If nothing else, I want this asshole disarmed. BigDaddyHoffman1911 is some kind of gun freak from North Carolina who is proud to be walking around everywhere carrying deadly weapons…and here he is bragging about carrying a pair of Glock handguns equipped with 50 round ammo drums each.
What war does he expect to erupt around him so that he’ll need that many rounds? Or does he just have 100 people on his kill list?
Jeez. Gun nuts. There really is something wrong with them.
(via Kick!.)
He wants to make sure you know he doesn’t shot blanks and has plenty of ammo.
Note to self: stay the fuck out of NC.
One word springs to mind: “overcompensating”.
Not to mention, why the fuck dos he need 50 rounds on a hand gun when he can just get that on an AR-15.
Wait that’s not helping…
Which is all well and good until his dream comes true, and everyone is walking around with 50 round pistols. Upon the first disagreement across the street where 2 guys are shooting each other, and a bullet whizzes right by your head, you level your gun and shoot…who?
These guys think they’re going to fend off the entire might of the US Armed Forces with their little handguns.
Two words: Predator drone.
You won’t even hear the explosion that turns you into a fine mist.
The thing is that when we do get a totalitarian government that is going to ruthlessly suppress our rights, these assholes are going to support it.
Kevin: That’s why every God-fearing American should be able to exercise their God-given right to own a Predator drone of their own, and an anti-aircraft gun, SAM launcher and, of course, radar installation. Why do you think Jesus gave us these things, except to use them against the ebil gubmint?
Also, does this guy’s appearance remind anyone else of that “Eagle of the Apocalypse” YouTube preacher, the one who thinks Gangam Style is a prophecy about the End Times?
Those look fun. I should add a couple to my wishlist. Actually, they look like an impractical waste of money… but whatever frightens and pisses off you gun-control supporters is fine by me.
To me, people like this are pathetic to the point of hilarity. I mean, why is he wearing shades? It’s not sunny. He blatantly thinks he’s some sort of super-cool action hero. To someone actually living in North Carolina, I imagine he is fucking terrifying.
freemage — Screw that. Just give me my god-given, inalienable right to personal nukes…multiple 50 round drums to boot. Don’t be messin’ with me.
I’m reminded of a list about videogames that give you starting weapons so good you ignore the rest of your arsenal. One game had a pistol with an extended magazine (clip? I forget the difference.) “The magazine is longer than the gun itself! This is a gun that’s more concerned about shooting the next twelve guys than the one it’s shooting now.”
This guy terrifies me.
When I see or read about people like this, I always wonder what they’re so afraid of. Are guns just security blankets for adults? Mighty uncomfortable if you ask me.
So as we see, the gun lobby are not concerned with freedom, but with their right and ability to terrorise others.
It doesn’t frighten me. The morons who want spend the money on them, fetishize the weapons and insist that their need to own deadly fucking weapons which they treat like toys worries me.
Well, I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’m neither frightened nor pissed off – I’m laughing at this chump. A drum mag on a pistol is such an absurdly stupid idea that I’d never imagined such a thing existed.
You know what does frighten me and piss me off? Gun nuts shooting their own dicks off. You know what to do…
glodson @14
QFT!
I would add that shades-wearing action hero wannabes (like the upstanding citizen in the video) would be rather amusing were they not so pathetic, fearful and gleefully eager to put a round through someone.
People who love to shoot big guns, like the guy in this video, are not the problem behind gun violence. These people (myself included) see guns as an end in themselves, as something that is fun to shoot. The problem is people who use guns as a means to carry out violence that would otherwise be less effective. The root of this violence is clearly not in the guns themselves, but in socioeconomic factors, medical factors, mental health factors, etc.
Support? They’re going to be deputized by it.
***
Don’t criticize: this is God making the world a better place by way of darwinian exctinction of useless breeds.
An ammunition drum that size when loaded has got to be pretty heavy. Notice how he does not show the target ? And how the guns were waving around all over the place. He stats firing those off in a public place, and anyone could get killed.
Exactly. These are a bunch of wannabe Rambos who assume that the good guy with the gun will win, and want to do the brave thing of brandishing a weapon without regard to the consequences of fucking up. Like this asshole. They think that they will get it right, and the right person will be dead, and that the death will not just justified, but moral.
They will claim they need the guns to fight off the government, but I stand by the assertion that these will be the first to bow to the authoritarian government because that government will appeal to their narrow lizard brains.
Fuck, and I’m not even for banning guns, I just think gun control is a really good idea. But then we see stupid jackasses who place their need for fucking murder tools above all other concerns.
When I was 10, my friends and I used to play army out in the back fields with plastic machine guns and such.
We don’t do that any more.
Those are so impractical. You’ll never be able to hold the guns sideways and keep firing with both hands.
LOL @ Larry.
Its fascinating to me how it’s ALWAYS creepy ass white dudes and their obvious inferiority complexes waiving around guns trying to terrorize people. Like chickenshit indictus up there. It’s a desperate prick waiving that only highlights what frightened ridiculous little cowards they are. They want to be EXACTLY like those skeerry mooslim terrorists they see on Fox Nooz.
So, its not at all about freedom or safety or constitutional rights, it’s about their Jihad Envy. Again. What is it with moldy crackers and their Jihad Envy?
travisrm89 wrote,
And the ease in which people with those conditions can get their hands on a gun.
If all your guns were locked away at the shooting range, you could still have all the fun shooting them that you wanted, at a minor inconvenience of having to drive to the range.
Would I be considered a bigot if I were to cross the street to avoid walking past a stranger openly carrying semi-automatics?
When my neighborhood wasn’t as nice as it is now I had a CCW, and sometimes I carried. Never had to shoot anyone, but there was a couple times when someone decided a guy without a gun would make a better class of victim.
Eventually, things changed. The mayor put a full stop to redlining. Banks started lending for businesses other than pawnshops, bars and liquor stores; yes, that was quite literally how they operated until the 1990s in NE Portland. Shots fired became a New Year’s Eve thing instead of once a week. I let the CCW lapse and the guns went into the safe where they’ve stayed except for hunting season and trips to the range.
What’s the point of all this? When I carried a pistol the whole point was that it was concealed. Nobody knew about it unless there was a life-or-death emergency. And if it did have to be drawn the chances of getting into a magazine-swapping contest would be just about zero. A hundred rounds? Most police officers don’t pull the trigger that many times in their entire career. Most SWAT team members don’t. If a regular citizen does in a single encounter he doesn’t need a gun. He needs a priest.
@ Janine:
You would just be sensible.
@glodson #20
Things like that make me so angry. How exactly does the fact he does church stuff detract from the fact he shot a 22 year old in the head for pulling into his driveway? Worse, as he was leaving his driveway, according to the police report. The worse part is, many people out there will read that and immediately be persuaded that there’s a chance he was in the right, purely because he did church stuff.
Would it be uncharitable of me to suggest that Sailors may not have been so quick to fire had the victim been white rather than Colombian?
More guns than people in the US and violent crime has been decreasing.
The people that want very strict gun control remind me of the religious that say, “if you don’t believe in god, what’s to stop you from killing and raping?” Very strict gun control advocates don’t seem to understand that people can have deadly weapons, use them safely and responsibly and never hurt anyone. And occasionally use them for self defense. The fact is that millions of people walk around with guns everyday, myself included, and no ones gets injured. I will not be robbed at gun point again without a fight, and if my house is invaded like my neighbor up my street, the burglar will be welcomed with hollow points.
There is a set of reasonable gun laws that we can pass that would be a good balance. Closing loopholes and enforcing laws already on the books will bring us close and from there we can talk of any further restrictions. Right now, too much over reaction on both sides of the debate, imo.
Their mindset is more similar to the Taliban’s than they would like to admit.
50 rounds? Pffft, that’s nothing. No less than 600 rounds in a Glock.
@Illumanata #23
“Crackers”? Not cool.
#25 Janine – If you lived in a place where people regularly carried openly it would be strange and rude. Do you cross the street when you see a cop or a security guard? They’re more likely to fit a criminal psychological profile than your average person on the street. And you’ve probably shared the sidewalk with lots of folks who were carrying semiautomatic pistols. They just didn’t feel any need to advertise the fact and kept them politely concealed.
And why “semiautomatics” in particular? Most revolvers are more powerful than self-loading pistols.
Not this silly argument again. You claim to be in favour of gun safety. Well, when being kept in the home, guns should be kept dismantled, and unloaded, locked away in a cabinet. Keeping a loaded gun lying around is not safe. So please, do explain to us how you get the intruder to stand around whilst you unlock your gun cabinet and then assemble and load your chosen weapon ?
Or do you want to withdraw with your claim you are in favour of gun safety ?
One word springs to mind: “overcompensating”.
Poor substitute for frontal lobes, if you ask me.
But, but, but – that wasn’t 50 rounds worth of shots with each gun at the end.
#34 Matt Penfold
Why should firearms be “unassembled” when they’re stored?
Have you ever actually owned a gun, a gun safe or a quick-access safe storage device?
Safe storage with quick access is a solved problem. It’s easy. It’s cheap. It’s one of the reasons why accidental deaths from firearms are incredibly rare and getting less common every year.
@Alex B #29
This is a false equivalency, but otherwise I sort of agree with you. I firmly believe there is absolutely no justification for any civilian owning an automatic weapon, semi-automatic rifles or shotguns, or any magazine over ten rounds. If you want a semi-auto handgun for self defence then I sort of get that, even if I wouldn’t use one myself and even if I think the solution we have here in the UK is better; but if you are carrying one then you do not need more than ten rounds. If you can’t hit center mass on a human in a self defence situation within ten shots then you are such an awful shot you shouldn’t be let loose with a gun anyway.
Otherwise, carry on. I think thees are sensible restrictions.
Why should home security guns be kept dismantled and unloaded?
We already have an answer to keeping a loaded gun locked up yet easily accessable: http://www.gunvault.com/
What is even scarier than just this nut is the amazing plethora of nuts showcased in the follow-up video recommendations.
Because that ensures there is no possibility of an accident. Could you not work that out for yourself ?
So long as you extend that logic to the police. Why would they need more than ten rounds if a normal bloke without backup doesn’t need any more?
Stop being an idiot, OK ?
So how is a locked, but assembled and loaded gun going to cause more accidents than a locked, unloaded and dissambled one?
Guns don’t just go off on their own. Hell, my state even tests all pistols sold by dropping them on hard surfaces in various orientations to make sure that they don’t go off from even that sort of force.
Oh, and those gun vaults ? There does not seem anyway of securing them to the wall or floor. So hardly very secure after all.
An excellent example of “spray and pray.” As long as there is lead in the air there is hope of hitting the target. [/snark]
And doing any of what you said would be pure anathema to the NRA. To them, any restriction no matter how small, is tyranny. When they are the group representing one side of the argument, the compromise you suggest will be impossible. They think that having armed guards in every school is a more plausible solution, ffs.
@Christopher
They shouldn’t, anyone who actually knows how to shoot shouldn’t need more than ten bullets. However you fail to take into account that I specified civilian use. The Police and other armed security forces should obviously have access to superior firepower than anything a civilian could potentially get so as to ensure they can win in any situation where a civilian misuses their firearm. This is simple common sense. If they cannot, then how on earth are they supposed to fulfill their purpose?
Yes, I do.
Funny how those defending weapons haven’t heard of range safety rules. All guns are stored unloaded and open, so their status can be checked before being picked up.
Aside from screws or the included security cable?
Cops are civilians and are exposed to the exact same dangers that joe blow average citizen is, only they have backup. Why should cops have greater firepower than a mundane when we all have to face the same possible situations?
Do you have an example of firearm that turned from an inanimate object to an animate object?
Exactly.
And to add more to my response to the person who claimed guns do not just go off by themselves, he needs to explain why the UK Government is spending millions on replacing the standard issue handgun in the military in part because there is a risk of an accidental discharge when taking the gun from its holster.
That question is nonsensical.
We aren’t talking about a range, we’re talking about a bedroom.
For a sporting arm, storing it unloaded with the action back is a good idea, mainly from a corosion perspective though.
For a defensive firearm, it should be stored loaded so as to minimize the time it takes to get it to a position of utility.
He has a small penis. That’s the obvious explanation.
So cops do not undergo any training in the use of firearms ? They are never required to practice, and to demonstrate they have an acceptable level of skill ?
Why do you keep saying these silly things ?
All of the following is OPINION:
Nope, ime, that would be accurate. Have you ever noticed how strongly gun derangement correlates with racism? I.e., the bigger the racist, the more likely it is he’s gun nut.
Someone up thread asked if guns are a security blanket. For gun owners like this guy , yes, that’s exactly what they are. Bigotry is an expression of cowardice just as much as it is an expression of ignorance.
Examples:
1 -My boss: an endlessly babbling, Fox News watching, rush Limbaugh listening bigot of many colors. Not shockingly, also a gun nut.
2 – I had, until very recently, one of these pants-pissing asswipes as a Facebook friend. He is an atheist who inexplicably refers to Obama as “the anti-christ” and who is a) deeply racist, and b) absolutely convinced the world is going to end soon. He’s also, unsurprisingly, a gun nut.
This led me to investigate some gun nut pages on FB. And, again, unsurprisingly, they’re cesspits of puke-inducing racism (and, unsurprisingly, homophobia and misogyny).
For the record, I’m a cracker gun owner. There’s a world of difference between me (and anuran) and gun nuts like these examples. I’m not for banning, either, but am for heavy (some say extreme), loopholeless restriction.
Wait. How much does 50 rounds of Glock ammo weigh?
Add the weight of the ammo to the weight of the gun and you may find that your accuracy is diminished.
Maybe the dude just wanted to lift weights. All of his intelligence is in his biceps.
@Christopher #52
Yes, because your job totally requires you to go to places where crimes have been reported and try to catch the potentially armed suspect that doesn’t want to be caught, doesn’t it? Don’t talk shite. Cops have to face far greater dangers than the rest of us on a daily basis because that’s their job. They are also, by definition, not civilians. They are trained to use their firearms and are expected to put themselves in dangerous situations in order to defend the public. Your argument is idiotic at best.
That is false.
The UK is replacing Browning Hi-Power pistols with Glocks. The reason is due to cost, weight, and an increased magazine size.
If they were worried about accidental discharge when holstering/unholstering their sidearm, they would have stayed with the Browning: it has a safety lever that must be disengaged to fire while the Glock only has internal safeties so you only need to pull the trigger. This has caused Glock-leg for many people when they accidently shoot themselves because they get their shirt caught in the trigger guard while holstering.
In short, your example supports the total opposite of what you intended it to.
If you watch the video, the guns are waving around all over the place when he was firing.
Seconded. Perhaps it’s my “anti-privilege” talking, but I’m actually a little surprised by the suggestion that he thinks there are people who don’t. Is he not aware of the state of “protect and serve” around here?
Then take it up with the MoD. Quite honestly, I trust them more than I trust you.
And you have not explained why you keep saying these stupid things. Do you not actually know why say them ? Or do you just not care ? Either way, you should stop. It is making your look a total idiot, and dishonest as well. I doubt that is your intention, so why do it ?
let me introduce you to a little something I like to call cum hoc ergo propter hoc
@Illuminata #59
I’m English and we don’t really have gun nuts… the closest we have are posh people who like shooting pheasants. But from what I’ve seen of US gun culture, gun nuts tend to be Republicans, and Republicans tend to be racist. And people I’ve seen being pro-gun on the internet tend to confirm this. So, from an anecdotal perspective only, I’d say they correlate, yes.
I am. Everytime a gun is stored, it should be stored properly. No loaded weapon should ever be left alone, at home or at the range. They should be unload and open before being left alone. Funny how gun nuts don’t get that simple safety consideration.
The claim the US has been seeing a decrease in violent crime because there has been an increase in gun-ownership is disproved by looking at the city of New York. New York has seen a dramatic decrease in violent crime, and yet has some of the toughest rules on gun ownership in the US. Yet that would not be what you would expect to see if increased gun-ownership was the cause. The areas that saw a decrease in violent crime would correlate with areas that saw an increase in gun-ownership. Yet that is not what is seen.
