This has nothing to do with self defence. Rifles of this type are worthless in the role. That said, we are the people doing the defending. In the US the only person responsible for your defense is you.
Absolutely. That’s why I mentioned the .300 Win Mag. A .50 would be a rotten choice.
Waverly,
Bats should be banned. They are a favorite among thieves and scumbags for incapacitating, maiming, robbing, killing and raping. If our legislature went out to classify all bats as weapons of murder and require registration as a deadly weapon by anyone owning, purchasing, or using them, what would be the call to arms? Hell, anyone can buy and swing a bat, what if an ex-felon or a wifebeater bought one? Should we perform background checks on those who intend on purchasing one? Maybe a cooling-off period just in case they intend harm with it?
“Baseball is a national pastime”, they say! “You’re ruining the fabric of America!” they will cry! “Baseball is a sport, not a crime!” THen little kiddies at the urgency of their hopeful parents can make up stickers, and an entire clothing line like happened in the 80’s with Skateboarding…“Baseball is not a crime, Fight the power”.
Anyhow, humor aside, if you can defend baseball accoutrements, ans baseball as a sport with what can be used as a weapon, surely you can defend other sports such as long-range shooting.
Sam
Which is quite silly on the face of it. Merely punching a half-inch hole in an oil storage tank isn’t going to cause even a fire, let alone a damned explosion - unless some kind of incendiary projectile is used - and probably not even then - unless you happened by chance to hit an empty tank. I used to have a video tape (remember those?) of some firearms experts shooting rounds of many sizes and types into old automobile tanks full of gasoline. And not a single one of them caught fire or exploded. Just a small hole and a stream of gasoline running out onto the ground. Ya gotta remember, it is the vapors that actually burn, not the liquid.
Dumb laws are generally enacted with dumb justifications. This is just one more sample of the same.
And that’s wrong too. Never implied it wasn’t, in any thread on this Board. In fact I’ve been fairly vocal against some domestic security boondoggles. Your rebuttal has no target, pun intended.
See Weirddave’s link. I don’t think many would consider that outdated, irrelevant, or incorrect. They are deaths due to a hobby - a sport - a pasttime. Technically speaking, deaths from the equipment of the sport. Like shooting.
I don’t expect you to truly understand why “anyone” would want a 0.50 BMG, not because of any lacking or failure on your part, but because of your different cultural frame of reference. We shooters have a personal emotional stake in our sport, others have personal emotional stakes in theirs.
You’re probably going to choke me for this, but we already have a sport called IPSC which grew out of law enforcement PPC training. It’s basically “knock down the targets as fast as you can with a pistol” in 10 or so different arrangements. There are also semi-auto rifle and shotgun events.
Just a little hyperbole, actually. I still consider it the same class of weapon, or at least - it can serve as the same class (the military uses Barrets both as long-range sniper weapons systems and as “pocket cannons” for harder targets). Incidentally, the RPG can’t penetrate anything at 500 meters, as the warheads self-destruct after 300 and something. Innacurate as hell, too.
Look, I’m not going to argue whether you have a right to shoot 0.50" rifles. You very well may have - your counrty, your debate. It just that a civilian using one of those things would seem kind of, well, silly.
This is what they’re for.
Yeah because nobody else uses terrorism to push their agenda.
:rolleyes:
Funny you should mention this. I’ve heard that baseball bat sales are quite strong in England, though baseball sales are not, and the game isn’t commonly played. Most of these bats are bought as weapons.
Here in Northern Virginia, we have a similar problem with machetes. Nobody goes hacking through the jungle here looking for Mayan artifacts, and you’ll not find many sugar cane fields either. But the machetes are sold, are perfectly legal, and are used by the Salvadoran street gangs pretty routinely.
Now, is the solution here banning either of these implements?
Links about the machetes.
http://beta.news8.net/news/stories/0105/200739.html
http://www.wjla.com/news/stories/0105/198357.html
Also, the main reason the gov’t wants them banned is not just oil refineries. See, a 0.50" can shoot through the best armored glass. The kind of glass they put in the windows of armored limousines. The kind of limousines they use in Presidental motorcades. See where I’m going with this?
But there’s no requirement at all that I need to provide the government with a reason for wanting a particular firearm. Hell, I might not even ‘use’ it at all beyond having it in my safe for the collector value of the thing.
It’s not like you have to justify having broadband in order to exercise your right to free speech when dialup would do the job, only slower.
Now you’re moving the goalposts! I’ll take it you can’t find what I asked for.
Have I said in this thread they should be banned?
I linked you to soccer related deaths. Are you disputing these deaths as relevent because they didn’t come from riots, but rather from playing the game of soccer?
I don’t think we should be banning anything. I think it is a lame attempt by do-gooder legislators to put paranoid people at ease. It’s not working.
I simply wanted to illustrate how silly the argument becomes when discussing “sports” and their particular accoutrements and what may or may not be used as a weapon. If there was truly some emergent issue with any firearm in particular, there ought to be a good reason behind it besides “someone could do X or Y with said weapon”-mainly because anyone could do something, anything, with ANY X or Y situation.
There doesn’t seem to be any reason for this besides outright paranoia and rights restriction.
Sam
Not really - unless it’s off into fantasy land. Because “armored glass” is nothing more than layered sheets of Lexan and more accurately referred to as “bullet resistant.” It’s not “armored,” and it’s not even “bullet-proof.” Such “glass” is, and always has been, penetrable by a variety of firearm cartridges - both handgun and rifle.
I agree with UncaBeer, Alessan. This ban has absolutely nothing to do with Armored glass. It has everything to do with “Scary guns”, “Bad guys”, or perceived “bad guys”, and a smokescreen of anti-terrorism. There aren’t even any crimes on reconrd as being committed with the weapon for christ’s sake.
Sam
Well, I don’t know the technical details, but the armored Jeeps I used to ride in the Territories could definitely stop an AK-47 7.62mm round, and I’m pretty sure they could have stopped a 7.62X51, too. They were not protected against 0.50", a a couple of troops learned about a year and a half ago (God knows where the Plaestinians got that king of firepower; it definately wasn’t homemade). These are the vehicles I’m talking about (scroll down to “armored”).
GaWd,
Certainly not every sport or activity justifies the existence of any and all equipment used therein. We both stretched arguments to the absurd, but somewhere in the middle is more serious ground. Baseball and hunting may be nearer to one end of the spectrum, while hunting blue whales with depth charges or torpedoes is at the other. Where does long distance target shooting with a .50 sit on the continuum? Do you at least agree there is a continuum? I don’t accept for a moment that everything fits neatly into two bins, “as harmless as baseball” and “misc. absurd example.”
By the way, your baseball example is a bit flawed. Firearms are among a small group of weapons that can a) kill at a distance, and b) yield big effect for small effort. Bat’s certainly don’t kill at a distance, and as effective as they are as a weapon, it isn’t exactly an effortless kill.
Mayb you’re right - I really don’t know. As I said, I’m kind of disconnected form this particular debate. The only place I see people debate gun rights is here on the SDMB.
That said, something doesn’t have to have already caused damage for it to be regulated by the government. The FDA approves drugs before they go on the market, for instance.
I don’t work for the government. Am I allowed to ask the question?
