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GunTV Aims To Premier 24-Hour Shopping Channel For Firearms
HughPickens.com writes: Mike McPhate reports in the NY Times that two home shopping industry veterans, Valerie Castle and Doug Bornstein, are set to premier GunTV, a new 24-Hour shopping channel for guns, that aims to take the QVC approach of peppy hosts pitching "a vast array of firearms," as well as related items like bullets, holsters and two-way radios. The new cable channel hopes to help satisfy Americans' insatiable appetite for firearms. The channel's forthcoming debut might seem remarkably ill-timed, given recent shootings at a Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs and at a social services center in San Bernardino, California but gun sales have been rising for years, with nearly 21 million background checks performed in 2014, and they appear on track to a new record this year. The boom has lately been helped by a drumbeat of mass shootings, whose attendant anxiety has only driven more people into the gun store. The proposed schedule of programming allots an eight-minute segment each hour to safety public service announcements in between proposed segments on topics like women's concealed weapon's apparel, big-game hunting and camping. Buying a Glock on GunTV won't be quite be like ordering a pizza. When a firearm is purchased, a distributor will send it to a retailer near the buyer, where it has to be picked up in person and a federal background check performed. "We saw an opportunity in filling a need, not creating one," says Castle. "The vast majority of people who own and use guns in this country, whether it's home protection, recreation or hunting, are responsible . I don't really know that it's going to put more guns on the streets."
How would you know that? TV shopping channels are all about impulse purchasing. That's why they have so many deals that have a timer on them.
The demographic they're going for may well be people who are sitting home alone watching cable TV at three in the morning, half-drunk and pissed at their ex-wives, angry at the boss. Let's face it, a lot of "GunTV viewers will be people channel surfing after an evening of watching Fox News and looking for solutions to their problems that are all focused on "them people out there".
You are welcome on my lawn.
Since when is the government actually succeeded in taking American's guns away? The only laws proposed are at preventing future gun sales, but they never actively try to take guns (except through useless gun buyback programs).
I use to support US gun laws, until I spent a year in Australia and three in NZ. From outside, America is bat-shit fucking insane. You have to register a car. You need a license to be a hair stylist. You need a license to practise medicine. I don't understand what's so crazy about needing to register firearms? It's not fucking unreasonable. It's called sanity!