I used to have a big gun-porn problem as a kid. I got all the magazines, and I mean all of them, and poured over them, becoming an encyclopedia of firearms knowledge in the process.
It is tough to explain gun-porn to a non-shooter, because non-shooters see guns, and they all look the same. But to a shooter, it is completely different because once you’ve shot numerous guns, you key in on the nuances and actually feel how the different guns you are looking at would shoot. Thick or thin in form, heavy or light, pointability, ergonomics, the clunky cycling of an AK or Mini-14 vs the tight smooth snap of an AR variant’s bolt carrier. The blast of a 7.62 vs the powerful crack of a 5.56, vs the boom of a 12ga, vs the light crack of a 22. The positions of the controls, the draw on a trigger, even the center of gravity all become felt in the mind.
As a kid I had the sickness bad.
It was rooted in childhood summer vacations spent in a rural area that was heaven on earth, and in the middle of nowhere. I would hustle outside with boxes of ammo, and shoot till my heart was content. Mostly 22 for economic reasons, but 22 was maybe even more fun than 9mm, 12 ga, or other larger calibers, which I still enjoyed judiciously.
I began getting the old catalogs; Gander Mountain, Bass Pro Shops, Sportsman’s Guide, and Cabela’s. I’d get an allowance to buy things for those vacations, and it would always go to gun accessories. The old cheapo folding stocks for the Ruger 10/22, fifty round magazines (they could jungle clip, putting 100 rounds right on the gun!), a cheap scope, sling, and so on.
I think shooting is a hobby which breeds visualization. Shooting is immensely fun, in a primal way, but most shooters can’t do it all the time. Neighbors in suburbia get antsy when they hear several hours of rapid fire cracks and aren’t sure where the bullets are going. When you can’t shoot for vast periods of time, the brain responds by seeking the dopamine hit through visualization. So when you see the plastic folding stock on the glossy pages of a magazine, you visualize holding the gun in it. You imagine the weight balance. You feel the molded ridges. You see yourself shoot it from the hip with the stock folded just for fun. You shoot it from the shoulder with the stock open, feeling the smooth plastic against your cheek and the sharp folding butt in your shoulder. You hear the crack, and feel the jump, as the bullet buzzes downrange. You even smell the smell of the gunpowder and feel the spent casings as you gather them up. You feel the whole thing in your mind. I even heard the casings bouncing around on the concrete.
Then the stock arrives, and you begin visualizing all over again. You pull the stock out of the box, open it up, and put it to your shoulder, visualizing how the gun will feel in it. Then you install it to the gun, and repeat the process. You put in an empty magazine, hold it to your shoulder, and look down the sights at a clock across the room. You fold it up, hold it at the hip, and feel how it feels as you picture emptying a 50 round magazine rapid-fire to make a tennis ball jump down the range, puffs of dirt around it letting you know where your misses go. You see how it will feel as you carry it through the woods. By the time you actually shoot it, you already know exactly what it all feels like.
As your firearms experience grows with your collection, you begin feeling every gun you see, until the visualization is reflexive, and you’ve become a gun-porn addict.
If you factored in the actual shooting, I would bet for most shooters that 70-80% or more of the dopamine of gun ownership would occur outside of those actual trigger pulls on live rounds.
I got weaned off of the porn as I got busy with other things in life and had less time for shooting. Up until a few days ago, I was probably several years sober, then I had a relapse.
I made the mistake of clicking this link, to check out some Mag-pul furniture for AK’s. (click that link and scroll down if you enjoy it, as part of this exercise). The link is insidious, because just as you get to the bottom, it loads a whole new raft of just-as-alluring gun porn, and you end up scrolling even farther down. It is a never ending pit of gun porn.
As I look at it, there are those childhood days. Guns laying on live grass. Guns laying on dead grass. Guns on snow. Guns on concrete. Rocks laying in the background. Long-barreled guns, short barreled guns, plastic stocks, varnished wood stocks. Stippling. Rails. I was back holding the open crimp of a freshly spent shotgun shell to my nose, inhaling the smell of burned gunpowder deeply like a junkie huffing glue, as I took in the beauty of the nature around me. The sun beating down, the breeze blowing through my T-shirt, the deep woods off a few hundred yards away, the massive grasshoppers jumping out of the grass ahead of me and flying off in every direction as I walked, the massive dragonflies buzzing overhead and periodically dive-bombing each other. My blood pressure probably dropped twenty points as I scrolled down.
