Precisely What America Needs Right Now- A "JR-15" Rifle
Because what five-year-old doesn't harbor thoughts of slaughtering their entire preschool class?
Intelligence arouses fear and respect, the lack of it keeps one on the narrow minded road of disrespect, stupidity and inferiority complex.
Michael Bassey Johnson
To be wicked is never excusable, but there is some merit in knowing that you are; the most irreparable of vices is to do evil from stupidity.
Charles Baudelaire
In my vast worldly experience, if someone had asked me, “What’s the one product this world desperately needs?” I would never have thought to answer, “An AR-15 sized for children.”
And yet that’s precisely what one company has gone ahead and developed. WEE1 Tactical has created a miniature AR-15 sized for young children to fire comfortably. Of course, if you asked, “Hey, Jack, why in the world would we need that sort of thing?” I’d have to say that I have no idea. There’s no reason- sound or otherwise- that leaps to mind when I try to think of why a five-year-old might “need” to be able to fire a “JR-15” (yes, that’s indeed what it’s called).
Yes, in a country already awash in guns, WEE1 Tactical decided it was time to hit up the only demographic not already flooded with guns- those still being weaned.
At a gun expo in Las Vegas last January, Eric Schmid, the founder of WEE1 Tactical, demonstrated his company’s first offering: the JR-15, a play on the popular AR-15 assault rifle designed to look just like its deadly cousin, but 20 percent smaller. “It fits the kids really well,” he told a visitor to his booth. “That’ll give them the confidence to hold this thing the way they should have confidence holding it — no drop down in the front trying to manage a weight that’s not right for them. It just fits ’em, fits ’em really well.”
Long guns for kids have been around for years, typically shotguns or single-shot rifles scaled down for a child. But what has attracted so much attention to the JR-15 is its semiautomatic action, firing with each pull of the trigger — along with the image of putting a mini assault rifle in the hands of children in a country where a 6-year-old just shot a teacher in the chest with a handgun legally purchased by his mother. With the JR-15 in production this year and a limited first run of 1,000 rifles being sent to distributors in February, the attention is only going to grow.
And, lest you think I’m making this up as a sick joke, Snopes.com has already taken a run at this and deemed it “TRUE.”
That IS some sick joke, no?
When Rep. Nancy Pelosi (R-CA) displayed WEE1 Tactical’s marketing materials on the House floor last year, Rep. Marjorie Trailer Greene (R-GA) remarked that the children in Uvalde, TX, should’ve been armed with JR-15s.
Because, of course, they should’ve been. Right, because EVERY elementary school classroom should be a free-fire zone.
While Democrats (and real, flesh-and-blood human beings) are appalled with marketing mini-AR-15s to children still feeding at their mother’s breasts, WEE1 has no problem with that. They’re pretty excited about the new market they’ve created.
Because an armed society is a polite society?
Because MORGUNZ!!! is effective population control?
Because MORGUNZ!!! is a great way to weed out the stupid and infirm among us?
Or could it be all of the above? Who cares, as long as it puts as much money as possible in WEE1’s coffers, eh?
Democratic lawmakers were especially appalled by WEE1’s advertising strategy and slogan: “Get em one just like yours.” The company’s logo featured skulls with binkies in their mouths, with pigtails for the girl and a mohawk for the boy. “We worked hard on that logo,” Schmid said in a video. “It’s pretty exciting. That keeps the ‘wow’ factor with the kids, I think.” Senators Ed Markey and Dianne Feinstein wrote a letter to the Federal Trade Commission after Uvalde urging the regulator to investigate the marketing. “There is one target market for this dangerous firearm: America’s children,” they wrote.
WEE1 doesn’t seem to disagree. In a statement, the company wrote that the gun is a “youth training rifle” for purchase by adults who want to introduce “hunting and shooting sports to the next generation of responsible gun owners.” In interviews with gun influencers, the company highlights its so-called educational features, including its unique safety mechanism — an extra knob that an adult can turn to override the normal safety switch and stop it from firing. At the gun expo, Schmid compared the feature to a pill bottle: It could stop younger kids, but “your 12-year-olds are going to unlock it real easy.”
