John Boyle

Asheville (N.C.) Citizen-Times

ASHEVILLE, N.C. — Two years ago, in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary massacre in which a mentally unstable man killed 20 students and six adults with a military-style rifle, such weapons seemed to be in deep trouble.

After the Dec. 14, 2012, tragedy, President Obama and Congress called for reform and restrictions on the guns and their high-capacity magazines. Fearing an outright ban, gun buyers stampeded stores, cleaning out shelves and driving prices up to nearly $2,000 a rifle, particularly for models based on the popular AR-15 platform.

The shooter in Newtown, Conn., used a Bushmaster AR-15. In some circles, such weapons, often just called "ARs," were labeled after the shootings as unnecessary and emblematic of Americans' obsession with high-powered weaponry with no practical application.

But all that seems like a distant memory now. In a country where gun ownership is assured by the Constitution, the supply of ARs is abundant. Some even call it a glut.

It seems the battle over these guns, if not over, is close to it.

"I think the shift you're seeing now is the military-style weapon is here to stay because it's appealing to a whole new generation," said Steve Denny, owner of Carolina Guns & Gear in Arden, N.C., which has a wall full of military-style weapons for sale.

"You can see it in the industry," Denny said. "The industry had to change from military-style weapons being something that they sold sometimes to them being something that is at the forefront of all their advertising — the tactical use of a firearm."

Jeff Stucker, co-owner of On Target indoor shooting range and gun shop in South Asheville, says his sales of ARs have "come to a screeching halt," but not because people no longer want the rifles.

"The market is saturated. The market is flooded with them," said Stucker. "Everybody ramped up, thinking they were going to be outlawed, and lo and behold they weren't."

In a recent opinion piece in American Rifleman, a publication of the National Rifle Association, NRA President James W. Porter II argued that the ubiquity of the AR-15 rifle in America has essentially made it very difficult to outlaw, as was the case with handguns.

Gauging the number of these types of weapons in the United States is difficult, in part because the federal government does not track them specifically, and partly because so many different models are available.

The AR-15, based on the military's M-16 and M-4 models but without the full automatic capacity, undoubtedly is one of the most popular.

In 2012, Slate.com crunched numbers from a variety of manufacturers, as well as federal statistics on background checks, and extrapolated that nearly 3.3 million AR-15s were in the country. But that was before Newtown and calls for bans, which drove sales through the roof.

In congressional testimony last year, the National Shooting Sports Foundation estimated assault-style weapons domestically in the range of 5 million to 8.2 million.

Denny, a former FBI agent and a Navy veteran, estimates the number in the United States now "somewhere around 8 or 9 million. The rate of them being produced is just enormous," he said. And that's just one type of semi-automatic, high-capacity rifle.

Slate noted that more than 800,000 Ruger Mini-14 rifles, based on an M-14 design from the 1950s and '60s, had been produced since 1974.

HAVE THEY BEEN 'NORMALIZED?'

Groups such as the NRA, as well as the buying habits of American consumers, have essentially served to "normalize something that to some people used to seem shocking" — the ownership of a military-style rifle, said Chris Cooper, a political science professor at Western Carolina University.

"That's one of the primary arguments that the pro-gun groups use, is that there's no way to keep a limit on these or stop them — the tide has gone too far," Cooper said, adding that it's been a successful strategy. "We would think a big focusing event — a Columbine, a Newtown — would cause us to change policy radically, but they really haven't, and I think that shows how successful the gun lobby has been and how stable public opinion is on this issue."

In the case of Newtown, restrictions failed to make it through Congress, and not much changed, although some states, including California, Connecticut, Maryland and New York, did enact stricter controls.

But gun control groups aren't giving up.

Josh Sugarmann, executive director with the non-profit Violence Policy Center in Washington, D.C., acknowledged that "there's certainly a glut" of assault-style weapons right now. That is driven by the NRA and the gun industry "creating a paranoid fervor to increase gun sales."

But he also rejects the argument that ARs as are ubiquitous as pistols. Americans own more than 310 million firearms, so despite their robust sales, assault-style weapons still probably constitute about 2% to 3% of total gun ownership.

"In the long-term trends, gun ownership in the United States has been declining steadily since the 1970s," he said, noting that it used to be about 50% and now stands at 34% of homes owning a gun. "The traditional gun-buying public, basically white males, has been aging and dying off, and there aren't enough replacement shooters to take their place. That's why you're seeing a shift in the industry away from traditional hunting rifles and shotguns evolve to focus on firepower and capacity."

Plenty of Americans see no purpose for the assault rifle. And gun violence remains a huge problem domestically, with 32 Americans murdered with guns every day and 140 treated for a gun assault in an emergency room, according to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

Asheville resident Cynthia Drew is opposed to military-style rifles in the hands of everyday citizens. She says "the Second Amendment doesn't give all of us the right to own guns, it gives us the right to form a well-regulated militia.

"No one needs an AR-15 for anything other than to randomly shoot other human beings," she said. "I say if you want your AR-15 you can have it, just take the ammo off the shelves. That way they can only be used as clubs."

VERSATILE, ACCURATE, FAMILIAR

The AR-15 platform, usually a .223-caliber rifle with a 30-round magazine, is popular because of its ease of use and cleaning, and its reliability. While many think "AR" stands for "assault rifle," it actually refers to the company that first manufactured it— Armalite Rifle.

Pro-gun groups such as the National Shooting Sports Foundation, call them "sporting rifles," and note that "groups wanting to ban these rifles have for years purposely or through ignorance spread misinformation about them to aid their cause." Their website points out that they are not "assault weapons," a "political term created by California anti-gun legislators to ban some semi-automatic rifles there in the 1980s."

Dozens of companies have manufactured ARs or their components over the past 40-plus years.

Steve Ballard, a former Marine who was visiting Denny's shop last week, said he's owned several military-style rifles, but the last one he'd want to give up is his AR-style rifle.

"They're easy to disassemble, and anyone with prior military experience is familiar with it," Ballard said. "They're good for long-distance shooting, rapid shooting. They're dependable, and the ammunition is inexpensive. It's light and easy to carry."

Like Denny, he doesn't blame the weapons for mass murders such as Newtown or the Aurora, Colo., movie theater shooting. The country needs to seriously address the mental health system, they say, before looking to ban weapons.

"I don't see the evil inside the metal and the plastic," Denny said. "Where the problem is coming is we're in a society that is not addressing mental health in a meaningful, professional way, and that is the common threat that nobody actually wants to talk about."