While there are way too many gun control laws on the books right now, the sad truth is that most of them aren't going anywhere in the near future—one of those dictates who is old enough to purchase a firearm and who isn't.
That seems to escape a few leftist senators who want a gun company to stop making and marketing one of its products.
See, the product was built for young shooters, and because it's a scary AR-style rifle, well, the usual suspects are wetting their pants about it, so they decided to flex their muscles to bully the company into complying.
Today, Senators Edward J. Markey (D-MA), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) wrote to Eric Schmid, the owner of Mountain Billy Gun Lab — a gun manufacturer that produces .22-caliber AR-15s scaled down for children — demanding that his company “cease all marketing directed at minors, withdraw related advertisements, and halt the sale of products promoted in such campaigns.”
In a letter provided exclusively to The Smoking Gun, the senators called Mountain Billy Gun Lab’s conduct “dangerous, irresponsible, and indefensible” and said it “not only threatens public safety but also raises serious questions about your compliance with federal unfair-marketing and consumer protection laws.”
Mountain Billy Gun Lab’s Marketing
The letter from the senators draws on reporting by The Smoking Gun, which found that Mountain Billy Gun Lab’s marketing tactics mirrored those of its predecessor, Wee1 Tactical, late last year, “positioning its scaled-down AR-15s as effective ‘training’ or ‘family’ guns for use by children and young shooters.” Specifically, the investigation uncovered that Mountain Billy Gun Lab had shared and reposted several Instagram videos depicting children firing its AR-style “GOAT-15” rifles and pistols, as shown below.
As the senators noted, “Photographs reviewed in that reporting display minors handling and firing the scaled-down AR-15 variants, often accompanied by marketing language that frames these weapons as ‘accessible,’ ‘approachable,’ and appropriate for younger shooters. These visuals and captions strongly suggest that Mountain Billy Gun Lab’s promotional outreach continues to appeal to minors — a practice that, whether intentional or not, raises serious questions about consumer safety and lawful marketing.”
Now, let's understand that only adults can buy firearms at all. These guns cannot be sold to minors, even if they're designed for young shooters. If a kid wants one of these, an adult has to purchase it. Typically, that's going to be a family member, if for no other reason than some random adult isn't going to buy a gun for a kid just because they want one.
These are chambered in .22, which means they're relatively low-powered and are easy-to-handled introductory firearms. In fact, youth models of firearms have been around for generations. I've got my great-grandfather's semi-auto chambered in the obsolete .22 Winchester Rimfire that he used to help put food on my grandmother's table during the Great Depression nearly a century ago. It was a youth model.
These kinds of guns are nothing new.
But because these are AR-style guns, the anti-gun lawmakers are losing their freaking minds. The goal is to bully Mountain Billy Gun Lab into taking the guns off the market entirely, or to refocus their marketing to pretend no child should ever even look at a firearm.
It's almost funny because these same three senators are absolutely convinced that a four-year-old kid should be able to decide to lop off their genitals and pretend to be the opposite sex if they want, and you're a terrible parent if you object to either that or the propaganda that tells them it's OK, but God forbid the learn how to exercise a basic civil liberty with the approval of their parents.
