It may become easier than ever before to lock and load guns in the United States, a country plagued by gun violence, thanks to a small business keen on selling bullets in possibly the simplest way imaginable: a vending machine.
American Rounds LLC currently has its bullet vending machine operations in Alabama, Oklahoma, and Texas, though the company has plans to expand to several other states. The Dallas-based company claims that their “automated ammo retail machines” utilize artificial intelligence to ensure potential buyers are of legal purchasing age. The one-stop drop shops can be found in eight different supermarkets across the trio of southern states.
“As a company our team are supporters of law abiding responsible gun ownership,” said Grant Magers, CEO of American Rounds, in an email to Gizmodo. “We believe in the second amendment and that by providing a safe and secure method to sell ammunition is needed in the market.”
Magers told NPR in a separate statement that the ammo supply company intends to open another vending machine in Colorado this week, and has had “requests” to bring their services to Hawaii, Alaska, California, Florida, and “every state in between for the most part.”
“We have currently about 200 grocery stores that we’re working on fulfilling orders on machines for,” Magers told the radio network.
American Rounds is of the belief that their service is safer than the traditional method of ammunition sales, which typically sees boxes stocked on shelves in gun stores or big-box stores such as Walmart or Cabela’s. But selling just ammunition requires very little government oversight: the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives does not require someone to obtain a federal license in order to sell bullets, and only a handful of states have passed laws necessitating background checks for their sale or purchase.
“If you look at the way it is currently sold in our country, we are the safest and most secure method of ammo retail sales on the market today,” Magers said, noting the machines also prevent underage customers from simply stealing boxes of bullets.
Critics of the easy-access machines argue that American Rounds isn’t providing any solutions that aren’t already presented by traditional gun retailers, who have the added ability to research whether someone’s criminal convictions prohibit them from buying ammunition, as well as assess a buyer’s mental and emotional state.
“A vending machine is not going to be able to say, ‘Hey are you okay?’ or ‘Why do you need this ammunition?’” George Tita, a professor of criminology, law and society at the University of California, Irvine, told NPR.
Against the background of expanding weapons access, gun violence in the United States has become so ubiquitous that it is almost silent. In the first half of the year, 287 mass shootings across the country claimed the lives of 301 people and injured another 1,261, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive.
While the dam might not yet be breaking, there sure are plenty of leaks: Some Biden aides and operatives overseeing his reelection campaign now see his chances of winning against Trump at zero.
“No one involved in the effort thinks he has a path,” one person working to reelect Biden told NBC News.
Concerns of Biden’s viability have grown following his shockingly bad debate performance in late June. Biden’s campaign at the time brushed aside widespread concerns from Democrats as ephemeral angst from “the bedwetting brigade.” Now it seems even some on his campaign see the writing on the wall, with some aides discussing how best to convince Biden it’s time to sail off into the sunset.
One campaign official who spoke with NBC described a perfect storm of impasses for Biden and concerns about his mental fitness, fundraising, and unfavorable polling, with two-thirds of voters thinking he should step aside.
“We have this window, and the White House is just running out the clock, which is so selfish,” a longtime Democratic presidential campaign strategist told NBC. “We’re all waiting around for Joe Biden to f--- up again, which is not a great position to be in.”
“He needs to drop out,” another Biden campaign official told NBC. “He will never recover from this.”
Since his debate performance two weeks ago, Biden has said multiple times he will not leave the race.
“I wouldn’t be running again if I did not absolutely believe I was the best person to beat Donald Trump in 2024,” Biden most recently wrote in a letter to Democrats on Monday. But nothing has been able to quell growing calls for Biden to step aside. On Wednesday, Politico reported deep blue New York is on the brink of becoming a swing state thanks to lackluster support for Biden, with local candidates being advised to avoid attaching themselves to him.
“I worry that the symbol of our party is the person who’s running for president and that that does absolutely trickle down to the down ballot races,” one state party chair told NBC News.
Despite those concerns, an internal memo to Biden campaign staff asserting that he still has a shot circulated on Thursday.
“Our internal data and public polling show the same thing: this remains a margin-of-error race in key battleground states,” campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon and campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez wrote. “The movement we have seen, while real, is not a sea-change in the state of the race—while some of this movement was from undecided voters to Trump, much of the movement was driven by historically Democratic constituencies moving to undecided.”
“No one is denying that the debate was a setback,” they........