Cite please.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-20978842
So their reasons are:
* parts availability
* no safety therefore quicker to get the first shot off
* reliability in a range of conditions
Where the hell are you getting the idea that they were chosen because there was less chance of accidental discharge? If that were even a criteria, glocks would have been thrown out of the first round.
Again, how is a locked, yet loaded and assembled, gun less safe than a locked unloaded one?
Matt Penfold #58 I guess you were not following the Dorner news in California, your beloved vaunted trained policemen put more that 100 rounds point blank into a pickup using fully automatic weapons and couldn’t kill the 77 yo lady delivering newspapers or her unarmed fortiesh companion.
Anyone who owns 2 glocks should only be able to buy 50 round drum magazines for it, they are a lot safer
An important concept in safety is understanding relative risk.
In the US a significant number of children are killed each year when they play with an unsecured handgun owned by a parent. Many more are injured. The number of people who’s are saved from being killed or injured by having a gun the house is not large. It is smaller than the number of children killed or injured. Thus pragmatism should dictate that guns are kept secure.
I’m curious if the anti-control people here have a problem with the proposed universal background checks.
You got numbers to back these assertions or are you pulling them from the same place you got the “Glocks are safer than Brownings” line?
@Christopher
It sure as hell isn’t you, is it? As a civilian you have the luxury of putting your head down and getting the fuck out of there. You are not Rambo, trying to play the hero is far more likely to get you killed than anything else. You also fail to take into account that these measures will be applied to all guns, thus making it extremely difficult for criminals to get hold of anything more powerful than the average civilian, so at worst you will be evenly matched.
Again, stop talking shite.
[Citation needed]. Opinion =/= evidence.
Since when did “civilian” specifically referr to non-military personell?
“ci·vil·ian (s-vlyn)
n.
1. A person following the pursuits of civil life, especially one who is not an active member of the military, the police, or a belligerent group.
2. A person who does not belong to a particular group or engage in a particular activity.
3. A specialist in Roman or civil law.”
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/civilian
[Citation needed]
Whether or not they are legally required to, they are expected to as part of their job. Confronting criminals is dangerous. They are required to confront criminals. You are not. They are trained. You are not. You do not confront dangerous people every day as part of your regular job.
You’re a bot, aren’t you.
OMFFSM Christopher, a loaded gun is always more dangerous than an unloaded one. Every branch of the military and I would hope most cops are taught that very, very simple idea. Combat deployed Marines don’t keep loaded fucking rifles just lying around, so do you really think your home is so much more dangerous it is worth the risk?
Or, to put it simply, when you pull the gun out of the cabinet, you are not at that point holding it in the correct firing position. That is to say, it could and sometimes does leed to accidental discharge.
This reminds me of the argument I had with a very stupid cousin of mine. He, an extremely unhealthy middle aged man, claimed he could assemble and fire a gun at an intruder after magically detecting said intruder. He also insisted that we live in some scary nightmare land where homes are constantly invaded.
Your own argument – violent crime is down – means we don’t live in a society that needs so many “defensive” weapons. Especially since the likely cause was the ban of leaded gasoline, not more guns.
And just for a fun story: my Marine buddy the other day was in some random argument with a stranger who thought he should pull a gun in a verbal confrontation. He probably suffered no mental illness and most likely was what the NRA considers a “responsible” gun owner. Fuck that noise, no one should be capable of carrying such a psychological and dangerous crutch around in public.
Seriously? He doesn’t see how background checks would have an effect on crime?
With that line, I’m done. It’s six o’clock here and I need to go home. I will check in tomorrow to see what new cop-bashing and other stupidity Christopher has come out with. ‘Night all.
I’m sure something like this has been posted before…
But guns in the homes increase the danger of dying by homicide or suicide of those in the homes. Also the risks of owning a gun outweigh the benefits.
From the abstract( the study itself is behind a paywall) of the second link: “There is compelling evidence that a gun in the home is a risk factor for intimidation and for killing women in their homes. On the benefit side, there are fewer studies, and there is no credible evidence of a deterrent effect of firearms or that a gun in the home reduces the likelihood or severity of injury during an altercation or break-in.”
Evidence suggests that owning a gun places the owner, or the people the owner lives with, in greater danger.
For anyone else confused why people cross the street to avoid cops:
And, Serious Trigger Warning:
The death of Kelly Thomas
if only Thomas had a gun to protect him from the government! All would be well!
Workplace homicides:
http://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/cfoi/osar0016_1.png
LAPD can’t hit a broad side of a barn:
http://www.ocregister.com/articles/police-494979-people-officers.html
NYPD cant’ hit a broad side of a barn:
http://www.copblock.org/19960/nypd-the-gang-that-cant-shoot-straight/
Civilian: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian
And how would it? If someone is intent on committing a crime but is not yet a prohibited person, they can still buy a gun. If they are a prohibited person, they would no longer be able to buy a private party gun legally. But they could still buy it illegally: straw purchases and black market arms still supply prohibited persons in states that already have universal background checks. Or do you think that the black market doesn’t exist?
I see Christopher questioning if an unloaded gun is actually safer than a loaded gun and I flash back on the rules about guns that he drilled into all of his children.
1) If someone hands you a gun, you check to see if it is loaded or not and if the safety is on or off.
2) Always keep the gun pointed down.
3) Never aim a gun at a person unless your purpose is to shoot.
Why the fuck would he have drilled this into us if a loaded gun is not as dangerous as an unloaded gun.
because chris says so. *jazzhands*
Reading fail.
How is a locked, but loaded and assembled, gun less safe than a locked, unloaded, dissambled gun?
Oh and the rules are:
1. Treat all guns as loaded, especially the ones you think aren’t
2. Never point a gun at something you don’t want shot
3. Keep your finger off the trigger until your target is lined up and you are ready to fire
4. Be aware of your target and your backstop: you are responsible for all rounds until they come to a stop.
@Christopher
Cops face more danger by virtue of being cops. While there are many issues with individuals in the police forces around the country and other institutionalized issues, such as often poor training and racism, you cannot seriously think they are the same as normal civilians? They are a paramilitary governmental force whose job involves being a target for violence, even when not at the scene of crimes.
Secondly, you seem to be parroting the wonderful idea that more fire will prevent fires. Well regulated guns, such as a national database of arms dealers and those who aren’t allowed to buy guns or perhaps allowing the ATF to actually bust the 1% of dealers who sell 80% of illegally owned guns would certainly help. Personally I think banning all concealed carry is a good idea, but even most people here probably don’t agree with me on that one. Concealed carry gives you too much of an excuse to draw your deadly weapon in frivolous situations or to overreact to non lethal situations.
Most importantly, no one is going to take your existing guns. Calm the fuck down. Most of the regulations proposed are simply to enable actual enforcement of existing laws and possibly study the culture for future regulations. In my opinion simply banning gun ads would help a great deal by reducing the gun obsession over time.
There’s one annoying archetype of gun nut troll I often see: The feigned/token responsible gun owner who pretends that responsible gun owners are the only kind of gun owners. I’ve seen a rare example or two of gun owners who convinced me of their sincerity by doing some things I would expect of a responsible gun owner: Denounce other gun owners for acting irresponsibly in handling their guns, denounce unrealistic self-defense fantasies and knee-jerk assertions that a gun owner would have easily defused a mass shooting despite conditions or fog of war, recognize that some people just aren’t mentally or emotionally equipped to handle a firearm.
Right now, it looks to me that paranoid, hot-headed, short-sighted, irresponsible gun owners are the ones with the political clout. They’re the ones setting themselves up as the models of gun culture. That’s what I find scary. As I see it, gun control laws and such should exist to make responsibility part of owning a gun largely because I’m not seeing strong cultural forces doing it.
On another note, what does the random graph Christopher linked to mean? That was a break down of raw numbers of shootings. Retail and gov jobs outnumber the rest, so would be expected to outnumber in any statistic like that. There are more retail workers so they will have the most X, where X is anything not directly correlated to the job.
those things look like some kind of movie prop guns and that video is an infomercial or a demo ad. yes it is a waste of money and most of what the NRA is about anymore is a trade organization more interested in the gun trade from both the large dealers/stores and manufacturers and the small individual small dealer license holders then gun sport and safety.
having guns in the home just gives the bugler something else to take that is quick and easy to turn in to cash . They ain’t going to come bursting in the front door while you are home awake.
you would be better off keeping a pack of Schnauzers or terriers if you are worried about home invasion or something.
uncle frogy
Sorry I’m more* with Kagin on this one. We don’t need more gun control so much as we need more gun-nut controls.
(*He didn’t mention what he thinks can resolve the problem, just that gun controls haven’t and won’t. I think the focus on guns either way is a symptom of the real problem that needs to be resolved; our society is obsessed with violence as a solution.)
Cops are not targets for violence except in the very rare case because everyone knows that if you target a cop for violence, every other cop will drop all their other duties to hunt you down and burn you to the ground. When a liquor store worker gets shot you don’t see a million dollar bounty and every cop within a 100mi put on all their mall ninja gear.
Analogy fail: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_burn#Back_burning
Cite
Thank you for this excellent example for very good reasons to institute increased gun control regulations. So many workplace shootings committed by all of the “responsible” gun owners we keep hearing about.
It’s quite obvious that there are problems within the LAPD and have been for some time. These issues within one city’s police department cannot be inferred to exist within all police departments. It is also not an argument for lack of civilian gun control measures.
Now your just being dishonest again. This is a very definition within a highly specified area of law.
@nakarti
Gun control has had its issues, but only because it can’t be enforced. See
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/02/atf-gun-laws-nra
Unless you live in an area with little to no civilian firearm ownership.
http://www.davekopel.com/2A/LawRev/LawyersGunsBurglars.htm
@Christopher
I’m sorry, you seem to have missed the point of my fire analogy. I have in fact heard of such tactics for forrest fires, but it isn’t applicable to human lives. The analogous tactic for humans would be some sort of purge of “undesirables” which I refuse to give an example of because Godwin. You seem to envision a Mad Max dystopia where it is every person for themselves in a universal shootout.
Look, even gun nuts have already agreed to some level of arms regulations. Why is it so important that you are allowed to have one specific set when you already agreed to give up another set?
For the cite, I was off by some amount. http://www.tucsonsentinel.com/nationworld/report/021113_atf_crippled/atf-crippled-by-weak-laws-paltry-budgets/
But the point remains. Gun control has had problems because we cannot enforce the existing regulations. If a law was pointless because criminals would break it, why have any laws?
As I said to my cousin I say to you – anecdotal evidence is useless. In a country of 300,000,000 people there are going to be some instances of almost anything you can imagine. The argument is not about absolutes, but about preventing as much harm as possible.
Hi, Christopher!
I live in an area with little to no civilian firearm ownership, and we still find ways to deal with the occasional gun-toting asshole who thinks might makes right just fine.
Actually, the entire argument has been sidetracked. At no point did Christopher or any anti-regulation person provide any reasons at all for the ownership of large capacity magazines or military style weaponry. Even the quite poorly constructed self defense arguments don’t hold up for weapon type. What is wrong with a shotgun for home defense? Where do you go on your daily routine to need a gun with you all the time? Why do you need to carry constantly while the rest of America doesn’t and still ain’t dead yet?
You’re forgetting (or would I say omitting?) the violent situations cops are required to get into as part of their jobs.
So, Christopher, your argument for why you need a gun is that you might have to defend yourself from the NYPD?
Such as?
SOP these days seems to be avoid such situations at all costs: if someone is shooting something up, set up a perimeter, wait until you hear them blow their brains out, wait some more, then send in a robot.
The most dangerous violent situations cops are sent into are domestic disputes. Granted, these are highly dangerous, volitile situations, but the cops face much less danger in the same situation than the non-cops that are already embroiled in it.
We have the same reasons to own those tools as cops do.
No my argument is that I have the same need for a gun as a cop does and should have access to equally effective hardware as they do.
logicpriest #101 because many folks are not amused by people that think “military style” is evil. Painting a stock black does not make a bullet magically more accurate even if you read it in the chicago tribune. Here is an example of the meme we see. A sling shot is okay but an assault sling shot is not.
“tools”. It’s cute when a gun nut teettering on the brink of a racist diatribe calls weapons that exist only for the destruction of life “tools”. As if we don’t notice the chickenshit couching.
Its also cute when a gun nut tries to pretend that the militarization of the police hasn’t been anything but a catastrophic disaster . . . for everyone who isn’t a cop, of course.
The sickness and delusions are strong with this one.
Chris I live in an area that has gone through transition from more gang and drug activity to seemingly less.
I kept a pack of dogs and there was no way and no time I could have been surprised with anyone coming into my yard at all.ever.
they were always loaded and ready one a mixed bull terrier inside cause he could get over the fence faster than I could open the gate. the other two stayed outside I have seen them surround people who came to the door not making very much noise more like stalking them.
They even woke me up to trouble out in the street once in a while.
so unless you are standing up with your gun in your hand you will be surprised no probably shocked then overwhelmed before you can think.
My dogs were a very friendly (to me) deterrent to being disturbed or burgled. They also could not be stolen and sold for dope money or used in any mass killing unless it was rats you were after.
uncle frogy
A captive bolt pistol only exists for the destruction of life, yet it is a tool.
Pesticides only exist for the destruction of life, yet they are tools.
Mouse traps only exist for the destriction of life, yet they are tools.
And unlike captive bolt pistols, pesticides, and traps, guns are used for more than just the destruction of life.
And where the fuck do you get off insuinating that I’m a racist?
A gun is no the end all be all of home security. One should have a layered security system and dogs are great additions (unless you live in the UK where you can go to jail for your dog biting a burgler). Guns are for when the locked door didn’t stop them, the dogs didn’t stop them, and the blaring alarm didn’t stop them.
Chris, pistols and assault rifles are tools for killing human life. They are tools which make killing humans easy. Even accidentally. They are tools that are easily concealed and drawn in arguments that shouldn’t end in death. They are tools used to intimidate family and strangers. They are tools used to fucking end lives for no reason. First justify murder, then get back to us on your needing all teh gunz.
@broboxley
Military style not military colored. Weapons with high capacity magazines and high rates of semi-auto fire. Weapons built for urban combat with short barrels and super light stocks. Weapons like the AR 15 and AK variants. Weapons with rails for tactical gear. Weapons that are easy to use to kill a lot of people. Don’t play dumb.
Besides, I am against pistols more than assault rifles. Mass shootings are admittedly rare, but people shoot family members and lovers and strangers in arguments all the time with pistols.
I didn’t, which you’d know if reading comprehension ws compatible with gun nuttery, which we know isn’t.
Allow me to repeat myself: “teettering on the brink of a racist diatribe” <— that means, what you said prior was leading me to assume that a racist diatribe was forthcoming.
Why? because of amazingly dipshitty comments like this: "No my argument is that I have the same need for a gun as a cop does and should have access to equally effective hardware as they do."
Because, WHO do cops mainly use their ridiculous militarized weapons against? Whether or not they "deserve it? Whether or not they are actually the victims or not? Etc.
And, to that end, who are YOU so afraid of that you (apparently) geniuinely believe you need tear gas to protect yourself?
So, to recap, I didn't call you a racist. I essentially said you're using racist dogwhistles.
Fuck it, Christopher. Go live in a Somali fortress. You seem to think we live in some kind of feudal kingdom with constant Viking raids, though I would suspect you imagine rather more “urban” vikings.
Interesting, so, to you human life is at the same level of importance as vermin and parasites?
And, praytell, what is the use of a gun outseid killing things?
Wait – i know, killing clay pidgeons! Which, of course, requires an assault rifle.
EXACTLY. Thank you.
“when the locked door didn’t stop them, the dogs didn’t stop them, and the blaring alarm didn’t stop them.”
then I think I’m boned guns or not maybe I should change into the Hulk and drop the disguise.
your kidding right if “THEY” are making that much noise and are that determined I’m am out the back door even a bear will run when it makes sense. Let the ass holes have the fuckin stuff that’s why I have insurance. get real
uncle frogy
Nah, where I live they will be cracker crackheads.
Wow, project much.
Why do cops need tear gas? They only seem to use it to assult peaceful protests or to incenerate people who they don’t want to get to trial.
