When the public asks, “How did we get here?” after each mass shooting, the answer goes beyond National Rifle Association lobbyists and Second Amendment zealots. It lies in large measure with the strategies of firearms executives like Dyke. Long before his competitors, the mercurial showman saw the profits in a product that tapped into Americans’ primal fears, and he pulled the mundane levers of American business and politics to get what he wanted.
Dyke brought the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, which had been considered taboo to market to civilians, into general circulation, and helped keep it there. A folksy turnaround artist who spun all manner of companies into gold, he bought a failing gun maker for $241,000 and built it over more than a quarter-century into a $76 million business producing 9,000 guns a month. Bushmaster, which operated out of a facility just 30 miles from the Lewiston massacre, was the nation’s leading seller of AR-15s for nearly a decade. It also made Dyke rich. He owned at least four homes, a $315,000 Rolls Royce and a helicopter, in which he enjoyed landing on the lawn of his alma mater, Husson University.
The AR-15 is just popular because it’s the honda civic of rifles and people fetishize it for the same reason highschool car guys fetishize honda civics. It’s cheap, ubiquitous, and you can modify it to do basically anything you want. You can get an AR-15 chambered in anything from a .17 varmint round up to .50 Beowulf if you really want. You can slap basically any attachment or replacement part you can think of on it and it will just work. It’s also fairly robust so maintenance isn’t a huge concern. It’s just a generic, cheap, and highly versitile platform. As far as “big bad guns” go the AR-15 isn’t anywhere close to the top of that list. To anyone who actually knows about guns the AR-15 is basically the great value brand rifle. It’s what you buy when you don’t know what you actually want.
You also have a bit of the glock phenomenon going on. It became a thing a while back where a lot of people just started calling all handguns glocks even if they weren’t actually Glock handguns. Similarly now you have people calling any black rifle with a handguard and a picatinny rail an AR-15 even if it’s not even close to an AR-15.