I had to laugh at this VPC Tweet:
Would “proud” NRA Life Member Thomas Edison be so proud of today’s NRA? We doubt it.
Well let’s think about this. First Edison was a scientist with a knack for mechanics, and probably had a better understanding of how things worked than most people. He was also a wiz a physics.
This would mean when an organization attempted to ban firearm because of cosmetic details, he might smell the bullshit long before others did.
Also he was a scientist, so when a war of statistics broke out he’d be able to see which statistics were fair and which were biased.
Also he had a home in Ft. Meyers Florida which is known as the “Gunshine State”.
I dunno, Its foolishness, but if you want us to speculate, I suspect he’d be plenty fine with the NRA…
Well during the latter part of his lifetime, if inclined to do so he could have walked in to a hardware store with $200 and walk out with a Thompson submachine gun. That period predates the ATF and all of their byzantine 922 restrictrions as well. If I recall correctly, carrying firearms still required no license or special permits in many places. That is just off the top of my head. Point being the early part of the twentieth century was largely free of the anti-gun nonsense we saw from the 60’s through the 90’s. If I was going to hazard a guess, I’d say NRA members from that period would find some, possibly most of the laws current gun owners put up with as intolerable.
If they were somehow transported to the present, I imagine their reaction to them would probably peel paint off of the walls.
Wouldn’t surpise me if Edison had a Thompson, especially one of the early delayed blowback models as it was a rather interesting piece of mechanical hardware. Also one of the big issues with the civilian sale of the Thompson was it was so expensive. A Model A Ford could be had for $400, and the tommy for $200. Makes a $3000 SCAR rifle seem cheap, doesn’t it? Still Edison had a good flow of cash that having a pricey mechanical marvel wouldn’t be an issue. Especially since he was an NRA Member so he probably already liked guns.
Yeah you’re right, the laws we have today are totally ridiculous. Edison lived through the eras of Pocket Revolvers, and the birth of the small Browning pocket guns. They were made for conceal carry. The Colt 1908 is specifically called the “Vest Pocket” because that’s where it was designed to be tucked by people as they went about the town.
Of course they hadn’t dreamed up the idea you might have to ask permission of the local government before you dropped that .25 or .32 into your pocket. Yeah I suspect they’d be outraged by all the laws….also our crime issues. You could buy Laudanum, heroin, and Cocaine at the local apothecary. He also lived through the hey-day of Prohibition, so I suspect he’d think we were a bunch of fucking morons with our current policy overall.
Yeah, well, you know, that’s just like, uh, your opinion, man. 😉
On Edison,
He had no hobby, cared for no sort of amusement of any kind and lived in utter disregard of the most elementary rules of hygiene … His method was inefficient in the extreme, for an immense ground had to be covered to get anything at all unless blind chance intervened and, at first, I was almost a sorry witness of his doings, knowing that just a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90 percent of the labor. But he had a veritable contempt for book learning and mathematical knowledge, trusting himself entirely to his inventor’s instinct and practical American sense. Nikola Tesla
I’ll take that account with a grain of salt given the heated rivalry as well as dirty pool played between those two utter geniuses.
Hehe good choice, but I have to get my edison digs in where I can 🙂
Given that the dude was a tinkerer, engineer, and all-around hands-on kind of guy, something tells me he would probably possess one of the larger collection of semi- and fully-automatic firearms, should he be alive today.
And, in any case, who the hell cares what a blatantly anti-rights organization thinks about a dead guy – they have nothing upon which to base their idiotic opinion, and should be appropriately derided for expressing it.
Easy, they started it! 😛 LOL
Who would of thought that Edison captured the preincarnation of Massad Ayoob?!?