What threats do cops have that 1) requires weapontry unavailable to the average non-prohibited person and 2) are not shared by non-cops in their jurisdiction?
Ok, Christopher, I understand there are issues with police abuse. But the response is accountability, not open warfare. Your argument there seems to be against cops having teargas, which I am not entirely opposed to.
But once more you are deflecting. Why do you need assault rifles, pistols and large magazines? Who are you so afraid is going to storm your home?
Human life that is trying to kill me is at a lower level of importance than vermin and parisites.
Precision shooting is an excelent trainer of the mind and is quite enjoyable in its own right.
“A strong body makes the mind strong. As to the species of exercise, I advise the gun. While this gives a moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprize, and independance to the mind. Games played with the ball and others of that nature, are too violent for the body and stamp no character on the mind. Let your gun therefore be the constant companion of your walks.” –Jefferson
those 2 are exactly the same rate of fire as a ruger 10/22, winchester repeater and mini14’s with no advantage what soever. You are leveraging your ignorance, military color is the only difference. Both items are a tube that fires a projectile with a single trigger pull. Each as deadly as the other and all the howling about look and feel will not change the facts.
Ok, so Christopher holds human life in contempt and has no use for the social order. Rather than try to affect change on the things he dislikes, he has decided to live out a dystopian fantasy world where he can and will shoot any and all perceived threats. Since this is the case, logical argument appears to be useless.
But I will try anyways.
Christopher, when are you ok with killing a human being? If they approach your car? If they punch you? Or only if they, too have a gun? Would you kill any trespasser, despite their intentions? Or, as in many southern states laws, would you kill your lover out of jealousy? It was legal until the 90s in North Carolina, and it is still a way to drop to a lower sentence.
I’m not advocating open warfare against cops. I just don’t why they should be entitled to a different class of arms than any other non-prohibited person.
For the same reasons cops do.
If everything has gone to shit enough that you are in a gun fight, you will want as many bullets as you can get before reloading. You are going to want a light weight weapon (less fatique) that is as compact as possible (higher manuverability) can defeat soft body armor (no pistols or shotguns) and has good ergonomics for more natural aiming of follow up shots. Modern firearms (post WWII) are designed with these factors in mind and are thus a better option to have. Hence why cops have replaced or supplimented their shotguns with AR-15s.
In the same situations that my state is OK with it:
Though I am a bit uneasy with #4, but can’t think of a better wording that would legalize the good edge cases but not the bad ones.
Well, broboxley, I am not sure who is showing ignorance here. You are over simplifying all weapons into a few statistics or basic physics, yet I am sure you wouldn’t want people casually owning the a grenade launcher, despite it being a “tube that fires a projectile with a single trigger pull.”
If you don’t understand the difference between a hunting rifle, which are usually small mag and relatively low rate of fire, and an assault rifle with the ability to accept large magazines and fire as fast as you can pull the trigger, then you are very ignorant indeed. Why you bring up the mini 14, a fucking assault rifle as an example against assault rifles I don’t know.
Besides, perhaps the ban should include your listed rifles, if they have a certain fire rate. But assault rifles are more than just rate of fire. Pistol grips and short barrels with tactical rails are all features that are unnecessary on civilian arms. If you think those are merely cosmetic factors, then I welcome you to do some research on why the military adopted such features, if not for effectiveness in combat. To be honest, what the hell do civilians need with any magazine fed rifle or gun?
If a hunting rifle can easily be modified into an assault rifle, then it should probably be regulated as well.
Following is scatter rant trying to address some comments above.
“let me introduce you to a little something I like to call cum hoc ergo propter hoc”
I did not mean for you to think I was arguing that increased gun ownership lead to that decline. I was simply stating that gun violence is declining in spite of higher gun ownership. If you have children or know there will be children in your home, locking them up is common sense.
You cannot say that NY is safer today directly because of gun control. You know there are many things that were done to reduce crime there. Along that same vine I could point to Chicago which also has high gun crime and strict gun laws.
I have 4 siblings in law enforcement all working in a county with highly regarded training and service record. Even they only qualify with a firearm once a year.
As for the people who can’t understand why people need standard capacity magazines, I have the following to say. You say that a trained shooter just needs a handful of bullets. Well recently I read of a pregnant woman who shot an intruder 6 times and the guy ran away. Later found at a hospital, where he will be treated then taken into the justice system. What if there were multiple intruders? I don’t have any expectation that the government local or federal will start a war with the people. Not in my lifetime. But think about how many times we have seen here at pharyngula police and military that abuse their power. Think about the corrupt police that have carried out organized crime in our country. That is part of the reason you can’t just give away your right to bear arms. You never know if you might need it. And if that is a responsibility you can’t handle, then don’t buy a gun. Our first president called firearms “liberty’s teeth.” Most killing every year involving guns comes from suicide and gang violence. Take care of that first because gun laws are not going to stop gangbangers and people that want to kill themselves.
Having a super large magazine like the one in the video above is mainly just for show. It might have some use in a machine gun (which are already illegal) and more likely just a fun way to waste ammunition down a range.
Stop misusing the term assault rifles. Assault rifles are fully automatic and strictly controlled by NFA. Any semiautomatic rifle can be used to hunted. I have a friend who hunts wild boar with .223 semi-auto (mini-14, ar-15, etc.)
That is completely true. Oh, wait. I meant false.
It is true that a piece of draft legislation proposed by the Welsh assembly included no defence if a dog the owner knew or suspected to be dangerous bit a burglar. Consultation on the legislation ends in March.
It is also true that a burglar thought about suing the police because one of their dogs bit his ear off.
Out of interest, you know that the last time 30000 British were killed with firearms in a year was during WWII? Why is our gun death rate 40 times lower than that in the US?
Alright Christopher, then it comes to this: are you ok with anyone, including these imagined villains of yours, having all the firepower? Are you ok with the risk of “as many bullets as you can” piercing walls and killing bystanders or even family members? Are you ok with the risk a loaded gun carries when not being used somewhere safe?
Are you ok with the risks inherent in allowing almost anyone to be constantly armed on the extremely rare possibility you will be besieged by an evil SWAT team? And please don’t claim that you could have stopped X mass murder, because it doesn’t happen.
The rest of us aren’t ok with anyone carrying a gun anywhere. We aren’t ok with untrained people with fantasies of vigilanti justice owning high ROF guns meant solely for killing humans. We aren’t ok with armed posses “guarding” our schools or teachers being forced to keep loaded guns in a room full of children. If you think the risks are worth the negligible chance of reward, fine. But this is a democracy, and it increasingly seems like most of us don’t like those odds.
Are you going to ignore the democratic decree when it comes down? Will you fight back and thus invalidate democracy in favor of your personal autocracy?
Assault Weapon is a distinct legal term in the United States. It doesn’t matter what a given agency calls assault rifles. Language is about communicating, so don’t be an idiot. You know what people mean.
And if any semi auto or heaven forbid bolt action can be used to hunt, why do you need one that can empty a 30 round mag in a few seconds? That seems like a lot of stray rounds going who knows where.
Why do you have any deaths due to firearms when they are all banned?
Why do you have a greater murder rate than Switzerland or Norway (the two highest gun owning states in western europe)?
Why does Mexico have a much larger homicide rate than the US despite having an agressive gun ban?
It’s almost like homicide rates and civilian gun ownership rates aren’t correlated…
@34 Matt Penfold
This strikes me as a disingenuous argument. You propose a situation that is clearly useless for home defense, ignoring the fact that there are other ways of keeping it out of reach of kids without disassembling it.
@52 Christopher
I sincerely hope you are only holding this position out of some sort of devil’s advocate or argumentum absurdum ploy.
We are not exposed to the same threat: it’s the job of the police officer to actively involve themselves in that shit. The magnitude and especially frequency of the threat facing the cop is much higher than that facing you or I. Remember that silly ad from the NRA recently? This is much the same reason Barak Obama’s kids get bodyguards while other schoolkids go without.
Also, cops usually aren’t considered civilians, at least not while on duty.
@57 twosheds1
Come on now, measuring the worth of a man (or denigrating him) by his penis is as gendered and unnecessary as all the more common bullshit directed at women.
@67 Christopher
Snark + bullshit.
@84 Christopher
And from the very next line: “In US parlance, a civilian is also considered one not on active duty in the armed services or not on a police or firefighting force.”
Odd how you missed that.
No one is saying that background checks alone are enough to end gun crime or gun purchase; instead, it is one of many avenues of control, all of which contribute to the end goal.
There is no single ban or restriction that can end this shit all by itself, change is incremental.
I wouldn’t want to trade my liberty for (false) security because some people are uncomfortable with the of people owning guns of their choice around them.
How will these laws disarm the villains? Look at Mexico, total gun ban (you can go to prison for have a single round of ammunition), yet the villians somehow seem to aquire full auto machineguns and all the ammunition they need to launch an actual war against the cops.
Sure it does. The news media just rarely reports it outside the home market:
http://www.kgw.com/news/Clackamas-man-armed-confronts-mall-shooter-183593571.html
The good thing about mass shooters is that they hole up and blow their brains out as soon as they meet some sort of resistance.
I know, put a “gun free zone” in the entrance to the school. That will stop all guns from getting on campus and children will never be threatened again. Ooooh, I know, lets make murder illegal, then it will never happen again.
I truly fear the real democratic decree that will come down if any sort of gun legislation passes: democrats will be hammered like 1994 and we will be stuck with the regressive policies of the Repubs.
You want a real democratic decree: http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/nics/reports
Americans make 9-14 million gun tranactions a year. Those don’t include private party sales in most states and can include more than one gun per transaction. A huge portion of this country are gun owners and will not take kindly to having their rights abridged. Unless you think it is ok for a slight majority to vote to fuck with a large minority (tyranny of the masses)…
Since the total number of “civilians” that will ever encounter a fire far exceeds the total number of firefighters, why do we even have firefighters?
Just make sure everybody has one of each type of fire extinguisher, a good length of high-pressure fire hose, a solid wrench to use on fire hydrants, and a fire hatchet. Okay, so some people might not be as handy with the equipment as others, and there are bound to be accidents involving wrenches and/or axes, but I’m sure the reduction in overall fire damage that is sure to come of this would far outweigh the negatives.
I mean, if firefighters are supposed to be all that effective, why are there still so many fires in the first place?
@Holms 133: Well said. Generally, a major argument used in the case against police security is the existence of clauses that relieve police from liability for failing to protect someone from crime (no cite on this, I could be completely wrong)
@logicpriest 130;131: Your argument on “eveyone having that kind of firepower” is a bit moot, as this is already the case. Statistics hold that almost all shooting in crime use semi-automatic weapons.
RE: your argument on assault weapons: The proposed redefinition of an assault weapon is any weapon that has one of the following traits: Pistol Grip; Detachable Magazine; Forward Grip (a grip surface past the action of the weapon, i.e. where the pin meets the primer), or a high capacity magazine (detachable or not). This would also ban by name pretty much every weapon seen in a Call of Duty game. These weapons are FUNCTIONALLY identical to most semi-automatic hunting rifles. The majority of bolt-action hunting rifles would fall into the layman’s term of a sniper’s rifle: a highly accurate scoped rifle in a large caliber designed to be effective at long (400-800 m) range. Might as well just ban hunting at that point.
My personal stance on the issue is that 1) we need enforcement of existing laws. Gross negligence of several state agencies means that the NICS system (where all background checks occur) is severely outdated, and that needs to stop immediately. 2) Almost every suggestion from the President is good, except for the cosmetic clauses in the AWB. My preferred remedy would be a licensing and tracking system to allow people with good records and proven (documented) training more leeway in what they can own. Combine this with some tax stamps and whatnot. 3) Dissolve the NRA. Seriously, fuck those guys.
Please let me know if anything I said was horribly dumb or contradictory
Why do civilians need fire extinguishers when we have professional fire fighters?
Why do civilians need high capacity sprinkler systems, shouldn’t only professional fire fighters have that?
Why should civilians be allowed to own firetrucks just like the state agencies?
Because Britain is a more violent society than either Switzerland or Norway. What do you suppose would happen if violent Brits had more access to guns?
Our homicide rate is 20% of that in the US, despite violent crime being at least as prevelant (more common by some measures).
Because violent Mexican criminal cartels export drugs to the US in return for readily available guns (often legal bought in the US) thereby circumventing any meaningful firearm control?
Mexican firearm deaths are excessively high in no small part because the legitimate controls have not been effective. There is no short supply of guns in Mexico.
The NRA has over 4 million paying members. Show me any other special interest group that is supported by more individuals. Like it or not, the NRA is democracy in action.
@Christopher (#139):
If nothing else, I hope the point gave your hair a nice part as it sailed over your head.
It has a strong membership, but it is also paid for in no small part by the firearms industry. Who actually sets the agenda?
Most major gun violence in Mexico is committed using full auto weapons. Those did not come from the US.
http://www.factcheck.org/2009/04/counting-mexicos-guns/
If mexican drug cartels can get all the guns they want, why wouldn’t they start dealing in guns along with coke, heroin, and meth if the US banned guns like it has banned drugs?
Diddums, your unexamined white privilege doesn’t change reality.
But, according to you, we live in a testerically dangerous world where military weapons in non-warzones handled by non-military personnel is required! And you should have those same “tools”.
You’d have to ask those that are arming local police better than our soldiers abroad. But, you realize of course that this also questions why YOU need the “tools” that police have, as you said you do.
++
Ah, of course. Naturally, the only moral murder is the one YOU commit.
Completely agreed. As I said above – I am a gun owner. Just not the ridiculously testerical, overcompensating for my paranoid fantasies kind.
BULLSHIT. Ever been to a red light / generally rough part of a city late at night? No one in those areas likes police presence; all it takes is a bit too much alcohol, and the anti-police sentiment will very often rise to the surface.
You even note that it is an analogy, but take it as if it was literal. Pure anal facetiousness.
Weasel worded anecdotal evidence.
Good point, except for the fact that it is pure bullshit, as has been explained to you several times.
Oh, but you decided to ‘refute’ them with idiocy, cool.
“I value human life above all things except when I don’t.”
K then.
Again… because they are required to handle that shit, that’s their job, but I see you still hold to the idea of the ‘urban warfare’ city life, still trying to pretend that you have the same chance of facing that situation as the police.
Fucking stupid.
No one has claimed, in this thread at least, that gun control will completely eliminate all gun crime. Instead, we are saying that such crime will be reduced. To what degree, I’m not sure personally, but no one is saying 100%. Don’t try to pretend that we are.
The point has already been made several times in this thread: gun control is as much about gun culture as it is about the guns themselves. You’ll note many comments earlier in this thread mentioning things such as ‘fetishisation’, before shit got derailed by dishonest arguments coming from, mainly, you.
The membership.
During the last gun ban, firearm companies like Ruger and Smith and Wesson supported the ban and got the NRA to hold back a bit. Those companies got hammered by gun owners and only recovered when they retreated from their previous position. Recently the sagas of Zumbo and the PA Eastern Sports Show have showed that the rank and file gun owners will retaliate against any part of the firearms industry that supports any sort of assult rifle ban, and will retaliate effectively. The firearms industry dares not cross their civilian customers any more and that is felt within the NRA headquarters.
@Christopher 141: My issues with the NRA is the fact that it has been the single biggest impediment to ENFORCING the existing laws. They’re intransigent on ANY sort of enforcement that would cull issues, holding to slippery slope arguments and UN-gonna-take-our-guns rhetoric.
@Bernard 140: This is aided by the fact that the Cartels in current operation are largely hiring former military and special forces from Central and South America, who tend to bring large quantities of Military-Grade hardware, mostly select-fire AKs and HK G3 clones, commonly seen in use in these militaries. US style AR models are a bit rarer, but still available on all sides of the border.
Seeing as I haven’t commented on the video: This guy is a fucking idiot. Shooting two glocks that probably now weigh > 10lbs a piece like an overweight gangster is just plain stupid. I really don’t get it. I was a 249 gunner in the Army, and cyclic loses it’s appeal rapidly when you have to clean the damn thing. Suppressors/Silencers/et al are neat as hell, and I can understand the appeal there (less need for ear protection while shooting) and also why buying one requires selling your soul to the ATF.
