NBC News Tony Dokoupil

“Our father, Eugene Stoner, designed the AR-15 and subsequent M-16 as a military weapon to give our soldiers an advantage over the AK-47,” the Stoner family told NBC News late Wednesday. “He died long before any mass shootings occurred. But, we do think he would have been horrified and sickened as anyone, if not more by these events.” …

The ex-Marine and “avid sportsman, hunter and skeet shooter” never used his invention for sport. He also never kept it around the house for personal defense. In fact, he never even owned one. …

“What has happened, good or bad, since his patents have expired is a result of our free market system,” Stoner’s family said. “Currently, a more interesting question is ‘Who now is benefiting from the manufacturing and sales of AR-15s, and for what uses?'”

That’s the question for the rest of us.
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See the following for the answer to who gets rich off of mass murder:

Fully Loaded: Inside the Shadowy World of America’s 10 Biggest Gunmakers

They’ve kept their fingerprints off laws designed to protect their businesses — especially one that shields them from liability for crimes committed with their products.

By Josh Harkinson | June 17, 2016

by Adam Gopnik

Once again, the overriding lesson, as settled as social science can ever be, remains: If we had gun laws like the gun laws of most countries that resemble ours, we would have lower levels of gun violence, as they do. That would not mean that we would have no gun violence. It means that we would have less gun violence. Deranged fans would not casually assassinate young singers, and young men would not be sending desperate texts to their heartbroken mothers. It is possible to believe both that Islamist terrorism is real and that Islamist terrorism is uniquely empowered here because of the availability of guns designed to kill many people very quickly. It is impossible to make gun terrorism impossible. But it is easy to make gun terrorism hard. It begins with controlling the weapons that terror loves.

By NATE BETHEA

These weapons are intended for the battlefield. I don’t want an assault rifle, because I don’t want to think of my home country as a battlefield. I don’t want civilians to own assault rifles, because I think the risks outweigh the rewards. If people really do believe that they need them, maybe it’s because they see a battlefield where others don’t. …

I don’t want to believe that we live in a place so dangerous as to require these weapons. Maybe I’m naïve. Maybe I’m just waiting to be victimized. I’d rather be naïve and hopeful than face the alternative: the howling terror, the sensation that danger is kept at bay only by that familiar weight, those familiar clicks, and what comes after.

Gun-loons insist gun control is impossible and pointless. The bad guys are the problem, they say. Yet the bloody industry tool, the NRA, fights every effort to study this violence. They don’t want the truth to be known because they fear it will limit the profitability of their bloody industry. We must study violence to understand it — including violence involving guns. Push the NRA aside.

WebMD News from HealthDay
By Robert Preidt
HealthDay Reporter

TUESDAY, June 14, 2016 (HealthDay News) — On the heels of yet another senseless gun massacre in the United States, the nation’s leading physicians’ organization is urging more research into gun violence.

Specifically, the American Medical Association (AMA) said Tuesday that a long-standing ban on federal government research into gun violence must be lifted to better understand and tackle the problem.

The AMA is now pledging to lobby Congress to overturn 20-year-old legislation that has prohibited the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from researching the issue.

“Even as America faces a crisis unrivaled in any other developed country, the Congress prohibits the CDC from conducting the very research that would help us understand the problems associated with gun violence,” AMA President Dr. Steven Stack said in a news release from the group.

Such research would also help “determine how to reduce the high rate of firearm-related deaths and injuries,” he said.

Assault weapons must be banned in America
By Eugene Robinson, Opinion writer, June 13 at 7:28 PM

The only reasonable response to the massacre in Orlando is to ban the sale of military-style assault weapons. All else, I’m afraid, is just noise. …

The Second Amendment enshrines the right to keep and bear arms, and the Supreme Court has ruled that this is an individual right, not a collective one. The court has made clear, however, that this does not preclude reasonable gun control measures. Not all weapons must be considered suitable for private hands.
When the framers wrote of “arms,” they were thinking about muskets and single-shot pistols. They could not have foreseen modern rifles or high-capacity magazines. They lived at a time when it was impossible to imagine one man barging into a crowded room and killing more than one or two people before having to reload and surely being subdued. Today it is not only imaginable but also tragically commonplace.

No hunter needs an AR-15 to bring down a deer. None of us needs such a weapon to defend our families against intruders. And for those who believe assault rifles offer protection against a hypothetical tyrannical government — or who perhaps consider the present government tyrannical — I have sobering news: If and when the black helicopters come, they will be accompanied by tanks. …

Freedom is possible, however, without the right to buy military weapons designed for killing sprees. Banning them would not end mass killings, but it would mean fewer deaths. If we do not act, the blood of future victims will be on all of our hands.