If the politicians close one door, technology eventually finds another one and that plays specially true with guns. In 1969 the term Saturday Night special was coined and affixed to cheap handguns that could be afforded by those in a vert tight budget like the poor or minorities. Politicians went out of their way to make them look like metallic spawns of the devil and states and cities banned their ownership.

Truthfully they were cheap guns in both price and construction. sometimes even downright dangerous for the owner as they could sustain a catastrophic failure and you would end up being called Leftie for the rest of your life.

A great example of these guns of the past was the Rohm RG-10 revolver. Check this ad from 1960:

Now fast forward to the 21st century. I just got an email from Tombstone Tactical on a sale they are having. One of the guns is the Ruger LCP 380, a tried and tested small pistol that is several orders of magnitude above the RC-10 and its fellow cheap guns of the day.  Look at that price.

I went to the Inflation calculator and figured how much a Ruger LCP 380 at  $173.99 would have been in 1968 dollars.

Event though $20.56 was not peanuts, it was an acquirable sum in those days. And we are talking about today’s technology that produces a reliable small pistol that will go bang every time without fear of blowing up in the owner’s hand.

Then I went the other way around, how much an RG-10 revolver would cost today:

That would be a hard “pass!” for me anyway.

It does not matter how hard they try to contain the genie called guns, it will always find a way to escape and come back stronger and modern. May it be 3D printing a gun at home or pure capitalistic technology that allows a company to manufacture a high quality & low-cost firearm, that genie will never get back to the bottle.