distance triathlons.

I’ll tell you who: an Army or Marine sniper, that’s who.

Them too, but not exclusively.

They’re selling military-grade rifles to the general public. That’s what this sniper rifle is, and that’s what all the various iterations of the AR-15 style assault rifles are.

Congrats, your Remington 700 is now on the chopping block.

First it was your AR-15 for being a “military style assault rife.”  Now it is your bolt gun for being a “military style sniper rife.”

Just so we’re clear on this, the Remington 700 was a civilian rifle FIRST.  It was adopted in the form of the M40 and M24 decades after the first M700 was sold as a deer rifle.

Military-grade killing machines. All of them are for sale on the open market here in the United States of America. You can go down to your local gun store and buy one tomorrow. That means you’ll be able to set the damn Scorpion up on its bi-pod and hit a so-called “soft target” so far away you need a goddamn telescope to see it.

If you have $9,000 and pass a background check.  For a lot less you can buy one of dozens of other less expensive rifles that are nearly as accurate and come in wood stocks and look like grandpa’s old deer gun.

But this fuckhead knows that, and that’s the point.

The looks of the gun are peripheral.  He is offended by your ability to put lead on target beyond the ability of the naked eye to see it clearly.

Oh, I can hear them now. The NRA and its ilk will tell you that this military-style assault rifle is just the thing to use hunting deer, or elk, or some other poor creature. But it’s really a killing machine, a thing you can buy that is designed for one purpose: to kill a “soft target” from up to a mile away.

That’s the first truly accurate thing this guy has said.

That is insane.

No, it’s not.  Maybe somebody should tip him off to the guys at Best of the West.

You want to know what else is insane? The list of the 24 guns found in the two rooms rented in the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas by Stephen Paddock, who fired more than 1,000 rounds into the crowd at a concert next door, killing 58 people and leaving more than 400 with gunshot wounds. We don’t have the space to list all 24 of his weapons, but here are just a few:

• Colt M4 Carbine AR-15 .223/5.56 with a bump stock, vertical fore grip and 100 round magazine. Front sight only.
• Noveske N4 AR-15 .223/5.56 with a bump stock, vertical fore grip and 40 round magazine. EOTech optic.
• LWRC M61C AR-15 .223/5.56 with a bump stock, vertical fore grip and 100 round magazine. No sights or optics.
• POF USA P-308 AR-10 .308/7.62 with a bipod, scope and 25 round magazine.

Two of the first three guns had no sights.  I’m not sure what they were supposed to be used for.  The Novekse has an EOTech, which is not magnified.  Good for hits out to 300 yards, maybe further than that, but not pinpoint shots.

This guy is raging on about sniper rifles and then turns to AR’s without sights.

That last one, the POF USA P-308 AR 10, is a rifle very similar to the insane Scorpio rifle. It’s got a long barrel, a pistol grip, an aluminum stock, vented “rails” along the barrel and the kind of scope used in the review of the Scorpio by Tactical Life.

It looks kind of like it.  That’s where the similarity ends.  The POF is a POS, a way overpriced AR-10 copy.  A semi-auto 308 vs a bolt action 300 Norma.

The Las Vegas shooter had it fitted with a 25-round magazine, but look at what he used with the other weapons: 100-round magazine, 40-round magazine, 100-round magazine. The other three AR-style rifles were all fitted with “bump stocks,” making them functionally fully automatic.

And no evidence he used any of them.  I’m just saying.

All these killing machines were legally bought by Paddock at the time of the Las Vegas shooting. The bump stocks have since been made illegal, but if you want to know whether you can go out tomorrow and buy a Colt M4 Carbine AR-15, or an LWRC M61C AR-15, or the goddamned .308/7.62 POF AR-10, the answer is yes.

America, fuck yeah!!

You can also go down to the local gun shop and buy a thousand or so rounds of .300 AAC Blackout ammunition. Here is what Guns & Ammo magazine had to say about that particular bullet recently: It “provides distinctly more close-range authority than the 5.56/.223 and is particularly useful in suppressed firearms, but it falls apart at long range. Be that as it may, AR-15 enthusiasts have choices, and that’s a beautiful thing.”

Yep, it’s a 150 yard cartridge.  At least the subsonic load is.  That is on the opposite end of the spectrum from the 300 Norma.

This guy is so angry he can’t keep is rage consistent.

He’s bitching about being able to shoot a mile with a magnum cartridge then bitches about a subsonic load that hits the dirt in 200 yards.

They’re calling these bullets “a beautiful thing,” and they’re telling you they are “particularly useful in suppressed firearms.” You know what that means? It means those bullets work really well with what we liberal-wuss Salon writers like to call “silencers.” That’s the tube-like thing you stick on the end of the barrel of one of these AR-style rifles so the damn thing will shoot without making much noise.

That is the second and third truly accurate thing this guy has said.  The 300 AAC BLK is useful in suppressed guns, and this Salon writer is a wuss.

You want to know who uses silencers, or suppressors, or whatever the hell you want to call them? Criminals who want to shoot their weapons and don’t want to be found out.

I cannot find one single murder carried out by a person with a suppressor who purchased it legally on an NFA tax stamp.  Not one.  None.  This is horseshit.

Oh, I can hear it now, the NRA types screeching about how hunters want to use suppressors so when they shoot at some animal and miss, the animal won’t hear them and they can get off another shot. Or maybe they’ll use the excuse that Donald Trump Jr. has made. He supports the legalization of suppressors so that when he shoots his big guns they don’t hurt his tender ears.