Oh sure. Except that the vast majority of gun owners are not against any of the controls or restrictions that the NRA is against. But hey, don’t let reality in. That would only ruin your stupid argument!
My god, you are getting increasingly more dipshitty with each comment. Tell me, did you actually rehearse these questions in your head and STILL somehow decided that they made any sense or had any relevance what so fucking ever? Seriously?
Well, let’s think real hard about this. Why do I need a fire extinguisher? When apparently EVERYONE IN THE WORLD has professional fire fighters just waiting to save them! Gee, I wonder. Clearly, there’s no such thing as small fires. We should call the fire department every time there’s an errant spark.
Why do office buildings need high capacity sprinkler systems when really they should just let the building burn down and endanger these freely available professional fire fighters for funsies?
And that last one is just so incredibly stupid I see no reason to mock it. It stand on its own.
++
Oh, Bernard. There you go injecting reality into chris’ paranoid fantasies again!
Yeah, I find many of the same faults with them as you which is why I am not a member. But they are an effective voice for their membership. I wish the rest of the bill of rights had an equally effective lobbying group.
RobPowell #148, the mook in the video would have fun trying to empty those clips. Snail Drum springs are notoriously noted for causing jamming.
@134 Alex B
But you already have made that trade, or are you arguing that people should legally be permitted to own field guns, tanks, gunships, aircraft carriers… nukes? Obviously not, hence you accept the basic idea that people’s weapon ownership can and in fact should be restricted.
The only point on which we differ is where exactly the line should be drawn.
@136 Christopher
One might speculate that the mistake made by Mexico was taking the step from gun control to total gun ban. Much like prohibition immediately permitted massive profiteering by the criminal world, so too did their gun policy.
Which is why I for one am not arguing for a total gun ban, nor am I going to compare two situations to one another when they are clearly not analogous. That would be your penchant for dishonest argument showing again.
And what about the Aurora shooting? Oh, would you look at that:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_Colorado
It occurred in a state that permits concealed carry. People still got shot to shit. Sometimes guns can work out in favour of the gun utopia touted by you NRA types; usually it doesn’t. Funny that you note the unequal reporting of such ‘gun success’ stories, when you yourself fail to acknowledge the ‘gun fail’ stories. Understandable I suppose the Aurora shooting thing only made international news; how could you have noticed???
You are now officially a fuckhead.
Who would buy them except criminals?
Anyway, my point was that in a violent society such as in Britain, the restriction of firearms does seem to affect murder rates. At the very least it affects the rate of deaths by firearm.
UNODC thinks the supply of guns to Mexico from the US is very significant.
The “1911” in BigDaddyHoffman1911’s moniker is a reference to a gun, by the way. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M1911_pistol tells more, but the short version is the M1911 was the pistol for a long time.
So he’s not just bragging about his size and his fatherhood, he’s referencing the gun that was the model for the ones he’s waving around.
Yeah, the sunglasses are dumb.
The magazines are also dumb. Fully loaded, they’d weigh a lot and damage the gun. If you need that much ammo, carry it in a bandolier of regular magazines and learn to do quick changes.
Dual wielding, with a gun in each hand, is dumb. You can’t sight, you can’t aim, and you are off balance. The heavy magazines just make it worse.
This video is so bad that I have to wonder how much of it is meant as humor. The guy is joking a bit, I know, but he paid money for those magazines.
I didn’t do a count, but I am pretty sure he didn’t have a full load in that final firing sequence. For one thing, he’d have had trouble holding up the guns.
—
The NRA is based on a bad misunderstanding of the Second Amendment, and is in the business of keeping itself in business.
The theater was a gun free zone. Licensed concealed carriers were banned from carrying in the theater. For some reason the killer didn’t heed the “gun free zone” signs….
So too is any organised opposition to the NRA.
Show me any gun control group with more individual paying members than the NRA. Hell show me such a group that has at least an order magnitude less members than the NRA (over ~425k paying members).
Clearly, if only EVERYONE in Aurora was armed then EVERYONE would be alive and happy to this very day.
John Wayne movies tell us that the good guys always win gun fights, so that’s reality, right?
Democratic Party, HTH
“…If you can’t hit center mass on a human in a self defence situation within ten shots…”
Do an informal survey of the police and security personnel you encounter on a regular basis. You’ll perhaps be surprised how many of them have extended capacity magazines – magazines that were issued as a matter of departmental policy.
The Democratic Party is not a single issue gun control organization. If they are seen to be, they will be thrashed next election like they were in 1994.
Even if you concidered the Dems to be a gun control organization, they only had ~500k individuals give them money. NRA still has them beat by a longshot.
Let me get this straight…
1. “Civilians” deserve to be as well-armed as their local police.
2. Police need to be better-armed than civilians in order to be able to deal with well-armed unruly civilians.
3. GOTO 1
or…
do {civilian.armament == police.armament;
police.armament == civilian.armament + 1;
} while (police.armament > civilian.armament)
Yeah, I can’t see any problem with that.
Catching up after a drive, but I said to both Broboxley and Christopher that assault weapons are a specific, legal class of weapons. Secondly, if the pistol grip and magazine capacity and short barrel don’t mean anything, why does the military use them? Thirdly, I want pistols banned. To be honest, I don’t really see the need for semi auto anything in civilian hands, but you can fuck around all day playing with the language, certain weapons are better at killing lots of people than others.
And again, stop using Mexico as an “example.” Mexico has the issue of a big belligerent neighbor selling them guns under the table – something that could be curtailed by allowing the ATF to actually enforce gun laws. We are the source of illegal guns for our entire continent.
As far as the whole criminals/villains still getting guns, are gun nuts really that stupid? A reduction in legal weapons means a reduction in illegal. Illegal weapons are purchased from legal owners and dealers, not from some imaginary secret organization of illegal guns.
And Christopher, the Democrats lost the house because of gerrymandering. They lost the white house because Bush jr’s daddy stacked the supreme court and his brother ran Florida. And if the majority now want to regulate certain types of weapons, what are you going to do about it? Statistics and the democratic process are not on your side.
Most of all, if criminals don’t follow laws why bother having them.
what a total prat!
More importantly, the NRA is anything but democracy in action. The NRA is primarily funded by the people who make guns. They then spend millions of dollars influencing congressional and state members to do stupid shit like cripple the ATF, block gun legislation that most gun owners support and outlaw the Surgeon General from doing a gun violence study. 500k members is a drop in the bucket in a country of 300,000k people.
Gob I hate these gun nuts.
My late great aunt was one. When she was elderly and lived alone, a young man cut her phone line (this was long before wireless) and broke into her home. She retreated into her bedroom; she figured she’d let him take what he wanted. The man had other ideas and started to break through her bedroom door. My aunt had fetched her pistol from her nightstand, so shot through the door, and the guy fled. (She didn’t think she hit him.)
FFS, didn’t she know how much more dangerous that situation was with her gun? At the very least, it should have been completely unassembled and locked. She should have just learned to relax and try to enjoy whatever that man wanted to do to her. Who the fuck is she to think she has a right to defend herself?
Figure I would just put this article out there.
Because we all know how important Bill of Rights is for gun nuts. It is the democratic will of the people that people not be allowed to propose laws that might enact gun control measures.
Holms your writing is beautiful. Spot on.
Proves it for me. Guns for everyone!
Exactly!
Just ask Reeva Steevenkamp!
Christopher:
Which argues that the NRA is in the business of keeping itself in business.
Name another group that has as many people paying money into it, with any sort of political or rights agenda.
By the way, I’ve NRA magazines/newsletters in my house, arriving monthly. They read like fundamentalist religious material, and probably have much the same audience.
No, just desperately trying to cling to a clearly false and faulty premise – that they NEED big scary weapons. Peace through superior firepower!!
You’re right, Bernard. Someone claims his aunt once successfully scared a burgler with a gun that one time. ARM EVERYONE IMMEDIATELY! What could possibly go wrong!
@Illuminata
That worked so well for Europe circa 1914. Wanted to add a wink or something, but seemed a bit harsh for the worst war in history.
It’s especially amusing since, in his attempt to refute a well established and frequently used definition of “civilian,” he leaves out the sentence in the very same paragraph that says this:
The ATF is the one selling them guns under the table to Mexican drug lords. That combined with all the M16s we give the Mexican government that then get pilfered by the cartels account for far more arms than the US civilian channel.
Guns are easier to make than cocaine. If the whole world banned the legal production of guns, there would be many, many black market sources to supply whatever was desired.
I’m sure you’ll have another excuse when the Republican party goes from Whig level death throws to the dominant force in politics. I fear for what a radicalized Repub party will do if given the seat of power again, and democratic gun control will give it to them.
There are quite a lot of laws that should be thrown out under that reasoning. Start with the drug war and go from there….
It was like a veil was lifted and I saw the sun for the first time – I was dazzled by its brilliance, and able to feel its warm glow on my skin.
An absurdly high rate of murder, accidental death, and suicide via technologically perfected, convenient, pocket-sized killing machines is exactly the price everyone should pay to protect apocryphal aunts everywhere.
uh what?
@178
What? You don’t have a gun plant?
Why, I heard tell of somebody buying a lottery ticket and winning millions. A surefire retirement plan for everyone, if ever I heard one!
Christopher, you seem deliberately dense. You are making the claim that all the guns Mexican cartels come from the ATF, and that one single factor led to the GOP victory in the 90s, and then taking an obviously sarcastic statement seriously. I am starting to doubt your sincerity.
American gun dealers sell across the border. Many if not most are legal dealers. And guess what? Law enforcement could drastically curtail the “black market” of guns quite easily. The same way that the AK-47 is the most common gun on earth yet very, very few Americans own the military version. While it wouldn’t be perfect, no law is. There are always failures in any system, but you cannot claim the response to a few incidences is the widespread ownership of military weapons.
Guns are made by a surprisingly small number of companies. Most illegally owned weapons – that is to say almost every single one – was made by a major multimillion or multibillion dollar company with ties to the NRA. Or the Kremlin. Guns require a lot of resources to build on any kind of scale, unlike cocaine which can be grown by subsistance farmers.
And moviegoers. And school children.
If only everyone was armed at all times. Then, surely, no one would get shot for pulling into the wrong driveway because of faulty GPS dierctions. The kid could have just shot back and everyone would be safe!
@BroBoxely OT 151: Indeed. The Beta-C mags that were issued as emergency ammo were pernicious little bastards. The slightest hint of granulate particle and they’d jam up. Bloody useless. I’d rather just have another belt for that.
@Logicpriest: To further identify: Short Barrel Rifles are controlled weapons under the National Firearms act of 1968, and are thusly illegal to own, produce, or sell without ATF tracking and tax stamps. The forward grip/pistol grip are ergonomic considerations that became popular in the 60s for controlling recoil. I have no argument to pose against Hi-Cap mags as proposed, due to the fact that the majority of these arguments become cyclical. The issue with pistols is something I have not considered in depth, but the UNONC report seems to back data that they are the major issue in gun violence, which from their data seems to be a reasonable conclusion.
Matthew Penfold bloviates:
Because that ensures there is no possibility of an accident. Could you not work that out for yourself ?
If a gun is locked in a safe there’s no possibility of an accident. If someone is willing to break into a safe or disable a lock to get at the gun an accidental discharge is the least of your problems. Anyone who knows anything about firearms and safe storage knows this. You obviously do not know what you are talking about. I expected better from you than massive ignorance
Coca can be grown by farmers, cocaine processing requires a processing facility. Both the growing and processing take up more space and are easier to detect than a gun manufacturer.
It’s not like it takes a bunch of equipment to make a gun:
http://www.ease.com/~randyj/ph_18/r18_011_Darra__05.jpg
http://www.northeastshooters.com/vbulletin/build-yourself/179192-diy-shovel-ak-photo-tsunami-warning.html
Guns were being built before electricity and the techniques haven’t changed much since then.
You’re right. All gun owners should be compelled to lock their weapons in gun safes. The keys should then be destroyed.
Matt Penfold opens his anterior colon and excretes:
If you watch the video, the guns are waving around all over the place when he was firing.
I watched the video. They did no such thing. The recoil was less than what you’d expect from a pistol being fired one-handed. The added weight of the ridiculous large magazines means LESS motion as anyone who took high school physics would understand.
Christopher (#176):
And, of course, placing limits on gun types that civilians can own is exactly the same as banning their production. I remember the days when there used to be cars, back before regulations on what was actually legal to drive caused the worldwide banning of automobile manufacture. We had to go back to horses, until regulations on where you were allowed to take your horse meant that they had to be eliminated. I need not delve into the Great Glue Glut debacle, of course.
Christopher, if you want to make a semi automatic gun with any kind of accuracy you need far more resources than cocaine processing, which is often hidden in shacks in the jungle. I don’t understand your argument here. You need metallurgy facilities ranging from large scale casting to the manufacture of precision parts. You, of course, will respond with “oh you can order those etc” but that is not manufacture, that is assembly. Those parts are only available from gun manufacturers. The link attached he built the stock and upper receiver. Meanwhile the actual bits what make it work were ordered.
Then you need ammunition to make the metal tube any good. That involves a lot more.
So yes, I could assemble a custom weapon from pre-made parts or even forge an individual muzzle loader using pre-made ammunitions, but to actually make working semi-automatic weapons from scratch is not feasible on any kind of scale.
Why the fuck does it need to consist of paying members before it qualifies as democracy? Oh, dishonest, gotcha.
Massive fail in terms of getting his point. Again.
You continue to bring up the point that ‘gun control will not eliminate gun crime’, as if that is some kind of argument against gun control. It isn’t. We know that making a law against X will not quite fully eliminate X, but we make the law against it anyway with the goal of reducing X.
In this case, guns.
Banning extended clips alone will not eliminate gun crime.
Repealing concealed carry laws will not eliminate gun crime.
Repealing ‘stand your ground’ laws will not eliminate gun crime.
Restricting the types of guns that may be purchased will not eliminate gun crime.
Tightening background checks will not eliminate gun crime.
Unshackling the ATF will not eliminate gun crime.
Hell, not even dismantling the NRA will not eliminate gun crime.
Pointing out that none of these will not eliminate gun crime is not a refutation, because it has never been claimed; at best, you are simply knocking down a strawman. We can even argue that, alone, none of these measures will have more than an incremental effect on gun crime, but that too is not a refutation because even incremental change in a positive direction is still positive change.
However, have you considered what an entire raft of considered gun control measures will do? Individually they may be weak, but a concerted effort of small restrictions can have a powerful effect.
That is the point you continually miss, and I’m a mug for trying to spell it out to you in detail as I’m sure you’ll manage to miss or ignore it anyway.
Half assed limits are even dumber. I know of quite a few people who, during the 1994 ban, proceeded to build their own banned firearm. Dumb as fuck in my opinion, but they are out there, owned by otherwise law abiding folks who did it just because. If some redneck can do it, you can be sure that the blackmarket will easily fill the void.
If a law is totally ineffective at its purported purpose, why should it exist?
No you don’t:
@Christopher (191):
Did you want that double-part in your hair?
Christopher, you have now just fallen back on “it won’t matter so why bother.” In that case, it won’t matter what you say or who is killed since we are all just gonna die. I mean hell, why bother with any laws or society. It isn’t perfect so let’s not do it at all.
Otherwise law-abiding law-breakers, right, I understand.
Laws which are effective in many other liberal democratic jurisdictions. Perhaps cultural attitudes are critical to enforcing the law? Perhaps education is required alongside legislation? (Did anyone mention that already?)
And yet Mexico. Total ban on guns and ammunition and yet far more people are getting shot than here. What makes you think that your incremental regulations will work better than a total ban?
On. Any. Kind. Of. Scale. Skilled smiths could possibly make one from scratch, but this is again NOT about absolutes. Most people can’t. And then you still need ammunition.
He is circling. Back to Mexico, next we will hear the beginning of the whole thing from scratch.
No, people who only commit victimless crimes. Breaking mala prohibita laws isn’t the same thing as breaking a malum en se law.
(Presumably, restricting the supply of arms in the US would have the happy coincidence of lowering the marginally higher rate of death in Mexico. Win-win.)