Within minutes, I couldn’t stop scrolling down on that endless page of dopamine. If you have the sickness, you can see how if you won the Powerball, you could very quickly blow your way through it, creating a gunroom of epic proportions – and endless visualizations on every wall. In the middle could be a big recliner to sit in as you looked over all the pieces on the walls, and felt each one’s unique characteristics flash through your mind, like a virtual-reality orgy of nature, gunsmoke, and pure fun in your imagination.
I thought it an issue worth looking at, since guns are about the closest I can get to an addiction that would ruin my day to day life if I let it. As I looked, I could feel the amygdala shut off as I focused on each feature and felt the guns in my hands. I read the comments and felt them, or the clash they provoked, “Spetsnaz AK? With all the accessories mounted by the muzzle, moving the center of gravity forward and slowing pointability? I don’t think so….. AR-57 looks quick on target and the weight could be half ammo, but it would feel weird to not have a magazine in front of the pistol grip for some reason, even if you could shoot prone better…. Every one of those little AR-15 SBRs just looks so tight and pointable…. Those AK pistols must have a muzzle flash four feet long….” I feel like I’ve already shot each one without even touching them.
I think the reason it is addictive and shuts off the amygdala so fully, is that because of the practiced visualization you develop, it blocks everything else in the amygdala, and replaces it with something which was a pinnacle of bliss in my mind. I can still feel the well weathered concrete, exposed sand granules hot from the sun, as they abrade against my finger tips as I pick up the brass. I loved the sun beating down on me, heating me up as soft breezes carried the heat away. Then there was the smell of super-clean rural air and freshly cut grass, with periodic faint bouquets of cow manure from a farm way down the road. I can see all the ammo and magazines laid out on the gun case on the concrete, representing fun to be had.
But as I look at the page, I realize this is all a waste of time. Looking at all these guns accomplishes nothing, and I have stuff to do – and the cocksucker who made this fucking page designed it so it would never stop scrolling. As I stop scrolling down through the images and close the page, that perfect brain state disappears, and I am back to trying to come up with something intelligent to put on the blog that isn’t a waste of everyone’s time. Ugh. It is unpleasant to retreat from those ancient memories and sensations of childhood bliss. My amygdala complains.
Then I remember, unpleasantness makes me stronger. That is my amygdala exercising, adapting to the discomfort and becoming more powerful. So I open the page, look at a few guns that bring particular pleasure, and then force a closing of it again, just to do it for the amygdala-exercise. Sure enough it is easier the second time. And then easier still the third. Now I am focused on being stronger, and it changes the entire sensation of deprivation. Now I don’t want to open the page a fourth time.
The amygdala can only focus on one thing. Willpower is focus, and when I shifted my focus from hedonism to strength, I shifted my focus on what the act of closing the page represented. When I did, closing the page went from a loss of pleasant memories, to a gaining of strength and power.
One was adding to amygdala angst because of a loss of pleasure right now. I was adapting to expect and need pleasure. The other was reducing amygdala angst because I knew I was making myself stronger. I was adapting to enjoy embracing pain and disregarding pleasure. Because the amygdala can only focus on one concept, your focus is your will power. What does the discomfort represent? What do you focus on? Hedonism that breaks you, or control that strengthens you? The fleeting moment now, or the entire rest of your future?
Try it, because you will feel it yourself and see what I mean. Those second and third closings, you will feel like a focused machine, in full control, with just a small shift in your perception.
Overcoming a gun-porn addiction is not a big deal in the grand scheme, but this is the program you carry forward to other areas, which will remodel your brain and your drives elsewhere in life. Develop this mindset on something small and easy, and it will set itself in your brain, and open pathways you will adapt to use in other, more important areas.
Understand the amygdala, and hacking the mind throughout your life becomes much easier. And the basis of all of it is to mold how you view that amygdala-burn, and what it represents to you. Pain can become pleasure, or at least something you embrace happily.
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I recently saw a Youtube video of an art installation some anti-gun hippie had made of a map of the US composed entirely out of guns. All i could think of was that every gun owner who saw that thing must’ve been wishing he had something like that hanging in his living room…
Boys and men react with immediate testosterone level increases in the blood and pleasure center activation in the brain to three kinds of things: 1)Sexy females 2)significant resources(money, gold) 3)weapons.
