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The NRA Claims the AR-15 Is Useful for Hunting and Home Defense. Not Exactly.

January 4, 2013

The Freedom Group’s 2011 annual report noted that the commercial modern sporting rifle market grew at a 27 percent compound annual rate from 2007 to 2011, whereas the entire domestic long gun market only grew at a 3 percent rate.

AR-15

©2013 By Justin Peters, slate.com

On Dec. 24, in Webster, New York, an ex-con named William Spengler set fire to his house and then shot and killed two responding firefighters before taking his own life. He shot them with a Bushmaster AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle—the same weapon that Adam Lanza used 10 days earlier when he shot and killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary. James Holmes used an AR-15-style rifle with a detachable 100-round magazine this past summer when he shot up a movie theater in Colorado. (Though the AR-15 is a specific model of rifle made by Colt, the term has come to generically refer to the many other rifles built to similar specifications.)

I generally consider myself a Second Amendment supporter, and I haven’t yet decided where I stand on post-Newtown gun control. I would own a gun if New York City laws didn’t make it extremely difficult to do so.

Read the entire story at slate.com

Thanks to Kelly (see comment below) for alerting us just …

How easy it is to convert an AR-15 into a nearly full-automatic wepon

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOUNvIwxSWg&w=681&h=383]

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