Adventures at the Gun Shop: Bushmaster Edition

So, as I've noted before, my brother lost his real job on the leading edge of the recession, and ended up taking a part-time job at a gun shop. He knows a lot about firearms, and is--or was--very interested in them, so the job seemed like a good way to make ends meet. Four years later, he's still stuck there (southeast Missouri is not exactly packed with manufacturing jobs), he's a lot less pro-firearm than he used to be, and he's so fed up with the nonsense he has to hear every day that he's going to quit and move out here to stay with us and take some classes.

Anyway, in the wake of the Sandy Hook mass murder, the shop had a run on AR-15s. They all sold out in a week or two--it'd normally have taken months to turn over that inventory. The weirdest thing he had to report was that a guy had come in a few days after the shooting saying that he wanted to buy a Bushmaster (the brand of rifle used in the murders). Turned out that he had no earthly idea what "Bushmaster" meant. He thought it was a type of gun rather than a brand, but had no idea what type--didn't know whether it was a rifle, a shotgun, a handgun...no earthly idea. Apparently all he knew was that one was used to kill a lot of people...

This is, incidentally, not the weirdest thing he's experienced there.