Combine all three, like in sex+crime movies about bank-robberies and you maximize all three together.
Evolutionary psychology easily explains why this must be so. Even low-status cars sell better when sexy women pose with them in ads or car shows.
Weapons symbolize and are power. Men are genetically hard-wired to seek power, for aggression, defense, status, mating etc. If there are no guns known, young boys play war with spears or throwing rocks in play warfare, hide and seek (=ambush training). Ability of physical violence is extremely important for life success (more so has been) for getting what we need and want and for keeping it. As all life is about competition in the field of survival and extinction, weapons and related issues are a primary concern for males, especially so for K-selected males.
As for the gun porn – I had the bug as a kid, too, and in Germany we could not get real guns easily, but I had the gun magazines, of course. Even today, elegant or “effective looking”, power-conveying weapons still stir me emotionally.
That being said – weapons, guns are in today’s society not really useful to get what we want – wealth, security, high-quality mates and offspring. Those are the “victory conditions” of life.
As can be easily seen, however, the guys sitting in the huge mansions, the ruling and owning class,
is not directly involved with weapons – they fight war, too, but theirs is all cognitive and mental.
Realize that even owning thousands of guns, ammo, missiles and other stuff will not get you closer to the victory conditions laid out above.
Ideally, you would want to set up your life so that you do not need to have weapons around – because you were clever enough to remove all probable threats from your life by other means,
or by paying people who protect you and deal with being shot and being shot at.
The Warren Buffetts and Bill Gates of the world did not gunfight their way to the top, and you should
not even dream about trying to do this for yourself – this is how media propaganda manipulates Negroes and idiots (that includes young boys) into believing true success to be found there.
With a powerful brain much more is possible than even with a personal standing army – as African warlords and billionaires prove.
I think that in the US, serious self-defense needs aside (ideally you should not live where such things are needed to begin with), weapon addiction and food addiction are driven by the same reward centers in the brain, and both are causing wrong investments by the people suffering from it – the same as being obese will not make you stronger, loading up on any more guns will not make individuals stronger, but in both cases industry owners profit from the underlying desires.
(OT)
It occurred to me that an economy of K’s is not optimal for the economy:
To maximize wealth and employment one needs to maximize consumption.
This is only possible by r-type behavior: Basically spending one’s money as soon as one gets it,
completely.
An economy of only K’s would try to save a lot of money instead of squandering it – digging their
own economic grave in a downward spiral of ever-increasing savings, falling prices of goods and hourly wages, until the economy crashes.
Economically, realistically, you need a broad class of consumers, as r-type as possible, especially
in the times of automation, rising productivity and general abundance.
Only r-type consumers would crash their system, too, as was pointed out in your book and articles.
But having a well-functioning mix of r’s and K’s, the first the great majority, the latter a controlling, investing, ruling minority, seems stable and productive – and, note: This is exactly the system set up by our elites.
R’s would form the lower classes, K’s the higher, especially true upper classes.
I disagree with your idea that a collapse must follow today’s developments, and instead think
that we’re actually more stable (at least in the West) than ever before.
I think it would be a mistake to only see the r’s behavior and degeneration and to overlook what happens in the top-caste of K’s, the upper class, the owning class, the true elites!
The first do indeed degenerate, but the latter grow ever more competent instead!
R’s can easily be reduced to an animal-like state, as long as they reliably consume;
they could not produce anything meaningful anyway, as automation and rising productivity
leads to an economy where only the true cognitive elites are able to further increase productivity and progress in knowledge and ability of humanity.
The r’s only use – and it is a real use – is in being primitive, immediate-gratification-maximizing consumers – obese 500lbs-giants with only rudimentary cognitive abilities (otherwise they would not even want to live that way, and eat up all the low-grade food and low-grade endlessly available stupid entertainment).
Therefore, I think that modern-day K+r is not about what it meant to be exclusively in the past;
it is about social class, social function – with cause and effect (and vice versa) that the more “K” a person is, the more likely he is true upper class.
Social class, in essence, is a function of mental and cognitive ability; being able to think AND act
rational, which to me is much the same as K-type behavior.
Interesting.
As you find it interesting I’ll explain what the refugee phenomenon in Europe is really about:
Envy – and greed – by our European, especially German, upper classes, compared with what they see their US counterparts enjoy: A sizable low-IQ, mostly Negroid underclass.
