Reply #56: Rambo used a full auto M60, a big knife, and big 1980's hair,

[benEzra]

not a civilian AR-15. And I dare say that most Gen-Y gun owners have never even seen a Rambo movie.

I would say that ergonomics and modularity play as big a role as styling, but let's grant your hypothesis for a moment and assume that everyone who owns rifles with modern styling owns them because they prefer polymer to walnut and phosphate coated aluminum to blued steel.

If you really believe that, why would you expend all the political capital that would be necessary in order to merely shift the aesthetic back toward walnut and blued steel?



Let's say you make it a Federal felony to put a black plastic stock on that rifle. What have you accomplished, other than to piss off tens of millions of Gen-X and Gen-Y voters who own guns, resurrect the Dems'll-take-yer-gunz meme, and further divide the party over the issue? What does that do about the already-small percentage of murders that involve rifles?

That makes precisely as much sense as making it a Federal felony to paint a Honda Civic in bright colors or to put shiny wheels on it, in order to address drunk driving deaths. What you are proposing is all cost and no benefit. Of course, that pretty much sums up the 1994 Feinstein law...