senor honda

[h=1]Professors Ayres and Wickelgren, managed to publish a half-baked, minimally researched and fatally flawed article won’t matter in the least to their colleagues in the faculty lounge.

They’re on the “right” side of the guns in America question and that’s all that really matters.

Brookings ‘Scholars’ Find Solution to America’s Gun Problem: Collusion[/h] by Dan Zimmerman |
Mar 18, 2018

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It’s a problem that has vexed politicians, academics, the media and civilian disarmament types for decades…Americans’ embarrassing national love and support for firearm freedom. More specifically, they can’t figure out what to do about our terribly inconvenient affinity for the nation’s most popular rifle, the AR-15 . . .
Gun controllers have tried passing laws, advocating for repealing the right to keep and bear arms, promoting and shaping a consistent message that more gun control is the “rational” solution and, well, moral suasion. Somehow, none of this has worked, particularly on a national level.
Now, along come two ivory tower academics to take another crack at the problem.
Yale’s Ian Ayres and Texas’s Abraham L. Wickelgren have put their pointy little heads together and looked at the frustratingly persistent popularity of AR-15 rifles from an economics perspective. The result: eureka! They’ve managed to come up with a gun control solution gun manufacturers can get behind!
But the problems with their incisive analysis start early and often:Here’s some news for the distinguished perfessers: among the panoply of individuals and interests that fight against restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms, gun makers and the political influence they wield play only a bit part, at most.
The reason politicians are so reluctant to impinge on Americans’ cherished right to armed self defense isn’t because Smith & Wesson, SIG SAUER, GLOCK and the rest are out there, sprinkling cash around Washington, D.C..
It’s because there are tens of millions of gun owners who are passionate about their natural, civil, and constitutional right to keep and bear arms. They’re politically aware and they vote. That’s a lesson you’d think the anti-gun left would have learned from painful past experience.

Ayres and Wickelgren are off to a rollicking start with a big, juicy false premise on which to base their prescription for getting to an “assault weapon”-free nirvana. So let’s get to the meat of their argument.Oh noes! Now we’re really screwed! These two have finally stumbled on the secret…the magic bullet (so to speak) aimed right are the heart of gun demand that will finally cut the number of civilian-owned firearms in this county. The one we hoped no one would would ever discover!
Ayres and Wickelgren want to use gun makers’ own greed as a weapon against the rest of us. We’ll never be able to afford to buy another firearm now!Yes, and how well has that arrangement worked out for OPEC?
Ayres and Wickelgren are apparently unfamiliar with the oil industry phenomenon that is fracking. Whether it’s oil or small arms, just like those fences and elaborate security systems put up around Jurassic Park, nature (and the market) always finds a way. Just ask Cody Wilson.Pure genius. Since there are only a dozen or so makers of AR-15 rifles, it should be easy to cartelize the business and incent the few makers of these weapons of war to pad their bottom lines once they’re granted an antitrust exemption. Right?
Just one problem. In “researching” their seminal piece for the port-leaning boys at Brookings, Ayres and Wickelgren apparently spent all of three minutes Googling “biggest makers of AR rifles” to come up with that one, lame blog post to link.
That’s apparently the sum total of their knowledge. So in their abject ignorance of the firearms business and half-assed attempt to gain a little insight into their topic, they somehow overlooked a few other noteworthy players in the AR manufacturing game. Little companies like . . .And then there are . . .Just to name a few. Never mind the dozens of smaller bit players that turn out thousands more guns a year.
Another six minutes of searching — or actually talking to someone who, you know, is familiar with the gun business — might have revealed to these lazy academics that AR manufacturing isn’t nearly as concentrated as they think. But Ayres and Wickelgren apparently couldn’t be bothered.Right. Because with loads of manufacturing capacity, the ease of making an AR yourself and at least 10 to 20 million scary black rifles already out there in the hands of gun owners nationwide, it would be nigh on impossible for someone like a James Holmes, Nikolas Cruz or Adam Lanza’s mother to get their hands on one.So they plan to choke off imported AR’s through high tariffs. That would cut out Hecker & Koch, TAVOR (not technically an AR) and, well, just about no one else.As Ayres and Wickelgren see it, these newly-cartelized AR makers will gladly trade support for “high capacity” magazine bans, outlawing bump fire stocks and, say, raising the long gun age to 21 for the promise of new, easy profits to be had by hiking their prices.
Another of the mysterious aspects of the firearms business and America’s gun culture, about which the authors are apparently blissfully unaware, is what happened to Smith & Wesson and Ruger (to say nothing of Springfield) when those companies made common cause with politicians who would degrade or eliminate our Second Amendment rights. There’s no reason to think American gun owners would be any less forgiving now of cartelized gun makers that signal support for universal background checks or a national magazine capacity limit.
Professors Ayres and Wickelgren, however, come out smelling like roses. They have one more publishing credit for their no doubt impressive CV’s. The fact that they’ve managed to publish a half-baked, minimally researched and fatally flawed article won’t matter in the least to their colleagues in the faculty lounge. They’re on the “right” side of the guns in America question and that’s all that really matters.