Why?
Because, for the upper class, Negroes function as what I termed “profit pumps”, or “profit guarantees”:
The only class that really produces surplus is the middle class (MC) – skilled workers, above that doctors, engineers, small businessmen etc.
I repeat, for this is important: The middle class is the only class producing meaningful amounts of surplus wealth.
The upper class (UC)wants that money from them, naturally.
Problem:
Middle class is too smart to simply being tricked to give their work’s profits to the UC;
and this cannot be changes, because they MC must be kept rather smart, because the nature
of their work as a profit source needs to keep them that way.
How did the UC solve this problem?
MC has a weakness – they lack capital, they are not really, independently rich – they fear unemployment, illness and falling the down the social ladder from that.
Therefore, they agree to pay high taxes – for a social welfare system, because of their deep-seated
fear that they would need it one day themselves.
Their tax money, therefore, goes to the lower classes (LC) – White Trash and Negroes, in the USA.
But does their money END there? Not at all – LC people immediately spend it – specifically for stuff the MC would never spend it for (as they are too smart, saving, “K”, for that), like huge-margin/profit goods like branded sports shoes (Negroes actually kill each other for those and crave them – MC parents would scold their kids for buying things like shoes for 500$ that last few months before being worn/ugly and cost 3$ to make, the difference being profits for the UC owners of industry).
So how can the UC increase the money flow from the MC to themselves?
By growing the r-type, immediate-gratification, money-squandering LC, ideally Negroes (as those have lowest IQs and act like boys all their lives).
Thanks to the welfare system, the more LC people live in a society, the more money is forced from the MC to flow to the UC (by proxy of LC).
This is also the reason the UC enforces “anti-racism” rules – as any questioning of importing more LC people and their r-type traits and the welfare tax-based system would immediately endanger UC’s income from the work of the MC!
This is also the reason for the UC pushing “equality” and “social justice” and all those concepts – the higher MC is taxed for the welfare system, the more the LC-r’s consume of the MC’s money, and the more profits flow to the UC.
Therefore, I think it appropriate to think of the welfare system not longer merely as just that –
it actually has been modified into a weapon to enslave the MC by the UC.
And this is what happens in Europe – the native population is too MC, too K, they tend to save too much and squander not enough of their income and savings for consumer trash, therefore limiting UC’s profits. This is especially relevant in connection with the rise of China, as more and more wealth of Western societies flows out towards there because more and more products and services are made and based in China – moving profits and wealth also there; to limit the threat to themselves, Europeans UC’s now mass-import a future LC, their own versions of US Negroes so to speak, to enforce and secure future profit flows from the productive MC to the UC.
This would allow the European UC to keep their wealth, or even increase it, even in a future where average European wealth would fall due to Chinese competition and an aging population.
Demography is a weapon, tool, profit and status foundation.
That is possibly one of the most brilliant things I have seen.
Well, thank you, I found the insights from your book brilliant as, well, as it allowed me for the first time to get somewhat of a working model of how society and politics work on the basic level.
As you seem to like my thoughts I will tell more of my thinking:
I found historical and contemporary events mostly confusing; I looked for cause and effect, and I found nothing relevant enough to base a hypothesis, let alone a model on it.
After reading some books, among them the “Dictator’s Handbook” (a rather good read, but only after the the first quarter which seems much like babble to bore readers), and having thought already in the past long about what really moves events, I came up with an idea that proved to be a fruitful model about how and why the world works:
I realized that – by and large – almost nobody ever did something meaningful, not in history, not today; most people are moved by external events like autumn leaves in the wind, yet never deliberately cause or start new or interesting things to happen. Almost all people are passive,
for lack of ability and understanding, or for lack of resources or personal power.
Almost everything that happens – directly and indirectly – is caused by what I call upper class (UC), very few select people at the top in their societies and countries.
Of course, a huge amount of things also happens for purely random causes – but I would argue that randomness can be well ignored for the model I sketch here, for it is not a deliberate, human cause of events.
I think that most wars between countries are caused by inter-UC rivalries, almost never by Lower Class (LC) or Middle Class (MC) people – the latter very rarely have a personal cause to go to war with, practically, LCs and MCs of other countries; inter-UC-rivalries are the only cause for war, and because UC has higher cognitive, financial, systemic and media resources than LC and MC, the first always succeeded to motivate the latter to fight their wars as mere tools for the first.