Drug cartels are building their own submarines, you don’t think they couldn’t figure out how to aquire and operate a CNC mill, a lathe and a press. With those you can crank out AK clones at any scale you wish.
Ammunition is a bit trickier, but brewing meth is harder than nitrocellulose or priming compound, so I don’t see much of a barrier for the black market there either.
You really believe that? You really think that cartels are dependent on US civilian firearm sources?
I’m quite willing to say that producing your own killing machines in the face of a ban designed to reduce deaths is not sufficiently distinguishable from an action malum in se.
So you are OK with laws that aren’t effective at what they claim is their purpose so long as they make you feel good?
So who was harmed by them making that object and storing it in their home? What is fundamentally wrong about having a gun with slight cosmetic differences from what you can buy at the local gun shop?
Amusing.
Tragic. The only ineffective laws are the ones which are not being enforced.
This really is getting beyond the pale. You’re now comparing shitty backyard guns with all the with fuck all reliability to a precision machined factory made gun. Are you actually trying to convince us that they have the same mechanical reliability, the same accuracy, the same flight characteristics, the same fatigue resistence etc. etc.?
These are NOT the guns that are being used in any of the crime statistics, they are also definately NOT the guns getting shipped to Mexico, they are completely unrelated to the discussion at hand, but you bring them in in what has to be the most ignorant episode yet, in a conversation that you have been filling with idiocy from the start.
And what about the cocaine aspect of this? “Cocaine processing requires a cocaine processing facility” well no shit, in much the same way that “gun manufacture requires a gun manufacturing facility… for a given interpretation of ‘gun manufacturing facility'”. You drew false equivalence between the shitty back yard toolshed ‘manufacturing facility’ with the real deal, but completely omit the fact that cocain can also be refined basically anywhere you can stash some tables and heat sources… e.g. a back shed, basement etc. etc. etc.
Basically, fuck off.
The level of hypocrisy among those self-professed progressives is amazing. “I think a particular person on YouTube is an idiot? More than enough reason to take away his property and rights.” As long as you are going to concern yourselves with certain rights (the ability to control one’s body, the right to love whoever you please, etc), knowing what freedom really is means respecting ALL rights, even those you don’t exercise. So bitch all you want, ‘chickenshits’ like me will hold onto our guns and feel free to go fuck yourselves.
See? Mexico again. The guns they use come through American dealers and manufacturers. The ammo they buy does too. They could spend the resources building arms factories, but that is not as cheap as you seem to think. The fact is we supply Mexico with guns. Enforce gun laws here, we will see a drop off in gun availability.
Sure they could set up arms factories with the hope of keeping up with their own demand while not wasting away the profit from the drugs, but I doubt it. They didn’t before we started selling them the guns.
As always, your argument is that if it ain’t perfect it ain’t worthit. Gun control is not a gun ban, nor is it a perfect solution. But it will reduce gun violence. It will help, even if just a little.
I counted only 29.
Holy fuck indicus, way to miss the point. Gun regulations are aimed at sales not existing guns. Besides, rights are all limited. There is no absolute free speech or freedom to own any and all weapons. Regulation is what the government exists for, so that we don’t infringe on each others rights.
OR the right to life outweighs the right to property, as decided in 1865.
P.S. I’m curious exactly how I remind everyone of the Taliban. Examples would be nice. Or was that yet another mindless cliche… About all I’ve come to expect from the self-professed glorious progressives?
logicpriest
Christopher
Try again Christopher.
I’m sure they did. Never test-fired? Never fired at a range? Never lost, sold, or stolen?
The moral boundary is crossed when one sets about circumventing a law which is designed to protect others, to protect everyone from a certain type of killing machine.
If I decide to make explosives in my basement I would rightly be labelled as reckless, and morally culpable if I blew up the neighbourhood and killed people. No matter if only planned to polish them and put them on a shelf.
Disregard for the safety of others is a type of immorality.
All you need is a mill, a lathe and a press and you can have all the precision, if not more, than a factory made gun. And as I quoted Gale above, all you really need is a file.
But even super ghetto gun shops can put out perfectly servicable firearms that are at least as good as what the Comblock produced.
The claim was made that if guns are banned, then we won’t have gun crime because guns won’t exist. My retort was that criminals (you know the ones committing gun crimes) could easily aquire guns from other sources given how primitive of a technology guns are.
And guns can be made in even more places because they aren’t limited to being close to the source of coca production.
After you sweetums.
Where?
Who made that claim?
So you all are admitting that none of the proposed regulations or bans will do anything to reduce the availability of guns to the people who would use them badly? Why are you proposing them then?
Where?
No, you are creating a badly done strawman. People for gun control think that it will reduce gun violence in the long term. People for banning guns outright believe that it will greatly reduce gun violence in the long term.
No one says that there won’t be gun crime because gun won’t exist if guns are banned.
So again, where exactly was this claimed? Which comment? Where was that claim made? At least cite it it directly.
Elvis has left the building, and the horse likewise has vacated the barn. Check out Cody Wilson and his toys.
The kid may be playing, but he did not invent the technology. If not him it would have been someone else.
— TWZ
So, having utterly failed with his original argument, chris’ new plan is to pretend people said things they didn’t say. LOL right on cue. Lee coyne is that you again?
I see you didn’t understand the whole ‘incremental progress’ thing. Or maybe you just ignored it?
And on what scale is this bustling home gun manufactury? Two per day? Yeah that really compares well to massive factories, and that’s also assuming that they have the same quality, reliability etc.
I’m guessing you ignored that point too.
Uh yeah, I already explained that. You clearly ignored it, but it was the post of mine that used the alcohol prohibition as an example specifically on that point.
I love the way you glibly throw that out, as if the ‘narco-subs’ are somehow equivalent to the meaning more usually intended by the word ‘submarine’.
Look at these pieces of shit, and compare them to the more common meaning.
Fucking worlds apart, nice comparison.
I don;t think you know what ‘scale’ means in this context. It means: “how many of these things can you crank out per day?” And the answer is: “a mill, lathe and press do not equate to a fucking factory, only an imbecile or a liar could possibly equate the two.”
So no, they actually can’t manufacture the stuf ‘on any scale they wish’, they will always be small fry as compared to the gun corporations.
Oh it’s ‘harder’, because I keep forgetting you are an expert on all matters of gun / cocaine manufacture. simply declare that bullet propellant is ‘easy’, or that cocaine is ‘hard’, with no real qualification.
1- fuck you, sexist bigot.
2 – your hilariously idiotic assertion that supporting logical, reasonable rights that improve lives means having to support every whim from whiny ass cowards is hereby rejected.
3 – I am a gun owner, you ridiculous crybaby.
4- Go back to cowering under your bed.
I’m going to try for an analogy and see if you can find the similar faults in logic: In a calculated measure of concern for public health, the President issued an executive order which would prevent the sale of tobacco products which contained chemical preservatives or any type of chemical adulteration. In the short term people could obtain the chemically-laden cigarettes but over time they would be consumed or confiscated, leading to reduced overall consumption and less risk of ailments associated with those additives. But because some people know how to put formaldehyde and arsenic in the cigarettes and how to forge name brands, and some people prefer the adulterated brands, you won’t be able to eliminate 100% of the tainted cigarettes from going on the market. Therefore, the President shouldn’t have even bothered if it’s not totally effective.
Seeing as this discussion has ballooned a bit, and ignoring Christopher’s one man brawl in the corner:
Would anyone have an issue with a tiered licensing system for owning firearms that would be at least as strict as police qualification standards? To pull out a hypothetical: Concealed Carry of a pistol would be middling, requiring 4 qualification tests a year and 80 hours of coursework on legislative and practical material, in addition to a full background check (not just NICS), all recorded in a registry (local or federal, or both with the magic of the internet). I think this would put some much needed checks in place. Scale up or down from there. Hunter’s safety for the yearly hunters and a yearly course on not shooting someone in the face with a shotgun. Want to own a fully-automatic belt fed machine gun (and not be a classIII dealer)? Provide your reasoning to the ATF, Full on clearance background check (last I checked they PERSONALLY interview each person you provide) and you get to maintain a logbook and required ATF standards for as long as you own the gun, in addition to paying a large ($20,000+) tax stamp on the purchase.
Did you notice the ad that FtB is sporting with your blog? http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/simgad/13075402823597249153
I also have to wonder about bigdaddyhoffman1911’s sanity. What do you do when you’ve shot your first 50 people and there are still some left? Of course — you carry a second Glock with a 50-round drum! It does raise havoc with concealed carry, but what the hell — wear it proudly as an open carry weapon!
Anyone who remembers the FBI Miami shootout (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_FBI_Miami_shootout) also remembers why most agents no longer carry those wimpy little 9 mm sidearms. The ones who still had wrists left after firing 10 mm or .45 ACPs wore them as replacements. Those would be a real man’s guns, so why would bigdaddyhoffman1911 consider replacing those with the dainty 9 mm weapons? It makes me wonder if bigdaddy hasn’t gone a little soft in the head. He’ll have to change his name from bigdaddy 1911 to bigdaddy 9. (Okay, so you’re not a gun nut. The 1911 refers to the model number of Browning’s first military .45 caliber ACP semi-automatic pistol.)
Now, let’s get to the most import thing. These drums are selling out as fast as they can be made, so you’d better hurry and get yours now just in case Glock decides to stop manufacturing them (fat chance). There’s a huge demand for them, so get your order in now. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeUBDdCgqvs
I know know how much most Pharyngula readers really wanted this information. By the way, that ad that I copied from the FtB posting is placed by one of PZs favorite gun promoters, Tim Schmidt, who publishes the Concealed Carry Report.
Now you’re just lying, home assembly jobs are notoriously unreliable, but for the moment let’s set aside that point and assume you are correct in saying that home jobs are at least as good as the manufactured guns. If they are so good, why do we not see a thriving amateur supply of guns? Why do the petty criminals and rich cartels seem to insist on buying the factory jobs?
I just love the why you so glibly profess to know all about these things… methinks it all boilds down to ‘I read it on the internet’ and a smattering of anecdotes.
No it hasn’t, at least not in this thread. I’ve even argued against exactly that claim, just review my post #190 which you fucking quoted (#196) so I know you read it, you’re openly ignoring it.
So… cocaine processing is reliant on cocoa locations, but gun manufacture isn’t reliant on metal refineries? Oh, because that stuff can be shipped around wherever it is needed… implying that the same can’t be done for cocoa? What the fuck?
You’ve been caught in numerous lies, half truths and plain idiocy, so: NO U.
As a further example:
This is another claim that no one here has made. As I pointed out in #190, the goal is reduction. Again, that’s from a post of mine that you quoted, and are ignoring again.
The goal of incremental improvement is not ‘zero improvement’ and hence useless, nor is it ‘complete improvement’ and hence impossible. No one here is making any claim of either of those extremes, you are simply setting those up as strawmen.
With a mill and a press, you have a sheet metal stamping machine that can crank out magazines, recievers and top covers as fast as you can load it.
With a lathe you can crank out barrels, pistons and bolts as fast as a factory.
With a CNC mill (or a regular mill and a human) you can crank out all the rest of the small parts as fast as a factory.
How the fuck do you think guns are currently factory made?
With a few pieces of equipment, a couple of guys, and a garage, you could crank out a dozen or so AKs a day. Streamline the process, duplicate machinery, add a few more people and you can build a factory that could run continously with output numbers that rival commercial enterprises.
Does this look like the kind of manufacturing plant that couldn’t be replicated by anyone with some cash:
http://media.englishrussia.com/112012/kalashnikov/kalash001-10.jpg
@ 227
Do you know how the ads are selected? They have a service that produces these ads. As far as I understand, the algorithm isn’t very good. It doesn’t notice context, it just looks for words to match up an ad that fits. That’s why there’s also a lot of ads for Liberty University and Christian Mingle, and other god stuff on many of the blogs.
I’ve built an AK in my back yard with hand tools that came out better than anything I could buy commercially. Have you?
As for why guns are mostly bought commercially rather than purchased from illegal home shops, it’s all about the money. The taxes on firearms are not enough to make illegal manufacturing profitable, especially concidering that home workshops will always be less efficient than huge dedicated factories. It is the same reason why moonshining only happens in the South where there are huge sin taxes but not in the west where the alcohol taxes are low enough to not make it profitable.
If there is profit to be had you can be damn sure that gun workshops will spring up all over the place.
Oh and steel will never be a controlled substance like coca leaves, so no worries shipping it wherever you like, thus the factories can be anywhere.
Yes, people could hand-make guns. But there would be less of them, and the cost of each would be substantially greater. Gun-making techniques have changed radically since 1780, by the way, as is evident from the babble about setting up a CNC mill in a garage. But a garage-based manufacturer could be hunted and punished, just like drug manufacturers are.
(BTW, a lot of weapons that are only hand-made are not illegal.)
Christopher seems to be dealing in stark absolutes.
@226 Robpowell
Personally, I consider that case for posessing a semi-automatic pistol, lacking magazine extension and sound supporession, to be quite reasonable. I might also agree with the argument for hunting rifles / shotguns for farmers, as there is (provisionally) a practical use for such, if we again have restrictions on magazines, auto fire and such.
Concealed carry on the other hand… no, I see tiny practical benefit at best, outweighed heavily by a non-trivial increase in Trayvon Martin-esque cases. The way you phrase it does not change the cost-benefit aspect, but also has the downside of making pistols more or less out of reach of law abiding people desiring such a pistol for home security.
And a factory can crank out… fuckloads more. Because it has bigger machines than is really affordable by ‘a couple of guys [in] a garage’, more of said machinery, more staff than ‘a couple of guys’, more material supply, MORE ECONOMY OF SCALE BECAUSE YOU’RE ACTUALLY STILL TRYING TO COMPARE A FACTORY WITH A SOME DUDES IN A SHED YOU IDIOT.
Oh, but I see you already realised that, but went ahead with a comparison you knew to be unequal anyway.
So, I believe the term is ‘fuckbrained arsehole’.
@Christopher
Well, there’s a drug dealing ring in my area, can you grab your gun and come over here?
You’re the only moral murderer. Gotcha. You’re the exact kind of person who I don’t want having any guns.
@Alex B
Why stop at guns, then? Let everyone have tanks, landmines and nerve gas!
@indicus
If you think the problem is one idiot on YouTube, you haven’t achieved the mental level required for a discussion with adults.
To my knowledge, about the only piece of particularly specialized equipment necessary for firearms manufacturing is a barrel drill.
Pretty much everything else can be found in a high school machine shop.
Guns really aren’t all that complicated, neither is ammunition.
… and, of course, even if you completely banned the manufacture of all firearms and ammunition in the US, there’s plenty of other countries out there producing the stuff.
All of this is, of course, academic, since the right to own handguns (by far the firearm most often used in firearms murders/suicides) for self defense is protected by the Supreme Court decision in DC vs Heller, so they’re not going anywhere any time soon.
Highlighted the bit I don’t believe. A ‘refitted garage’ gun making outfit will never match the factories in terms of output without sacrificing quality, and will never match quality without sacrificing output.
A restriction on the official, lawful purchases from the legal factories will impact the general state of gun circulation. They have the resources and economy of scale the back yard guys lack.
@Holms 233: I think I can see that point. I believe I’ve just considered something I never considered before, which was the necessity of concealed carry. I think in this case, one can replace my mention of concealed carry with just handgun ownership, and nix concealed carry entirely from the list. Would honestly just be better to save that classification for the police. Considering the options, carrying a gun in the open really doesn’t carry anything resembling a benefit now that I consider it. Much to mull on. Thanks!
Well it turned out better than either of my AKs from Izhmash…
vaiyt
You can own a tank, you can even own one with a functioning main gun if you jump through the right legal hoops.
Land mines, not sure about, I don’t know if they’re regulated any differently than any other explosive device (again, legal to own with enough paperwork).
Nerve gas, probably not.
I personally don’t have a big problem with people owning ridiculous firearms (which are invariably only ever used at gun ranges since most of them are wildly impractical for self defense) as long as they go through the requisite training and background checks.
who fucking cares if “someone can make a gun” unless all gun manufacturing can be very tightly controlled every where on earth you will be able to by guns of any type you want if you have the money hell the Chinese make a fare U.S. M-14. So stop with the hypothetical bullshit arguments.
