And yet they wonder why we call them ‘gun nuts’.

According to ABC4.com this picture was taken Wednesday about four hours after President Obama called for a renewed ban on assault weapons:

From RS:

A man in Riverdale, Utah walked into a local JCPenney department store this week armed to the teeth, carrying a holstered handgun, a semi-automatic assault rifle and extra clips on his belt.

The strange display of firepower was enough to draw a scene, with bystanders taking photos and making concerned comments to one another. Images of the man published to Facebook caused a stir in the community.

[…]

Utah state law, however, says the man’s actions are legal, provided the weapons were unloaded. The man was not positively identified, and JCPenney’s public relations team did not respond to a request for comment.

The assault rifle he was carrying was an AR-15, the same firearms platform used to kill 27 people in Newtown, Connecticut in December.

If his name was ‘Abdul Aleem Raashid’ no doubt a SWAT would have been called as precaution.

The world’s largest supplier of firearms, Brownells.com, said that it had experienced ‘unprecedented’ demand for high capacity AR-15 ammunition magazines after the Newton shooting and subsequent “threat” of potential ban.

From Rawstory:

In a statement on the AR15.com forum, Brownells’ spokesperson Jason Corpus apologized to customers for delays in fulfilling their orders of assault weapon clips.

[…]

To shed some more light on the magazine situation at present, it really has been unprecedented in the last 5 days,’ he continued. ‘[W]e sold the ‘average demand’ equivalent of about 3 1/2 years worth of PMAGS, and and an even greater amount of our Brownells magazines. We’re working like crazy to get these orders to you as quickly as possible.’

Corpus later corrected his statement to clarify that the 3.5 years worth of magazines had actually been sold in 72 hours — or three days — instead of five days.

Stockpiling weapons, ammo, and magazines ahead of a potential ban is a GREAT idea. I haven’t regretted for a single second my personal stockpile of asbestos, lead-based paint, and lawn darts.

I think someone in one of the threads referenced this NYT article, but here it is.

But in the last couple of years, residents began noticing loud, repeated gunfire, and even explosions, coming from new places. Near a trailer park. By a boat launch. Next to well-appointed houses. At 2:20 p.m. on one Wednesday last spring, multiple shots were reported in a wooded area on Cold Spring Road near South Main Street, right across the road from an elementary school.

Yet recent efforts by the police chief and other town leaders to gain some control over the shooting and the weaponry turned into a tumultuous civic fight, with traditional hunters and discreet gun owners opposed by assault weapon enthusiasts, and a modest tolerance for bearing arms competing with the staunch views of a gun industry trade association, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, which has made Newtown its home.

The place that witnessed one of the worst mass killings in United States history on Friday, leaving 20 schoolchildren and 8 adults dead, is a bucolic New England town comfortable with its firearms, and not an obvious arena for the nation’s debate over gun control. But the legislative battle right here shows how even the slightest attempts to impose restrictions on guns can run into withering resistance, made all the more pointed by the escalation in firepower.

‘Something needs to be done,’ said Joel T. Faxon, a hunter and a member of the town’s police commission, who championed the shooting restrictions. ‘These are not normal guns, that people need. These are guns for an arsenal, and you get lunatics like this guy who goes into a school fully armed and protected to take return fire. We live in a town, not in a war.’

read the whole thing