UC rarely fights and dies themselves in wars; this is LC+MC business; yet UC is the primary beneficiary of war, not only economically, but also and importantly by removing or subduing their
UC rivals from other countries (this is a simplification – today’s UCs often have connections and alliances transnationally).
Another cause of events are intra-country conflicts between members of UC. Of course, while UC
shares some interests with all other members of the UC, there are also rivalries.
I think that most events that deliberately happen intra-countries are in some form or another
manifestations of intra-UC conflicts – mostly economical (though things like “power”, “ruling” and “control” may also be causes).
Just like in wars, UC utilizes their control over LC and MC to fight those conflicts – at least in well
developed, Western societies, there are no assassins hired or other such movie-type mostly false ideas – UC battle by wielding their “influence”, that is, their (superior) understanding of the inner workings of society and human psychology: LCs and MCs are targeted by opinion modification tools the UC wields; and when there are conflicts inside UC, inner-social conflicts in LC and MC are created and/or exploited.
Example: The Climate Change discussion.
The underlying climate science is irrelevant, for I think the matter is only a pretext, a tool or even opinion weapon of two factions of UC who battle each other.
Scientists cannot say reliably if a possible Climate Change would be dangerous or even relevant.
We cannot be sure, as is typically so with things concerning the distant future, especially in chaotic systems.
What we can know, however, is the effect of the Climate Change political discussion on the financial/power/ruling interests of the UC: Two factions exist: “Old Money”, UC members who derive their wealth and power from fossil fuel extraction (trillions of $); and UC members who compete with them for power (=profits from MC) by other business models (technology mostly, another multi-trillion market).
So we have these two groups in (US+EU) UC: The (atomic/oil/gas/coal) people profiting basically at the very basis of the economy (energy), as energy is involved in basically everything,
be it service or product; these guys only need to defend their very comfortable position, profits and power – as long as society’s energy needs come from fossil fuels, those members of the UC rule supremely.
And their contenders, a mix of non-fossil-fuels-derived wealth and power members of the UC.
I think that envy and greed is ripe among members of the UC in the same way as in LC and MC – the first only think in multi-billion scales, while the latter try to compete for status with petty goods like clothing/phones/cars; the motivation however, to out-compete their peers, should be the same – and in members of the UC there is the power/ruling motive on top of that.
So, perhaps, the non-fossil-fuels-industry-derived-wealth members of UC decided to try to end the domination of the fossil-fuels UC and dethrone them: Not only would they take their rivals’ wealth – by the “green technologies” they themselves hold in their hands- they would, sooner or later, transfer the wealth/profits/power from their rivals to themselves, making themselves the new dominant group of intra-country UC as provider for all of the economy’s energy needs, therefore then getting a profit from every service or product in that economy.
How would they do this?
The same as with wars – mobilize LC+MC by stirring up their opinions and feelings about the matter. The r’s will receive propaganda about the dangers of fossil fuels for the environment, food security, or even survivability of humans on earth (every hyperbole fitting r-type psychology will fall on fertile grounds); K’s will receive propaganda about rising energy costs of green technologies,
energy security, national security and the like which is tailored to their psychological makeup.
The battling factions of UC will fire propaganda through their respectively controlled media outlets;
finance and make public “scientific” studies and counter-studies; emotionalize the LCs and MCs as good as they can to make them into their “political soldiers”, in the hopes of dominating public
opinion at some point and from that then political decisions (like ending (=making it illegal or, by tax, prohibitively expensive) reliance on fossil fuels and investing heavily in green tech by tax subsidies and legislation) – if they win, they have destroyed the power of the fossil-fuels-UC and their dominant power and will succeed in assuming their former position for themselves.
This is but one concrete contemporary example – the general idea is laid out above;
never underestimate how different society, even global affairs, look from the perspective of the UC!
UCs have for generations, decades or even centuries experience with ruling and looking at
the world, at society/-ies from “above” – a vastly different perspective, a vastly different level of immediate insights than MCs can have, which are “short-sighted” because of their social functions and needs to get “education, job, wage, retirement, family” – and have no time and energy, let alone practical experience and financial independence, to deal with more than the struggle of producing – for themselves, and the UCs.
To put an even finer point on it – perhaps a worldview is correct, a world model, in that only UCs are real actors and movers of humanity’s affairs – all others being only servants at best, blown-about dust at worst.