For a long time the ATF has been underfunded and undermanned and barely functional in regards to the existing laws.
You know I just wounder how all this budget pressure these last years pushed by the same politicians supported by the NRA has anything to do with that. nah must be a coikidink sure that’s it.
uncle frogy
unclefrogy
I’m not even sure that’s it, even California’s DOJ lacks the funding to get the guns they KNOW are illegally owned out of circulation (usually these are guns that were bought legally, but whose owners are now felons or otherwise ineligible).
Funding the ATF or DOJ just isn’t sexy, it’s not the kind of thing people get elected on – passing (or resisting) firearms legislation, THAT’S what gets you votes, even if the act is almost completely symbolic.
Look at the ridiculous legislation that California is proposing, there’s absolutely no indication that any of it will be properly funded and the lawsuits are going to cost us a fortune, but that isn’t stopping people from proposing spectacularly ill thought out legislation.
Big Daddy must have a 9mm dick
Points of fact:
Switzerland has a huge gun-owning population because of conscription/national service – everyone (male) between 19 & 34 is a reservist and so must maintain a weapon at home which explains the huge gun ownership statistic.
Norway has a tiny population relative to the UK – less than 10% in a significantly bigger land area. If you look at the breakdown of gun types, then most Norweigian guns are hunting rifles, not handguns.It also has a completely different wealth/social demographic, and, in rural areas, large predators not generally found wandering in the UK.
Summary – UK hasa much bigger, significantly more culturally varied population in 100,000 sq. km less space – look up ‘crowding stress’ in a variety of published studies for possible explanations of current urban crime statistics in the UK
http://www.mongabay.com/igapo/world_statistics_by_area.htm
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why each firearm in the US military is made by a couple of guys with a lathe, rather than acquiring them from a commercial gun manufacturer.
After all, with cost not being a primary concern for the military — given equal production output and superior precision, why would they do it any other way?
—
This is patently ridiculous: either most guns are not made this way, where the superior quality dictates they probably would be…
or your glib summary where you “streamline the process, duplicate machinery, add a few more people” has to be equivalent to establishing a commercial gun factory.
“You don’t need to get guns from a gun manufacturer! You could just create a gun manufacturer, and get your guns from there!”
This dishonest combination of obfuscation and historical time shifting does you no good.
Cocaine is easy to make given the location and revolutionary war era firearms are not the problem.
Most of the highest end gun manufacturers (read: lightest & most accurate) are boutique operations run by no more than a handful of people, even the intermediate manufacturers aren’t that big, certainly nowhere near as big as the ones that supply police & military.
You don’t get the same quality with mass produced firearms (that would require much larger manufacturing capacities) as you do with the tiny production runs of boutique shops.
However, the only reason you NEED mass production is to meet commercial demand, if you were only going to produce arms to fulfill a hypothetical black market, then the requirements would be dramatically reduced.
As has been pointed out though, it’s bunk, there’s plenty of foreign arms manufacturers who will happily fill the void even if all arms manufacturing here was outlawed, which it won’t be.
I should probably point out that a lot of these boutique operations are producing AR-15 / AR-10 pattern rifles as well as 1911 pattern handguns, they’re not producing obscure weaponry nobody’s ever heard of.
I passed on Christopher’s comments to an old friend who works for BAE (who is also not sleeping – (although in his case due to baby!) . He rang me back, and
a]howled with laughter
b] pointed out that the sort of precision machine tools that can reliably manufacture guns are very expensive
c] failure rate of home-made guns is high (he is sending me some statistics from work), and unpredictable – a weapon may fail on first fire, or may last for years before a critical malfunction.
d] the commonest home made weapon injuries are loss of fingers/loss of functionality of hand and eye damage.He only has US figures – thankfully not a significant issue here in the UK.
He shoots regularly, both range and sport(pheasant, grouse and clays (although the latter are a bit hard on the teeth). All of his guns are kept, unloaded, in a gun safe at his gun club. Why? “Because my children are in my house, so the guns aren’t.”
excellent point, kagato, although they would run into significant legal issues if using any component designs covered by IP law, and I suspect that most weapon manufacturers have legal teams… big legal teams.
Why are we even talking about manufacturing guns?
If someone were to try to exterminate all guns, or all of a type of gun, prohibiting manufacture would be a part, but not all, of the program. Obviously. The fact that it would be impossible to prevent some guns from being build doesn’t mean that there would be floods of guns and no hope of stopping them.
The materials and machinery for manufacture could be controlled, even the information needed to make a gun could be prohibited. The result would be a reduction in supply of guns, and an increase in cost.
Then, of course, anti-manufacturing laws would be enforced, trafficking in guns prohibited, ownership criminalized, carrying forbidden, and use punished. All parts of the entire hypothetical program.
The fact that I could cobble up some sort of firearm doesn’t matter, really. It’s pointless to discuss.
I haven’t read the whole thing but no one really jumped on Christopher early on for needing guns for the same reason the police do. That’s a big ol’ red flag there. There’s some distinction between police and civilians in legal terms and their ability to act on breaches of the law.
No doubt he cites the many restrictions the police have in their ability to use deadly force and sees them as similar to his own. But that’s putting the cart before the horse, unless he is trying to assert that the police have no legal authority of any kind outside his own as well (it wouldn’t surprise me if that were true in some places as well though. The ‘freedom’ over there gets more convoluted the more you look). looking at it that narrowly would be to be ignorant or wildly disingenuous.
He then goes on to point out the problems that the police often have with shooting and their general abuse of powers as what seems to be further justification for his position that the rule of law generally isn’t to be depended upon..
As a foreigner, it always funny when libertas types bring up police problems and abuse of force and their increasing paramilitarisation as a reason for mistrust and self reliance. It’s perfectly obvious to me why the cops are twitchy and increasingly militarised. I mean really really obvious. See if you can guess what it is?
Watching this logic develop of needing guns to avert jackbooted thuggery and/or crime (supposedly), then the general availability of such things helping ensure that the police force looks more and more like jackbooted thugs, so you need more guns/freedoms… well it’d be funny if it weren’t so sad
It isn’t even the elephant in the room all this. Everyone knows it’s an elephant. They say come look at the elephant. We’re proud of our elephant. It breaks things, makes a big stinky mess occasionally, forces unnecesary renovations in really weird shapes just so people can co-exist with the elephant.
Get rid of the elephant maybe? No! It’s not the elephant’s fault its an elephant. It’s people’s interractions with the elephant that are the problem. If you live at the front end like me it’s fine. Besides, it’s too big now to do anything about. Not to suggest we can’t control the elephant or anything. We just don’t want to. It’s actually the backbone of the whole house! You can pry my elephant from my cold dead hands!
where do the guns come from that one finds in any of these hot spots civil wars in Syria, Africa
or any other place you know of.
You do not need match grade guns to kill anyone.
uncle frogy
@kyoseki – if you are talking small, professional manufacturers, that is different. They will have licences, and are likely to have reasonable QC practices.
What Christopher was suggesting, and I was commenting on, was non-expert’backyard’ producers.
And, of course, even if all guns and other assorted firearms were somehow completely eliminated, how are they going to regulate pointed sticks? Or bananas?
@Muz. Brilliantly said.
I have to say, I was ignoring his whole “police are eeeevil” thing because – well it’s ill informed, ignorant and bigoted, and after he said the same thing 3 times despite copious sensible answers, I just skipped through those bits.
It’s probably also worth pointing out here that some of the best precision rifles in the world are made in the UK (Accuracy International), though they’re all bolt action and I’m not sure what UK firearms law is with regard to bolt action rifles.
… of course, California has still banned some of them (the AW50 series) because apparently “you don’t need those and they can shoot down a plane”, quite how this applies only to the 50 BMG rifles and not to any other caliber has never been made clear.
Aargh! Not bananas!
*eclipsse cowers away from Richard with his yellow parthenocarps of doom*
eclipsse
Remember though that a lot of these boutique shops specifically started out as backyard producers and amateur gunsmiths.
The ONLY part of even an AR-15 that’s difficult to produce is the barrel, which requires a specialized drill, but the rest of it is actually pretty straightforward, you’d just need the right CNC machine (which isn’t firearm specific) and the right software, neither of which are difficult to acquire – there’s no exotic materials involved and the tolerances for a functional handgun don’t need to be that exact to give you something that will work in most circumstances.
Firearms really are not complicated machines and accuracy is generally more a function of the shooter than the firearm (handguns are generally not that accurate to begin with, so losing a little bit due to shoddy manufacturing processes
As stated though, this is all largely irrelevant, since there are plenty of firearms manufacturers outside the US who will fill the void if domestic manufacturing were rendered illegal.
Christopher @44
Because if it’s only required to be locked, then there’s only once place someone needs to fuck up before it’s a threat.
If it’s required to be locked, unloaded and disassembled then someone has to triply fuck up before it’s a threat.
Pretty basic risk assessment. The first case has a single point of failure, where the second has multiple redundant safeguards.
(Important note: “redundant” does not mean the same thing as “useless”.)
Snoof
In my estimation, locked and unloaded would be sufficient.
You don’t accidentally load a gun, and depending on the firearm, assembly takes only marginally more time than inserting a magazine, unless you want to assert that the various parts of the firearm be stored in different parts of the house, which is completely unnecessary.
The issue here, however, is that DC vs Heller also found that it’s unconstitutional to require that firearms be locked up and stored unloaded, specifically because it prevents their use in a self defense situation.
That’s really the issue here – the US, unlike just about any other western nation, legally recognizes the right to self defense, in particular with regards to firearms ownership. The real problem is that you’re allowed to own a firearm ostensibly for self defense without any requirement that you be proficient with it.
In my estimation, everyone purchasing a firearm should be given a mandatory training course, hell, I’d like EVERYONE to undergo a mandatory training course so that at least people would know what the hell they’re talking about.
No, you don’t need expensive, high-precision high-tech equipment to make reliable firearms. People were making them with treadle lathes in the 19th century and with hand tools in the 18th. The Sten gun was designed to be produced with nothing more complex than a press brake. A couple thousand dollars with Grizzly or Harbor Freight’s catalog and you would be in business.
I once spent an instructive couple of weeks working for a firearms manufacturer. There was nothing in that shop that John Moses wouldn’t have recognized. Heck, off-the-shelf tools now are more accurate than what early 20th century firearms manufacturers had to work with. Lindsay Books, about to go out of business sad to say, still has a few copies of their books on early-to-mid 20th century firearms manufacturing. It’s not that difficult.
There seems to be some misapprehension about the ease of large scale illegal importation. And about how many guns a small, illegal operation could possibly produce. In the unlikely event the multi billion dollar US arms industry was dismantled, I would assume law enforcement would then work on preventing the import of such weaponry. Scale is really, really important here. Individuals can not compete with someone like colt on quantity, and quantity is the important factor here.
Also the whole thing is a big ass red herring. Should we allow manufactured bombs to be sold because some people have the ability to make them at home? Does scale of availability not matter when it is available at all? Gun regulations would not prevent all gun violence any more than vaccines prevent all disease. But they can help reduce it, potentially by a large percentage. Straw regulations aimed at totalitarian control of your lives are not being proposed.
First of all, to all those who say our fears of gun bans and confiscations are unwarranted paranoia, please don’t piss on me and tell me its rain. You can read DOZENS of op/ed pieces a day from politicians and think tanks yapping about how such weapons as semi-automatic rifles have no place in civilian hands and about how we need to remove “weapons of war” and about nobody needs an AR-15. The recent New York law outright banned high capacity magazines and requires them to either be turned in or modified. PZ stated in this post that he wants a man who hasn’t broken a single law disarmed. THOSE PROPOSING MORE GUN CONTROL ARE EXPLICITLY CALLING FOR A RANGE OF WEAPONS TO BE REMOVED FROM CIVILIAN OWNERSHIP. This is not a matter of more paperwork and regulation. They are OUTRIGHT stating that they are trying to ban possession of these items. So before you whine about how gun owners are being irrational, why not learn how to read fucking English and pick up a newspaper?
Arguing about how easy firearms are to make is a moot point. There are well over half a BILLION circulating world-wide, a sizable fraction of which are true military weapons. If anyone thinks any laws will significantly decrease this availability, they are delusional. Even the Department of Justice stated that nothing short of a full, “Turn them in”, nothing grandfathered ban would have ANY affect on crime rates. And since not even the most off the cliff gun-control shitbag like Feinstein or Boxer have suggested such a law – and since such a law would stand less chance than Jainism being adopted as the United States’ official religion – what is the point in arguing it?
P.S. I’m still waiting to hear how a person such as myself – someone fully approving of adults marrying whoever they want, entirely supports individuals having complete control over their bodies, a supporter in the right of anyone and everyone to speak their mind even if it makes them look like an ass, a complete believer in the notion that education is the only way to improve our species’ position in the world, and without a religious fiber anywhere in his derived Australopithecine body – bears ANY resemblance to the Taliban. Care to mention an example or just continue to mouth off?
P.S. I’m still waiting to hear how a proposed ban on certain types of weapons is actually a ban on all weapons.
Um, it isn’t and I’m sick of wasting my breath slapping down this red herring. Nobody except the wack-a-loons think that The Man will ever be coming for our hunting rifles or shotguns. The problem is, if they have their way they WILL be coming for our “assault rifles” because they have said so explicitly. Many have also stated they would like to see handguns added to that list. As hard as it is for you to believe, some of us actually enjoy our ARs and handguns and the line “Don’t worry, we are still leaving you your hunting guns” is not an acceptable consolation prize. We want to keep ALL our guns. And we will. Clear enough?
Richard Smith
… are people supposed to just accept a ban on some weapons because they aren’t banning all of them?
So, are people supposed to just accept a “ban” on some forms of speech (ie, slander) because they aren’t banning all forms? If one type of a thing is allowed, all types of that thing should be allowed?
And, indicus, it was your “comrade in arms,” Christopher, who introduced that little red herring about all guns being banned into this conversation. If you hadn’t wasted all your breath slapping it down already (need a mint?), maybe you could take it up with him? BTW, “We want to keep ALL our guns. And we will,” certainly sounds like the sort of mature adult response of someone I’d like to see carrying lethal weaponry, and not at all like a petulant child complaining about the unfairness of an early bedtime.
Richard Smith
Slander is explicitly malicious, but that’s rather beside the point.
The proposed legislation is akin to banning certain words, or rather certain phrases – you can use the same words, you just can’t use them together – it doesn’t care about the functionality of the firearms it purports to ban or protect, it’s concerned only with cosmetic appearance, it may as well be called the pistol grip ban.
Feinstein’s assault weapons ban is patently absurd to anyone who actually understands it, that’s why it has no support from even moderate gun owners, unlike universal background checks which the vast majority of people support.
Most of the argument for including handguns comes from gun advocates themselves, as they point out all the time that most gun violence is committed with them. I’d agree completely. If you aren’t harshly restricting handguns you’d be wasting your time (I do think some gun control advocates don’t want to talk about that as strengthening the assault weapons ban is relatively achievable and too much talk of expansion could nix the whole thing in their view. Me, I’m from far away and have the luxury of frankness over realpolitik)
TOO.
FUCKING.
BAD.
If you want to live in society, you have to agree to abide by its rules and some times the rules are things that you won’t like but society has determined it’s going to impose on you anyway because there’s a concern, such as the safety of the group in general, that it has decided is of greater importance than your enjoyment. That’s why you can’t just go out into the woods and shoot every single fur bearing mammal you come across, day or night, any time of the year. Instead, you have to get a license and a tag, and you’re restricted to where you can hunt, what time of day you can hunt, which animals you can hunt, and how many you’re allowed to shoot. That’s why you can’t get drunk then go driving down the highway on the left side of the road at night with your lights off. You’re not allowed to drive drunk, you have to drive in the proper lane, you have to have a valid driver’s license, and you have to keep your lights on while driving at night. And that’s why your enjoyment having an assault weapon with a high capacity magazine for target shooting or whatever isn’t sufficient reason for why they shouldn’t be illegal.
