Yellow Ryder Truck

Here's a shred of hope...  I think.

If you think about the history of gun manufacture and sales in the US, it's really only fairly recently that assault weapons became available to the General Public.  After decades of just a few relatively simple types of guns to choose from, the assault weapon category was new and exotic and it got a lot of attention, and like people do, everyone wanted to have the latest thing.

My shred of hope is that the novelty of assault weapons will soon be worn off and supplanted by a stigma.  They'll become symbols of tragedy and no one will be able to look at one and NOT think of some pretty horrible things that they don't want to be associated with.  Not unlike renting a yellow Ryder box truck back in 1995, or in the most extreme example I can think of, like having anything with a swastika on it.  

I'm starting to believe that, very soon, gun collectors won't be able to divorce the object from what it symbolizes, and those guns will quickly fall out of fashion.