Subsequent gun panics followed a similar pattern: authorities and the media would use moralistic language to denounce a small segment of gun commerce as responsible for changing patterns of violent crime, and push for reforms to criminalize an imagined unvirtuous gun user.
The arrival of handguns from Austrian manufacturer Glock, which replaced some metal or wood parts with polymers, led to a panic over “plastic guns” in the mid-1980s. Later that decade, attention shifted to “assault weapons,” and the press especially hyped the AK-47, which was imported in greater numbers from China at the end of the Cold War.
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