You live in a society. Part of living in a society means recognizing that you need to follow the rules of that society. If you find one of those rules to be a problem, you have two choices. Choice one: try to convince other people of your point of view until you have enough support to change the rule. THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT WE ARE DOING RIGHT NOW. Choice two: go somewhere else, where there isn’t that society to burden you with its oppressive rules involving not allowing you to own something dangerous just because you like it. I suggest Antarctica.
Muz
The problem there is that ownership of handguns is explicitly protected by a Supreme Court judgment.
They’re not going away any time soon.
I can’t stress this point enough – gun control legislation should focus on the people buying the guns and not the guns themselves – whether that’s mandatory training, better safety education and better enforcement of existing laws.
Banning any type of gun simply ensures that the next massacre will use something else, there’s no logical argument to support the idea that banning “assault weapons” or even restricting magazine capacity will reduce the body count even in the next mass shooting or in any of the more common incidents of firearms related crime.
Kyoseki
Yeah, the legal morass mostly eludes me, it’s true. How do you square with indicus in all this then? Can you envisage any scenario of effective gun control where all these things are done that doesn’t involve the government coming for the guns?
Many times it seems as though gun advocates just want lots of training and licensing and so forth, which is fine, but the present -let’s call it- volume gets to continue mostly painlessly.
All I can see in your best case scenario doing any good is a very active cleaning house. You’re getting your license, you’re keeping up the training, or they’re coming for your guns. You got too many, you’re selling them without proper reporting, they’re coming for your guns. Any gun not nailed down properly is getting swept up (and they should be) and all the responsible gun owners we hear so much about are going to help if they know what’s good for them.
No offense to you, but I’ve heard this line a lot and, while not unreasonable, often it seems mostly to try and avoid prodding the, almost completely myth based, “They are coming for our guns!” nerve.
Whatever we’re calling it this week, whatever has the best chance of actually doing some good; bans, enforcement, etc I don’t really see any way out of this without someone coming for someone’s guns. (and that’s the ideal outcome as far as I’m concerned. Less net weapons and less net weapon availability in the USA)
Muz
Well, I find that a lot of the more vociferous gun proponents tend to have some valid points, but use rather more emotional language than I would – the signal gets lost in the noise.
It’s probably also worth noting that I have a rather unique perspective on gun control;
I’m English, I remember the Hungerford & Dunblane massacres, and when I first moved to the US, I was as anti-gun as anyone else. However, I’ve since changed my position on that and own a few firearms, primarily for target shooting.
I don’t subscribe to the right wing “we need guns to overthrow the gubment!” perspective, but I do feel that people have a right to defend themselves, including the use of deadly force. That said, I also feel that the US is a little to lax on when deadly force is considered justified – the way State & Federal laws interact is one of the strangest factors in US law, for a foriegner, it’s really quite strange.
Remember that we don’t actually know who owns what – there’s no registry of firearms in this country – so any proposed legislation has to deal with that simple fact, confiscation is pretty much a non-starter on that point alone (not to mention the legality of deciding that something that was acquired legally can later be deemed illegal, which faces another Constitutional problem).
There’s something like 300 million firearms in circulation in the US, the ownership of the vast majority of which isn’t recorded anywhere – if the FBI or ATF needs to trace a firearm, they have to talk to the manufacturer and figure out which gun shop it was sold through, then subpoena the gun shop for their records.
However, private party sales are not tracked (depending on the state – remember that fun part about State & Federal restrictions?), so all people in most states have to say is “I sold it to some dude in a parking lot” and there’s nothing much that can be done.
… like most gun owners, I’m generally not ok with this, gun ownership should be at least as restricted as vehicle ownership, but again, we have the problem that vehicle ownership isn’t a Constitutionally protected right so there’s a lot more wiggle room when it comes to legislation.
Let’s remember here though that the volume of guns isn’t as big a factor as who owns those guns – in terms of which firearms you can actually buy, there isn’t any significant difference between the US and most European countries. The restrictions are entirely on the person purchasing the firearm rather than the firearm itself – AR15s, for example, are considered perfectly valid sporting firearms throughout most of the industrialized world, despite the hysteria surrounding the things in the current debate.
Most responsible gun owners are actually ok with forcing a set of proficiency standards on everyone – you wouldn’t believe the stupid shit I’ve seen at gun ranges – and we feel that this is the best way to change attitudes towards the things.
A huge number of people in this country regard guns as toys, that’s the fundamental attitude that needs changing and that’s not going to come about through any legislation banning the sale of firearms that are already in widespread circulation.
Well, again, the problem here is that there’s a sizable portion of the gun control lobby who DO want to confiscate firearms, Feinstein herself said she’d pass that legislation if she thought she could get the votes, so a lot of gun owners are fairly justified in being overly defensive on this point.
This is a point that’s increasingly justified when we see asinine legislation like the assault weapons ban that do nothing to address the fundamental problem.
The problem here is that last part – up until very recently, most “assault weapons” spent all of their time gathering dust on gun store shelves, the supply generally far outstrips the demand.
If demand constantly outstripped supply, then any reduction in supply would reduce the overall number of guns in circulation, but that’s simply not the case – if I may offer an analogy, would banning the sale of Ferraris actually reduce the overall number of cars in circulation or would everyone who couldn’t buy a Ferrari simply buy something else?
That’s the flaw in the “any ban on guns would reduce supply” argument.
If you want to reduce the guns in circulation, then you need to change people’s attitudes toward the things and the only way to do that is through education and training – if you stop people wanting to buy guns then you reduce the number in circulation far more effectively than deciding WHICH guns people can buy.
If people’s attitude changes from “I want to buy a gun” to “I’m willing to bear the responsibility of owning a firearm” then you’d go a lot further towards curbing the level of firearms violence in this country than arbitrarily banning scary looking guns (which is really all the proposed assault weapons ban does).
“when the locked door didn’t stop them, the dogs didn’t stop them, and the blaring alarm didn’t stop them.”
Crikey. When both Michael Myers and Jason Vorhees are hell bent on stealing your microwave, maybe it’s best to drop the glock, admit defeat and leg it.
@kiyoseki: This is an impressively well written post that essentially conveys everything I have to say on the matter. Cheers!
also:
“A huge number of people in this country regard guns as toys…” This is the single biggest issue amongst the responsible gun owner crowd. Period.
Guns don’t kill people, everything else does
http://acksisofevil.org/382.html
kyoseki:
Right.
I hear Oscar Pistorius is defending himself against a murder charge by claiming he was fairly justified in being overly defensive.
kyoseki:
There are guns that don’t scare you?
(What, you’re bullet-proof?)
John Morales
There is a difference between being overly defensive against a political threat and being overly defensive against a perceived personal threat, no? With the exception of a few fringe whackjobs, nobody is likely to start shooting over idiotic legislation.
I won’t comment on Pistorius’ current situation since I’m not intimately familiar with the case, but assuming this was a self defense situation gone awry, better training on the part of the gun owner would have prevent it from happening.
I will say that people like Feinstein are making arguments aimed at people who really don’t understand firearms. The vast majority of the people I’ve spoken to who support her ban are people who have “never fired a gun and hope I never will”, who, quite frankly, should not be allowed to vote on the matter any more than we allow the old farts in the Republican party to have an opinion on what a woman can or cannot do with her body.
As far as I’m concerned, if anyone is proposing legislation on this issue, they should be an expert on the issue capable of arguing a well reasoned point on any piece of legislation they’re proposing.
Sadly, that is not the case.
I have a healthy respect for the lethality of ALL guns, but the problem is that a lot of people proposing/supporting legislation only seem concerned with firearms that LOOK scary, they classify plinking guns right alongside assault rifles because they look the same and classify weapons functionally identical to the AR-15 alongside grampa’s hunting rifle simply because it has a wooden stock.
Any proposed legislation should be based on lethality, not appearance, but the simple fact is that most hunting firearms are vastly more powerful than anything being called an assault weapon, the only difference is that they generally have smaller magazine sizes – though again, it’s worth pointing out that magazine size isn’t generally a factor of the firearm itself, but rather a case of who makes extended magazines for them (and an extended magazine is just an oversized box with a bigger spring).
The thing about Pistorius’ situation is that even if you accept entirely his version of events, his actions are still worrying. He got up to close the balcony door and heard a noise in the bathroom. He thought it was a burglar. He felt vulnerable because the bedroom door was locked and he didn’t have his prosthetics on. He shouted to Reeva to call the police, and then he went to the bathroom, shouted at the person behind the door to come out, and when they didn’t, he fired four shots through the toilet door.
I’m not sure I understand how better training could have helped him avoid these actions. My instinct would have been to (a) find my partner and (b) run away. Given the toilet door was locked, he wasn’t in any immediate danger, and he still chose to go to the bathroom and fire his gun (I presume to incapacitate the burglar).
I don’t have experience with law or much with the Constitution, but doesn’t this sort of contradict the Second Amendment argument that ‘we should all be allowed guns because by ‘militia’ it means all the civilians who can be called upon in times of need’?
Lethality in the context of hunting game and in the context of close-range, mass shooting are not the same.
Marginally related – last night I looked at an old target where I put ~100 rounds of 9mm from an Uzi through two holes, each the size of a grapefruit. (A terrifyingly easy weapon to use.) This was at a gunstore, whilst on holiday, and having otherwise only used shotguns. I am not a competent gun user.
I would stand a better chance of beating a dear to death with the stock of a hunting rifle than I would of shooting it at any significant range.
I doubt better training will help in cases like Pistorius’. Simply said, a lot of people who want guns for self-defense won’t accept running away as a valid response to a threat. It’s the whole reason they got a gun in the first place!
@Christopher #84
Good morning!
This seems to be an argument for gun control. Thank you for proving our point.
That is evidence that certain elements within the LAPD can be trigger happy morons when under direct threat. They hit their (admittedly undeserving) targets, so how is it evidence they can’t shoot straight?
– It says they could have injured bystanders, but didn’t. No word on whether they hit the target or not.
– They hit the dog they were aiming at and no one else.
– The two officers fired 16 times between them, hitting Johnson 7 times and injuring nine bystanders, 3 qith direct hits and 6 with bullet fragments due to ricochet. Admittedly poor but hardley evidence of force-wide incompetency, is it? Let alone nation-wide incompetency.
So, two articles, one of which is, judging by the name “Cop-Block”, designed purely to show the world how crap the Police are, neither of which show what you say they show. Nicely done.
So you’ve given a definition designed specifically for a very specific area of Law. The definition of Civilian under international law is designed for the prosecution of war crimes, the definition being specifically phrased so as to make it illegal to carry out military action on non-military personnel. You have deliberately sought out a definition to confirm your original biased assertion that anyone who is not military is a civilian. While under the terms of international law this may be true, it certainly is not true in everyday English. You are being deliberately disingenuous and dishonest, and it’s not impressing anyone.
@Christopher
It seems I should have read your definition of civilian more carefully… and so should you, because the third sentence of that entry is:
… Bit of an own goal there mate.
@Logicpriest #101
Didn’t you read Christopher’s post? He faces the same dangers cops do on a daily basis! Of course he needs automatic, high capacity rifles! Everyone does! It’s a dangerous world out there. But not because of all the guns, oh no. Because there aren’t enough guns.
@Rev. Big Dumb Chimp
Yeah I spotted that too. It’s bollocks. Given the right raw materials I could make cocaine. It’s actually fairly basic chemistry, you pretty much need coca leaves, a pestle and mortar, a pot of boiling water and some weak alkali. People seem to forget that it’s uneducated peasants in deepest darkest Colombia making this stuff, not people with chemistry or pharmaceutical degrees.
I sure as hell could not make a gun, no matter what raw materials I had. I do not have the design skills needed, the engineering skills needed, the right tools, the knowledge to use the tools, the knowledge of what materials to use for which bit or indeed anything more than a basic idea of how the innards of a gun function. And that’s just the gun, how on earth would you go about making ammo and cartridges?
Don’t know which bastion of white privilege is fapping harder, christopher or logicpriest they both claim to know everything about guns. For those of you who are not intimately familiar with ar15’s mini14s rugers etc please read the following link. No politics, no second amendment, just a detailed description of why a so called “Assault Weapon Ban” is only a feel good law designed to placate the non gun owners who demand that “Something be Done”
http://bradtaylorbooks.com/2012/12/a-simple-primer-on-assault-weapons/
His background is probably well suited, better than both logicpriest and/or christopher
As far as what we can do that may be marginally useful? “Issue a licence to own”. Ensure that states share criminal info in a central database with the feds. Anything deemed wrong that license is immediately revoked and possession of any firearm of any kind after that point carries draconian penalties. This avoids trying to maintain Universal Instant background checks. No way to really police that activity.
I have no problem with limiting magazine capacity, forcing someone in an active shooter situation where adrenaline is on max the simple act of changing a magazine can become very complicated giving a slightly longer margin of time for something bad to happen to the shooter.
A lot of anything to do with guns is cultural. Every house in our village back home has at least 20 guns, rifles, shotguns and pistols. Usually kept in plain sight or in a bedroom closet, all unloaded. That is the cultural norm there. Obviously many of you disagree, thats fine you dont have to live or visit there.
The comparison to freedom of speech and how we regulate the expression of that right is idiotic. Speech that is regulated (slander, threats, etc) is done so because such speech is directly harmful to others. This is the reason why the use of firearms in such a way which would be directly harmful to others – widely shooting them in the air, casual discharge in populated areas, etc – IS regulated and always has been and nobody is complaining about that. The simple ownership of certain types of firearms that you people consider scary does NOT directly affect anyone so it is not and should not be regulated.
As to my bitchy “mature adult response” to proposed gun control, I see the exact same thing from you people whenever the subject of restricting marriage rights or abortion rights or instituting creationism in schools hits the news… a rabid “Over my dead body!” response, which is exactly what I would want to see in those situations. Pity that you can’t fathom the protection of rights you don’t personally see a need for.
And everyone is still missing the point with this original topic. The guy on Youtube isn’t breaking a single law. He isn’t endangering anyone. Does he look a little silly? Yeah. But last time I checked, in a free society, appearing silly is NOT a legitimate reason to restrict an individual’s rights.
When guns are outlawed, only outlaws with a mill, a lathe and a press will have guns.
food for thought.
@Indicus
You are deliberately missing the point. Give me one good reason that any civilian anywhere needs an automatic rifle, or any gun with a magazine capacity of more than ten? Give me one legitimate, non-frivolous use a civilian would have for anything fitting those descriptions? Simply owning the gun may not be directly harmful to others but the fact of the matter is you have hold of a weapon specifically designed for mass slaughter of humans when you have absolutely no reason to own one, thus presenting the possibility that it will be used for it designed purpose and many people will die. This is a possibility which society at large are rightly looking for ways to avoid, and banning a type of gun designed just for this purpose that you don’t actually need still looks like a bloody good start to me. Why would any law abiding citizen need, or even want, the ability to make mass murder easier?
PZ’s remark about him being disarmed was quite clearly a joke supposed to convey worry at the fact that there are people out there who fetishise guns to such a ridiculous extent. No one is seriously suggesting that he be disarmed for being an idiot. You are tone trolling, demanding an answer to a query regarding a frivolous, throw away comment that doesn’t matter in a deliberate attempt to derail the thread away from a serious conversation about potential gun control measures. Stop it, please.
I’m a knife nut. I love knives. I love their simplicity (pointy end, blunt end) and I love the diversity. I own lots of knives, most of them throwing knives and I own various other throwing and projectile weapons such as catapults.
And I have never once felt the slightest need to carry one about with me or use one as an actual weapon. Throwing knives are really useless weapons anyway and I don’t think I could cut anyone with a knife unless someone else’s life depended on it and I’m not completely certain I could do it even then. In 40 years I’ve been in 3 situations that were dangerous enough to be potentially life-or-death and in retrospect I’m delighted I don’t carry a knife.
So tell me about the reasons to carry a gun.