Historically, things like revolutions, for example, are then merely acts of replacing one UC with another (as can be seen in the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution) – usually a subgroup of the old UC or a rising subgroup of the old MC becomes the new dominant UC.
Again: UCs/MCs do not fight themselves, only manipulating the (other)MC+LC into doing it for them.
Soldiers, revolutionaries, salesmen, engineers, media people act – but the ultimate cause of their action are members of the UC (or parts of MCs, as in some revolutions) who produce the planning, give reasons, social structure, pretexts.
As only the UCs have the “clear view from the top” on the world, only the UC can easily comprehend what really is going on. Motives and machinations of the UC, which I think are the
real cause of most events, are difficult to understand, or even be informed of, for the LC+MC, because the latter do not know how ruling and finance and all those things the UC is concerned with really work; UC can easily take and understand the perspective and motivations of LC+MC;
LC+MC have grave difficulty to take the perspective and understand the motivations of the UC.
Maybe this difference in insight capability is the highest advantage the UC holds over the other classes and allows UC to shape events rather freely, only hindered by other UCs, intra- or inter-country ones.
AC plz add this comment plus comments of similar o better quality to a section of the site. Could be simplily called great/top comments.
Not entirely true. In the past, when K was the norm, the economy still grew. It is true that in the early 1970’s the US fulled more growth through consumer debt where as prior it was savings that drove it.
Let me step back.
Prior to consumer debt driven growth, there was cyclical growth and contractions. There doesn’t to my knowledge seem to be away around that. There is only so much food one can eat, cars one can drive, etc. Sure a given individual will be obsessed with cars – Jay Leno comes to mind – or perhaps some other thing. But the average person has his obsessions and they don’t overlap with every other person. Prior to consumer driven debt, growth was slow, and when troubles hit, people didn’t lose homes because of it. Homes would be owned outright. Yes banks foreclosed but there was less leveraging. People worked lifetimes to save to own homes.
Now today we are in the situation where we are using debt to fuel the economy. This is eating the seed corn of tomorrow. When Kings of Europe did this the often had to declare bankruptcy, which would result in them losing the current action that got them in debt (See Charles and Phillip of Spain in the 1500’s).
The commenter does point out a problem that is currently puzzling economists – what to do when the population stops growing. And yes the population growth is slowing globally. If the economy is built on growth, how do you keep growing when there is no more new consumers?
HPA is on the move.
AC, should we get the hose?
We’re going to have to get the hose.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWb_aS7y6SI
i was never much of a gun nut, simply because guns kill just a small share of war casualties. But i also was never interested in electronics or chemistry in school, untill i learned about explosives and explosive devices. I watch IED porn. Chemical triggers, mechanical triggers and electronical triggers get me all riled up. If guns are phallic symbolism, IEDs are the jungian counterpart of phat ass chicks.
Try shooting a .45 with shells loaded with black powder. It’s a hoot, sparks and flame jetting from the muzzle. Not much velocity though. And a bitch to clean afterwards. Stops cycling the action after 40-50 rounds, too much crud.
Your description of Gun Porn sites could be applied with a different title to just about any web site…. Including this one for some of us. People have commented looking for it with their morning coffee
HAHA. I used to have a smaller level of gun porn. Here’s a rifle I used to own. FN-FNC. Got it on sale.
http://modernfirearms.net/userfiles/images/assault/as24/fn_fnc2.jpg
It’s an AK action that’s done correctly. AK’s have terrible balance with too much weight in the front. The FNC had great balance and A GREANADE LAUNCHER ATTACHMENT! WHeee! The action was somewhere between a AK and a AR. A little kick but not that thwak like an AK. Lightweight but not as much as the CAR15. I really liked it and had it for years. I finally sold it because of the machine gun market. Seems that there were a fixed number of convertors for AR-15’s and FN-FNC’s that would make them into machine guns and they wouldn’t let any more be made. The AR’s had gone up to, get this, $10,000 for the gun and kit. I can’t remember the price of the FN-FNC’s kit but off hand I think it was more like $1,000 but that had driven the price of the rifle, that the kit fit, to $3,000. There weren’t a lot of them imported and I had one. Me being no fool and not needing a machine gun…yet, I sold it and bought a CAR-15, a AK, a big pile of ammo and put a lot of cash in my pocket.