![]() ![]() I love that it comes with the massive cannons which you can imagine spinning up and spraying death around. It's manipulator arms lets him operate terminals, open doors, or just punch someone in the face with an enormous strength of a mech." "Bushmaster can punch holes in the wall with it's Dual Tiamat Flak Cannons for other troops to advance through, creating new tactical possibilities. These Ulysses pattern walkers are some hefty pieces of kit and we've got an exclusive look at some of them here. Matthew Price is a regular contributor to the Globe.Shockwork Studio are working on a new game called Black Rain and one of the main components of it is their massive Mechs. THE GUNNING OF AMERICAN: Business and the Making of Gun Culture Her historical sense, however, is brilliantly on display in these pages. She also endorses smart-gun technology and the same kind of consumer regulations that “apply to almost every other commodity.” Her recommendations are a touch cursory and anticlimactic. In a brief section at the book’s end, she weighs in on contemporary debates, arguing that we should look at guns as a business and put the onus on makers, not owners. One book will not settle the long-running gun debate, but Haag has powerfully reframed the issue as one rooted in dollars and cents, not the Second Amendment and inalienable rights. “One answer to the question ‘Why do Americans love guns?’ is, simply, that we were invited to do so by those who made and sold them at the moment when their products had shed much of their more practical, utilitarian value.” “With less practical utility, the gun became - and to some extent had to become - an object with emotional value,” Haag writes. ![]() Winchester sold 9,800 rifles in 1875 in 1914, its sales figures were 292,400. Interestingly, gun sales boomed as America became less rural and more urbanized. The legendary Winchester was machine tooled to 1/1,000 of an inch and fashioned from interchangeable parts “a mass-produced, mass-marketed object was to become an enduring idiom of American individualism.” The popular media played its part as well, with dime novelists embellishing the legends of gun-toting Wild Bill Hickok and Buffalo Bill. The “Wild West,’’ Haag argues, was actually a function of the industrialized East. The gun as an essential component of the image of the rugged individualists who settled this country turns out to be mostly fantasy, concocted in corporate boardrooms. The “Gunning of America’’ abounds with ironies. The weapon’s renown spread, even into the hinterlands of North Africa, where Arab tribesman sought them out from secondhand dealers. Turkish soldiers armed with repeating Winchester 66s - the “hero rifle” - were formidable foes. In 1870, for example, Winchester scored a huge deal with the Ottoman Empire for some 20,000 weapons, which would ravage Russian troops in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78. Bellicose European empires proved eager customers. ![]() Salesmen fanned out across Asia, the Middle East, and South America. As Haag notes, American gun makers were partly kept aloft by strong foreign demand. But other governments were keen to do business with him. It was a decisive moment for Winchester, one that turned him toward exploiting the civilian market. For instance during the Civil War, the Ordnance Department shunned Winchester’s repeating rifle for more cumbersome and primitive muzzle loaders - the quick-firing feature was considered wasteful. One key theme is the vexed relationship between arms manufacturers and the government. ![]()
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