Yes.  That is true.  Also, I don’t hunt but want to suppress my home defense gun so if I ever have to use that, it won’t hurt my children’s tender ears, you snarky fuck.

You want to know what’s insane? This kind of shit. Silencers. Suppressors. Reviews in magazines like Guns & Ammo that tell you what kind of bullet you should buy if you’re using a suppressor. It’s fucking insane. All of it.

Product review for legal items to be purchased by law abiding US citizens who have a Constitutionally protected right to own them.

The NRA, and the gun owners who support the NRA, and the politicians who take NRA money and refuse to pass the kind of sane law just passed in New Zealand that outlaws the ownership of these military-style assault rifles — none of them want you to know that this is how the gun manufacturers and the ammunition manufacturers and the magazines and websites that review the guns and the ammunition talk about their products.

Really?

Did he get this from the Protocols of the Elders of the Gun Industry?

I’m pretty sure you can buy Tactical Life off the magazine rack at Kroger.  It’s next to Lowrider,  Off-Road Magazine, and Diesel Tuner.

Or you can go to the website.  It’s all pretty much there.

That’s because they describe their products basically as killing machines, which is what they are.

I can’t actually disagree with this.  There are, of course, uses other than killing.  But the real argument here is freedom versus state monopoly on violence.

They tell you that their killing machines will kill from more than a mile away, or they will kill efficiently if you use them with suppressors, or will kill better because they’re easy to handle, or because they are lightweight, or because they are easy to set up, or even because they are easy to conceal.

For self defense and concealed carry, those things are important.  Clearly this wuss doesn’t believe in any of that.

They talk that way in their fan magazines and trade publications because they’re talking to each other and hoping like hell that you, John Q. Voter, doesn’t come across their insane, obscene gun-babble.

It’s on the shelf at fucking Kroger.

Also, the guys who buy Tactical Live and Guns & Ammo are John Q. Voter.  

Why do I get the feeling from that sentence he doesn’t want us gun people voting?

Tactical Life magazine will even tell you, in a red banner across the entire width of its website, that you can win a free gun this week: “MARCH FREE GUN FRIDAY: Win a Performance Center M&P Shield M2.0 + 500 Rounds of Ammo.” That’s right, dear reader! If you enter now, you can win a free gun! And 500 free bullets! All you have to do is enter!

That’s insane. It’s like a Publisher’s Clearinghouse giveaway for killers.

No it’s not.  It’s a marketing ploy like so many other companies do.  Also, if you read the fine print, they send the gun to an FFL and you have to fill out a 4473 and do a NICS check.  So it’s a give away to a law abiding citizen who is statistically highly unlikely to be a killer.

This is just anti gun culture prejudice.

You want to know what’s sane? The Connecticut Supreme Court recently ruled that the parents of the kids killed at Sandy Hook can go ahead with their lawsuit against Remington Arms, the company that manufactured the Bushmaster XM15-E2S used by Adam Lanza, and they can use the way that the gun was marketed in their lawsuit. And New Zealand took only three days to ban the kinds of guns used in the terrorist killings at the mosques in Christchurch.

Yes, holding Remington responsible for a crazy young man who killed his mom and stole her gun to murder children because of a magazine ad he may not have seen is insane.

New Zealand banning and confiscating guns is what happens when a country lacks a Bill of Rights.  They also banned watching the shooter’s video, having a digital copy of his manifesto, saying his name, and presumably, soon they will ban talking about the shooting all together and memory hole it.  So lets not hold New Zealand up as the paragon right now.

You want to know what’s insane? The guns we allow to be manufactured and sold in this country that are capable of killing 20 grade school kids, or 17 high school students and teachers, or 58 concertgoers, or 50 worshipers at mosques in a country thousands of miles from our shores. The assault rifles those shooters used are killing machines. That’s all they are. There is blood on the hands of the NRA and the United States Congress and state legislatures in all 50 states because they allow this shit to go on. I’ll tell you what it is. It’s insane.

This is hysterics.  There are 400 million guns and a few hundred billion rounds of ammo in the hands of at least 150 million US citizens, and the blood bath just isn’t there.

There is no blood on the hands of the NRA or gun makers.

I’m going to say this again, when it comes to school shootings, if you look at the states where the shootings happened, the local gun laws, how the shooters got their guns, what kind of guns they used, etc..

The only correlation between them all is a young man raised by a single mom who uses mood altering (ADD/ADHD) medication as a substitute for a father.

That’s what’s insane.

Keep all of this in mind, because when the Sanders/AOC ticket pushes the platform of taking your assault rifles because you don’t need those to hunt, they will take your hunting rifles too because you don’t need the same type of guns as a military sniper.

This is an argument for total civilian disarmament.

Lastly we get to this, the author’s biography.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. He has covered stories such as Watergate, the Stonewall riots and wars in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels and several unsuccessful motion pictures. He has three children, lives on the East End of Long Island and spends his time Worrying About the State of Our Nation and madly scribbling in a so-far fruitless attempt to Make Things Better.

Lucian Truscott was a highly respected general and commander of the Fifth Army during WWII.

Lucian Truscott IV was his grandson, and while he graduated from West Point received a general discharge under other than honorable conditions after only 13 months of active duty after refusing to go to Vietnam.

He also brags about the fact that Thomas Jefferson is his great-great-great-great-grandfather.

Considering that his great-great-great-great-grandfather was the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence and was the inspiration of the Bill of Rights, this anti-gun tirade is doubly offensive.

He spits on the memory and sacrifice of his grandfather and great-great-great-great-grandfather with this insulting horseshit.