Yeah, I’m not sure accenting “safety” is the marketing “win” that WEE1 thinks it is. If adults aren’t handling AR-15s safely, how can we expect children to handle JR-15s with appropriate caution?
News flash: THEY WON’T!!
The overall safety pitch for gun manufacturers like WEE1 is that when a child is taught how to use a gun under adult supervision, they will be less likely to use it improperly. But some gun-safety advocates doubt the effectiveness of such education. “Gun manufacturers make an AR-15 for adults, but that hasn’t prevented adults who own those rifles legally from in some cases irresponsibly using them, or from them being used in acts of mass violence,” says Dr. Sonali Rajan, a school-violence-prevention expert and faculty member at Teachers College, Columbia University. “My question is: If the AR-15 doesn’t foster safe practices among adults, I’m not sure I follow the logic that leads us to think the JR-15 would foster safe practices among children.”
Of course, what WEE1 is arguing is what they want to be true and what they HOPE adults will believe. In reality, it’s complete bullshit, and they know it. AR-15s don’t promote safe use among adults, so it makes no sense to assume that JR-15s will promote safe use among children.
One has to wonder whether the fine folks at WEE1 Tactical have ANY soul or conscience. Or do they not care about the body count as long as the sales numbers are good and the profits are acceptable?
I’m going to have to go with Door #2.
This whole thing seems like a bad dream, one in which the adults are the ones with the lack of maturity and common sense…except that this is no dream, and WEE1 IS displaying a lack of maturity and common sense.
Do none of these folks have children? Or have they deluded themselves into believing they're fostering positive gun safety habits by putting a JR-15 into the hands of children not yet old enough to go to kindergarten?
The JR-15, or Junior 15, is designed to be "smaller, safer, lighter" than a regular AR-15, gunmaker WEE1 Tactical said in a November press release announcing the gun's launch.
The child-oriented weapon is roughly 20% smaller than a full-sized AR-15, but the manufacturer claims it "operates just like Mom and Dad's gun," according to the press release.
The WEE1 Tactical press release notes: "We believe that this introduction early on will produce a deep respect for firearms that continue and last for a lifetime of safety."
Sure, that will last until the first time a five-year-old points his loaded JR-15 at someone, pulls the trigger, and accidentally cuts that person in half. Oops!! Never mind that Junior didn’t know what was happening or what he was doing before pulling the trigger.
Man, I can hardly wait until someone sues WEE1 Tactical for something like what I’ve just described. It seems almost inevitable.
And California Governor Gavin Newsom has been one of the loudest voices opposing the JR-15…because why do we have to wait for an unspeakable tragedy to strike before we take action to save children?
BECAUSE WE’RE AMERICANS, THAT’S WHY!!
At merely two pounds, even the smallest child should be able to handle a JR-15…and that’s part of the problem. WEE1 Tactical’s cynical appeal to children is a sick and wholly inappropriate marketing ploy in a country already awash in guns and easy, wholesale death.
Angry Unpersuadable Gun Control Foes are concerned only with the rights of guns and their right to carry them. They care nothing for the rights of everyday Americans not to die from randomized senseless mass shootings and other forms of gun violence. To them, the gun deaths of those they don’t know are abstract concepts; they’re numbers they have no reason to care about, and so they don’t. They’re far more concerned with their rights to carry whatever amount and degree of firepower they desire.
So what if WEE1 Tactical markets the JR-15 to small children with its skull, crossbones, and binky? Because MORGUNZ!!! can only make us more safer, right? And if children have MORGUNZ!!!, then we can only be even more safer…or something like that.
Indeed, we have become a nation that worships death and the instruments capable of dealing death randomly and at frightening speed. And why should we care if that death doesn’t happen to us or someone we know and love?
Why should adults have all the “fun?” Once Junior’s done feeding at Mama’s breast, why not let him blow off steam with his JR-15? Because shouldn’t kids have a chance to create carnage just like their parents?
Good Lord, y’all…we are so very, very f****d.
Jack - Yes, apparently. :(
God**n it! I just wrote a fairly long and thought-out response to you, and had to refresh the page, whereupon everything I wrote disappeared.
No time to re-do it now.
PISSED does not even begin to describe my present feeling about my email server.
:), D