Like there’s no tomorrow

Op-EdA Tennessee rifle that shoots like a machine gun. A war headed toward worse. The price of diesel rising a half-dollar in a day.I went to see my nephew who lives in Tennessee in a house in a forest with his wife and four children.With an engineering degree, he owns and runs a gun store. One day while I was visiting a week ago we went to a shooting range and shot a short-barreled rifle that he told me is illegal in California where he used to live.But not in Tennessee.The rifle includes a mechanism that, when you press on the trigger, puts another bullet in the chamber automatically by pushing against the held-back trigger. It does not meet the definition of a machine gun, but it felt and sounded like a machine gun.I went through a magazine of something like 15 bullets in the space of a couple seconds. It was a thrill, but I could not keep the gun from rising and pulling slightly to the right as the rounds went off.His daughter also came and he pushed slightly forward against her shoulder to keep her steady as the muzzle tried to ride up.He is meticulous about safety, and instructed me to keep my finger off the trigger until I was ready to fire and check the chamber before and after firing to make sure it was empty.While we don’t talk politics, his view is that, as we saw all around us at the gun range, a large number of men were shooting safely. So the problems with guns, in his view, are not with the firearm itself but with some of those who use them.He is the one other person in our family who runs his own business. So I asked him how it’s going.He has been established for some time now and counts the mayor as a regular customer, among many others in town. When we drove into the gun range in a his camouflage-colored, store-logo-emblazoned jeep, a number of people recognized his car and waved.He said that in the past he made about half of his sales online and half in-store. But so much fraud has filtered into online sales that buyers have moved to the big outfits like Walmart, and now bypass small businesses that don’t have a big volume of sales and a lot of advertising.So his online sales have dropped by more than 50%.What about the in-store sales, I asked as we drove back from the shooting range. “People still come in but they spend less,” he said.Where a customer might spend upwards of six or seven hundred dollars on a visit, they now spend a couple hundred. So the volume of online sales has been cut sharply and the average amount spent on in-store sales has cut back quite a bit.Consumer sales are the backbone of the American economy so it remains a mystery to me how they remain at a high level and the economy rides high. It is as though people are spending like there is no tomorrow because that is a little bit how they feel.The now is so chaotic that tomorrow is increasingly unknown.So come along into that mix the Trumpian war where the Houthis, who I have long considered some very tough fighters, are advancing toward the second strait at the bottom of the Arabian peninsula.Getting there will allow them, in combination with the Iranians, to cut off most oil shipments out of the peninsula. And then, quietly, it appears that Iran is upping its arsenal to include hypersonic missiles and possibly shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles.“A hypersonic missile travels faster than five times the speed of sound (Mach 5) and can maneuver during flight, making it harder to detect and intercept than traditional missiles,” is the succinct and quite serviceable definition resulting from an online search.Move the scene to a house outside Salt Lake City where our second-in-command lives. Her husband asked her on Friday, “Guess the price of diesel.” She guessed it was a cent or two higher than the day before. But it had jumped a half-dollar.“Six fifty seven,” he told her. “We are headed for a recession!”And so we might be.Subscribe to our free newslettersOur weekly newsletter Closing Arguments offers the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world, while the monthly Under the Lights dishes the legal dirt from Hollywood, sports, Big Tech and the arts.Additional Reads