The Anti-Gun Lobby’s Logic Would Have Outlawed Home VCRs — and Almost Did.

Are you old enough to recall setting your nightly schedule by “what’s on tonight”? Can you imagine not being able to binge watch an entire season of Game of Thrones or The Bachelor? What if there had never been any Blockbuster Video stores?

That is the world two Hollywood studios aimed to give us in the early 1980s, when they sued all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court attempting to make home-video recorders illegal. Why? Because people were pirating copyrighted movies and making copies for their friends? No, that’s not why manufacturers sold VCRs. But their machines made such illegal uses possible. So, the studios wanted to make VCRs illegal.

Does that logic sound familiar?

It’s precisely the same argument anti-gun activists make when they try to hold gun manufacturers liable for criminal misuse of ordinary rifles which they misname “assault weapons,” such as the commonly-owned AR-15 semi-automatic rifle.

Gun companies work under some of the tightest regulations of any industry. They comply with reams of federal restrictions, or else the feds would shut them down. But gun-grabbers peddle the mantra that none of this is enough – that gunmakers should be targets of bankrupting lawsuits when criminals abuse their products.