You can’t seem to understand a very basic point… firearm ownership is a RIGHT. As such, I do not have to demonstrate a ‘need’ to you or anyone else. I own a Ford Mustang. I don’t NEED to drive a sports car and would be perfectly capable of going about my daily life in a Honda Civic. And given the relative fatality rates of sports cars to ‘regular’ cars, statistically, preventing me and everyone else from driving a sports car would likely lead to a substantial reduction in vehicular deaths. But as a free individual, I have the right to drive whatever I want regardless of the potential effects of other misusing such an object. Getting back to firearms, I enjoy shooting AR-style rifles at the range. I like to be able to empty a 30 round magazine without reloading. Whether or not you think that is a good enough reason for me to own one doesn’t matter. Deal with it. And by the way, these weapons were not designed for mass murder or whatever other bleeding-heart cliche you mindlessly feel like parroting. The AR was designed as a sporting arm for civilian shooters. Only later was adopted and modified for military use. Also, if you think PZ’s or any other quips about disarming so-and-so is a harmless remark, you haven’t been paying attention. Because New York recently passed a law which states, point-blank, “We don’t want to you have this, this, and that. Hand them in” and many individuals would love to see similar legislation passed at the federal level. So when someone says they want to take away scary weapon A from person B, they probably mean it literally.
latsot, if you felt you were ever in a situation where carrying a knife would have turned out badly because you wouldn’t have had enough self-control to keep said knife in your pocket, then I’m very glad you don’t carry weapons. Most of us however, do have the self-control to determine when a weapon should be taken out or not. I carry a handgun. I’ve never come close to pulling it despite plenty of instances of obscene road gestures, cursing, and other examples of life’s assholes… the thing that people like you seem to think will turn me into a ballistic pseudo-Rambo. If you really don’t understand why some people feel the need to carry a gun I suggest you pick up a newspaper or otherwise look into the statistics on muggings, rape, and homicide.
As long as it’s not hurting anyone, you can own anything! Let’s deregulate the possession of fluoride reagents, nerve gas and Davy Crocketts. America!
@Indicus
And since you seem to have misunderstood me, I am aware there are people out there who want to ban certain types of gun… I’m one of them. Civilians do not need fully automatic rifles, nor do they need magazine capacities over 10 rounds. The constitution gives you the right to bear arms but was written in a time when “arms” consisted, at best, of revolvers and repeating rifles. The AR may have been designed for the range but most fully automatice rifles were designed for military use, and that was the original intended purpose of automatic guns in general. And I was under the impression ARs were semi automatic?
Anyway, entirely factual bleeding-heart cliches aside, if you feel your right to enjoy emptying 30 bullets at a paper target trumps other peoples’ right to not-get-shot then you are a selfish pratt.
G’nite all.
The vast majority of the people I’ve spoken to who support her ban are people who have “never fired a gun and hope I never will”, who, quite frankly, should not be allowed to vote on the matter any more than we allow the old farts in the Republican party to have an opinion on what a woman can or cannot do with her body.
Sadly for these people and for your argument, they are exactly as qualified to be hit by a bullet as anyone else.
@vaiyt
I thought it was spelled “‘MERKA!!!111ELEVENTY11!!”
No, you don’t. There are federal and state restrictions regulating what kind of vehicle can be built, and you can only drive the class of vehicles the state grants you a license to drive. Even then, whatever you’re driving has to pass a periodic inspection.
And the state can take away your license if you abuse your driving privileges.
The AR was designed as a sporting arm for civilian shooters. Only later was adopted and modified for military use.
Wow, it’s the gun-nut equivalent of the ‘Actually Hell wasn’t made for us, it was created for Satan and his icky miniony minions, so therefore it’s OK that God sends people there to get tortured’ argument.
‘Why yes, your honour, I did cave his skull in with a claw hammer. But in my defence, the hammer was originally designed for the insertion and removal of nails!’
Have a Balloon
Better training would have told him not to fire a gun through a locked door.
A LOT of the stories I’ve heard of people accidentally shooting family members involve blasting away at something on the opposite side of a locked door or a wall.
Unless you can identify a threat, you don’t act on it.
Running away is usually the best option (which is why I’m not a big fan of stand your ground laws), but not always possible (such as if your apartment only has one door or you don’t have any legs).
kiki
Then perhaps they could employ someone who knows what they’re doing to write their legislation for them.
… because right now, said legislation does nothing to reduce the likelihood of anyone getting shot.
Kyoseki,
In the case of any threat, you decrease risk in one of two ways
1)Decrease the probability of occurrence–Background checks, improved mental health screening… can do this
2)Decrease the adverse consequences–Decreasing the capability of the armament, decreasing clip capacity… can do this.
This is standard risk reduction technique.
So, in other words, women with autonomy are just like murder weapons?
tee hee.
Right there, perhaps. Statistically speaking he and everyone in his house are in danger.
thumper1990
At the gun range, meh, doesn’t really matter.
From a self defense standpoint, the correct number of rounds is “as many as I can fit in the gun”.
The idea of limiting magazine sizes to give bystanders the opportunity to tackle the shooter is largely bunk when you consider that you can reload a gun in 1-2 seconds, or simply perform a “New York Reload” where you drop the empty gun and start shooting a full one.
To my knowledge, only two mass shootings were stopped because the shooter was reloading (Tucson, Long Island) and that was only because the shooter carried a single gun, in most mass shootings, the shooters carry multiple firearms and perform a great many reloads without anyone interfering.
As for automatic weapons, I don’t see a *need* for them, but they’re already pretty heavily regulated and don’t tend to show up much during crime anyway, so they’re a non issue.
a_ray_in_dilbert_space
… and most responsible gun owners are generally ok with these, as long as they’re implemented correctly.
In California (where I live), I guarantee you that any mental health screening would involve an interview with a state approved psychologist, of which there would likely be two, each with a 10 year waiting list.
The assault weapons ban does nothing to reduce the capability of the gun, it doesn’t concern itself with fire rates or cartridges, it is concerned solely with physical appearance.
It explicitly protects firearms (Ruger Mini 14) that are functionally identical to the AR-15 simply because they look like hunting rifles – the only Mini 14 affected by the ban is the one single model that has a pistol grip – how does the orientation of the shooter’s hand affect the lethality of the firearm?
If the ban just came straight out and said “we want to ban all semiautomatic rifles with detachable magazines” then that would at least be logical (and I believe that they’re trying it in California), but again, the only real functional difference between a semi auto rifle, particular one in a smaller caliber like the AR-15, and a semi auto handgun (the ownership of which is protected by DC vs Heller) is accuracy at long range, which is irrelevant when it comes to most shootings which take place indoors at distances of under 20 yards.
… and I’ve already pointed out how the idea of reduced magazine capacities is flawed, it’s a nice idea in theory, but it doesn’t work in practice.
Adam Lanza apparently regularly reloaded with half the magazine (15 rounds) still full, I don’t see that taking the extra 5 rounds away from him would have made the blindest bit of difference considering that he was also carrying two handguns.
The Virginia Tech shooter would have gone from 10&15 round magazines to just 10 round magazines, he reloaded at least 10 times, so again, I don’t see that losing 5 rounds would matter.
In Dunblane, the shooter had 13 round magazines and 6 shot revolvers and reloaded at least 8 times.
Any effect would be marginal at best, our efforts are better spent elsewhere in my estimation.
If he can’t hit his target with one or two bullets, then 100 isn’t going to help him at all.
It is a terrifying thought that there are apparently people out there, with guns, who specifically need to be told this.
And what’s worse, there are people who think that it is somehow not a problem that there are people with guns who need to be told this.
Kyoseki @ 273
It’s a little late here, but cheers. Although, I’ve done it again. I frequently wade into these discussions in general terms when they are set off by some particular piece of legislation or other and the whole discussion turns on that.
I am not talking about the assault weapons ban. I really don’t care that much about the assault weapons ban. I think people are right in saying that it wouldn’t do much. But I also don’t care if it comes in. Gun ownership isn’t a right I care about, nor one I think is really a right. It’s existence seems only to warp US civil discourse and society in ungainly ways and think it’d be better off without it, frankly. All the argument in support of it from the constitution itself on down I think are hogwash.
In the abstract, removing firearms entirely from civilian life is definitely on the table as a concept as far as I’m concerned. The sharp intake of breath from many a gun advocate at that idea is just something they’re going to have to deal with.
Of course, it’s legally and socially impractical in the US so I don’t consider it an option. But people might as well know who they are arguing with.
So your lengthy argument against the assault weapons ban is wasted on me I’m afraid. Sorry about that. Should have been clearer I suppose.
Anyway, it’s too late but I still don’t see how your social change avoids people coming for the guns. Which will run afoul of a great many gun advocates (even the ones who ostensibly support safety and regulation). Plus, for all that your ideas make sense, I don’t see how they are an absolute alternative or rule out a two pronged approach that just plain gets rid of the things at the same time.
The apparent legal protection of handguns kind of limits the options, but there’s clearly pockets of the country where if no one had the things tomorrow everyone there would be better off and all the training and whatever would take decades to make any similar difference. These places need to be allowed to act on the problem and they can’t because of all those absolutists and their pointless individual right (and no one passing mistake me for saying that you can make all the handguns disappear overnight. If you, whoever you are, think law enforcement needs to be perfect to be valid or make a difference we have nothing to talk about, except I urge you to pay attention to how the world actually works and put your rote individualism aside for a little while one day.)
There’s a happy medium here that arch constitutionalists and just plain bloody minded gun fans, enabled by terrible rote learned arguments and fearmongering that adds un-earned sophistication to the fact that they just want to have guns so nyah, succeeds in preventing at every turn.
Anyway fairly off topic now, so, never mind really.
This is not an argument against an assault weapons ban on principle. It is nothing but quibbling over how it is practically administered. You can change that simply by changing the wording of the actual bill. It is in no way a credible argument against not having any bill at all.
Something that ACTUALLY HAPPENS IN REALITY is “bunk”?
1-2 seconds is sometimes all it takes.
Self defense? Sorry, but a gun is strictly an offensive weapon, unless you are good enough to knock down your assailant’s bullet in midair. A gun is designed to maim or kill another person; it has no defensive value whatever.
So, let’s talk probabilities. What is the probability that you will shoot the bad guy before he harms you, as compared with the probability that you will inadvertently harm an innocent person? (who might just be yourself)
How many shootings of people are justified? How many are unjustified?
Fewer guns are always preferable to more guns. Fewer bullets are always preferable to more bullets. It’s just arithmetic.
@Kyoseki #305
OK, let’s say we make fully automatic weapons legal for range-only use and require them to be kept unloaded in a secure, locked room/safe at the range when not in use, would that be a good compromise from your point of view?
As for reloading only thwarting two mass shootings, from my point of view that’s enough to support a magazine limit because it proves that it is entirely possible to thwart a mass shooting in this way. And in a situation such as that, any advantage is a plus. But that aside, you are not taking into account much more everyday situations involving firearms where they may have only one magazine and almost certainly won’t have multiple firearms, where the pause offered by reloading and the potential that they could simply run out of ammo would severely limit the loss of life and allow the Police and SWAT ample opportunity to close in on the shooter. I do believe that limiting magazine capacity would go a long way towards limiting the potential damage that could occurr in a situation with an armed suspect without inconveniencing any legitimate uses of firearms. So, maybe we could limit Hi-cap mags to range only use too? Hunting does not require anyhting more than single shot rifles or double barrelled shotguns. Self defence does not require anything more than ten shots. If people want to blat away at a target with a fully automatic weapon with a hi-cap mag, fine, but lock them up and leave them at the range when you leave. Seem fair enough?
@Amphiox #311
That’s why I’ve stopped using the term “Assault Rifle” in these arguments (or rather, I’m trying to). I was under the impression that an assault rifle was simply a rifle capable of automatic fire; so AK 47s, M16s, M14s, SA80s etc. are all assault rifles. However I’ve since come to learn that it is a rather ambiguous term which no one can seem to agree on a definition for. It can range from anything to it’s ability to have accessories such as fore-grips or sights to magazine capacity to fire rate… I still think the definition I assumed was the most sensible, but there you are. As such, I now try to use the term “Automatic Rifle” to referr to what I previously would have called assault rifle.
Still, I support the banning of all fully sutomatic weapons, rifle or otherwise, so the point is rather moot. That said, as a result of my conversation with kyoseki above, I do wonder whether it would be practical to enforce a ban where such weapons are allowed at a licensed gun range but must be kept unloaded and secured in a specifically designed room/safe at the range when not in use. This would seem, to me, to be a good compromise since no one actually uses the damn things for anything other than range use anyway… until they get mad with someone, then all hell breaks loose. So don’t have them at home.
I don’t think you quite get the idea of rights. Anything can be described as being a ‘right’, but the nation determines which ones you actually have. Rights can be granted, and they can be taken away.
Pretty sure multiplying his opportunities to land a hit by 50 does in fact confer an increased chance of hitting.
Deterrence is a defensive value. I would argue that this leaves room for a typical pistol for defense, provided that extended magazines, sound suppressors, and automatic fire are off the table.
How sweet, someone who lives in BumSquatDirtSquibble Elsewhere knows best. When your local tesco is low on your favorite food you just waddle down the road to the next town and get some there. Except where I am from the next town is a considerable airplane ride http://mapq.st/W6y6DE so how many civilized humans are you willing to starve to assert your worldview on the brown folk?
Ok, normally I wouldn’t bother. But that comment is completely baffling.
If I read it right it appears you don’t understand what abstract and concept means in a discussion about rights. Which is what that was.
What this has to do with “brown folk” also remains a mystery.
But project away, by all means.
Muz, you used “abstract” and “concept” to make your underlying aim of removing all firearms from civilians palatable. What is has to do with brown folk is that white folk just love to enforce their way of thinking on brown folk around the world without ever considering the consequences of what the imposition of “white folk” rules are. I just pointed out exactly how that happens. Obviously you enjoy your privilege way to much to reconsider your position
@broboxley
In muz’s defence I don’t see what his argument has to do with brown people either. I think you’re trying to compare taking away civilian’s guns to colonial imposition of laws, customs and religions, in which case it is a false equivalency.
For what it’s worth, I do not agree with taking all guns, but I firmly believe the US needs better restrictions.
#321 thumper
lets see, early colonial gun control, against the law to sell to Indians. Later US gun control, no arms can be held by blacks. Later gun control, poor people need to pay $200 to own a fully automatic weapon but mine owners can hire security firms to kill union members with fully automatic weapons. Brings us to today. MUZ wants all civilian guns removed, I pointed out that his response will leave some people mostly of color to starve to death in america. He shrugged. Now you shrug right along with him.
I don’t need to reconsider my position because you’re talking out of your arse brob. Like I said, project away all you like.
Obviously, reading what I said is too difficult. What I was discussing was how I come from a position of there being no intrinsic right to arms, which makes talking about the US context difficult . I used abstract and concept as abstract and concept.
After absorbing those facts you know nothing about what I think of people actually owning arms for various reasons and in various contexts. But you’re having too much fun inventing these things, clearly. So might as well leave you to it.
Muz
you claim you are from elsewhere, claim a position of there being no intrinsic right to arms. You posit
no, you are pretty clear in your stance.
well since there is a time difference between here and BumSquatDirtSquibble Elsewhere we can wait with bated breath for what hir really thinks should happen here if hir should be in charge of gun control without weaseling
brob, you’ve already decided what my stance is. Don’t pretend you might actually objectively want to know it beyond you own intuition and get into some reasoned practical discussion, please. You only want to damn with perceived thought crimes and nothing else.
You don’t know what abstract or concept means or even how it is being used in this context.
See, you put all guns going away in an abstract discussion of ideas, away from practical concerns and one with no 2nd Amendment. Abstract, brob. Concept, brob. The table isn’t real, you get that right?
From there you assess the pluses and minuses of weapons and how or whether to control them. One such plus would be hunting. Of course, as I mention, the US conversation starts with the second amendment right so it’s at least complicated from the get go and irrelevant, really (and no doubt some think it’s irrelevant altogether).
I’m sure there’s some way to spin this to the benefit of further captious moralising from you. So have fun.
Muz,
So you want to discuss guns, absent second amendment, absent history of gun control in the US, abstract away from reality. No prob, you may also discuss jacking off to computer porn, absent computers, absent porn. Not sure of the value of either conversation but I am sure you can rant for hours on either subject or possibly discuss what if any value your input has on either conversation.