The Cuddly .50-Caliber

This free WSJ article on gun manufacturers' attempts to blow up interest in its wares is riddled with more bad bullet and gun metaphors, analogies, and similes than a picture of Bin Laden at a West Virginia shooting range.

Looks like they're taking the Nascar Nation approach: stop trying to appeal to only dumb southerners; appeal to dumb people everywhere, which seems to include the article's author. Note the use of "booming" in the following:

"When grizzled gun dealers gathered for their big annual Shooting, Hunting, Outdoor Trade Show in Las Vegas last January, they found themselves rubbing holsters with a decidedly different demographic: people who play and profit from the booming sport of paintball."

The last pinball wizard I saw making money was some 12-yr-old kid at summer camp who'd bet you five bucks he could move the paddles with his wiener.

Oh, and, don't this remind you of the effect of every Parental Warning Sticker you ever did see:

Sales of Smith & Wesson's gargantuan .50-caliber Magnum 500, introduced in 2003 as the most powerful production handgun on the market, seemed to accelerate in 2004 when the Violence Policy Center, a Washington gun-control group, issued a detailed report condemning the gun's outsize specifications and its purported ability to punch through most police body armor.