Going to make a bigger reply later, but don’t forget whilke you’re listing other issues that de facto gun registration that would result from this.
It was not nor ever “ignored”, it’s just that the historical reading of it by gun advocates and some (but by no means all or even a supermajority of) Constitutional scholars, as well as the United States Supreme Court, disagrees with you. The meaning of “militia” and “well-regulated” have been laid out in detail in Heller over scads of pages.
And since you earlier were unaware that the Constitution did in fact deal with home defense, when you posted this:
…it was clear to me you were unaware of not one but two key findings of Heller regarding both home defense AND the disassembly/gun lock requirements. Which directly applied the 2nd Amendment to those issues. Thus, you might see why it would be difficult to believe one’s claim they were read on the issue, rather than just doing quick Wiki searches. How did you make that earlier mistake if you had in fact even read the first 3 pages of Heller?
:dubious:
The words DO mean something, just not what you think. The specifics of the 2nd were never before dealt with to the breadth and depth that they were in Heller, not by a very, very long shot. The Court ducked and weaved like Cassius Clay in his prime to avoid coming to this decision, but when they finally did address the 2nd directly with a laser-focus, they made the right decision.
As we gun owners have been told for years on here before Heller - you don’t have to like it, but you do have to accept it.
You also have not provided anything that backs up your apparent dismissals of Heller based on your implication that it is merely the result of a politically convenient Court, nor told us why your same dismissals cannot be equally applied to innumerable other rulings, some no doubt near and dear to you.
You’re right. It has to be quantified. Have you seen any evidence that THIS particular bill is talking about anything even close to “prohibitive?”
I’m speaking in terms of a realistic manufacturing cost increase. We’re not talking about something that is prohibitive in the extreme. An increase of 10 cents per round wouldn’t be prohibitive to most people. You might not like it. You might not shoot as much or as often as you used to, but it doesn’t touch the realm of 2nd amendment infringement.
Who’s made lots of comments about designed to punish or tax? We stopped that line of discussion ages ago, and it mentioned only once or twice (by me).
Okay folks - I am ready to be educated.
Why do you need to own military style automatic weapons?
That ulterior motive may be apparent to you, but it’s not apparent to everyone. There is a useful logic behind it, whether it’s do-able in the current version or not.
Your own words in this thread explain your motivation.
Because I have committed no crimes and have been deemed by my local and federal law enforcement to be able to legally own such things. I have the funds at my disposal and the desire to do so.
Next question.
Look - I am not trying to get in a pissing contest with anybody — I am trying to understand .
“Because I can and want to” may be what is in your mind and heart but that does not tell me why you have to own military style automatic weapons.
What is the ultilitarian purpose of this?
To reiterate another problem with this “tagged” bullet/casing idea, let me remind you of another potential issue of tagged ammo…
Joe Sixpack goes down to his MegaConGlomCoMart and buys a couple boxes of ammo for his favorite semiautomatic handgun, he’s going down to the local shooting club for a relaxing afternoon of punchin’ paper, he fills out the required paperwork and the ammo is registered in his name
He goes to the range (a semi-enclosed multi-station open front shooting hut), and has a great time perforating paper targets, but eventually runs out of ammo and has to leave
Joe, being a responsible, environmentally conscious shooter, then proceeds to police up (collect) all his fired brass to take it home
While he’s policing his brass, He’s dismayed to discover that one or more of the following scenarios has happened;
1; he cannot find all his fired brass, as semiautos have a tendency to spit brass everywhere, and the empty brass has a tendency to bounce off the concrete floor to random directions, often never to be seen again…
2; one of his fellow shooters in the next station is shooting the same caliber and brand of ammo from an identical brand of pistol, and their brass is mixed together
3; unknown to Joe Sixpack and his fellow shooter, a local Brass Scavenger is grabbing up their fired brass so he can take it home and reload** it, Joe confronts the parasite, as he is also a reloader, but the scavenger has already dumped their fired brass into his bucket and all the brass is mixed together
in these situations, how can Joe be certain he’s retaining the brass that has “his” identification code? what if he got some of his fellow shooter’s brass, or some of the scavenger’s “Mystery Brass”
and a fourth, more insidious possibility…
4; after shooting, Joe can’t find five of his fired brass shells, he decides to leave and hope they’re lost, after he leaves Greg Gangbanger stops by the range, and proceeds to do a “magazine dump” (burning through a magazine of ammo in a very short amount of time) holding his pistol “Gansta” style (sideways, with the ejection port up), spitting brass everywhere, he’s practicing for a drive-by his gang is planning later that day
after wasting ammo in a thoroughly unsafe manner, the range safety officers approach him and tell him to collect his brass and leave, banning him from the range for unsafe shooting behavior, Greg collects his brass, and in the process, finds some of Joe’s missing brass
Greg takes the brass back to the gang’s hovel, where Ron Reloader reloads the ammo for that evening’s Drive-By, some of Joe’s brass winds up in that batch, and is fired in the drive-by
The police investigate the crime scene, and in the process, recover three of Joe’s missing five cases, the identifier code in those cases is tied to Joe Sixpack, and the police list him as a suspect… and there are still two of Joe’s cases unaccounted for, and in the hands of the gangbangers…
No matter how you slice it, “tagged” ammo is a bad idea, there’s too many variables to deal with
**Many recreational/sport/competitive shooters collect and retain their brass so they can reload it, not because they’re paranoid about “marked ammo”, but because they shoot a lot of ammo, and customize the load for their purposes, a light-recoiling, accurate target load, a high-precision match-grade reload, hunting loads, etc…, and reloading ammo is signifigantly cheaper than buying commercial ammo
and as far as tagging a bullet, go to the Box O’ Truth and see how bullets fare after being fired, the structural integrity of the average bullet is not condusive to etching or marking, if the bullet itself does not mushroom/fragment/have a jacket seperation, the rifling would obscure any etching placed on the sides of the bullet, the only location with enough surface area for etching…
Does everything you own have a utilitarian purpose?
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=478916&highlight=assault
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=267629&highlight=assault
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=275265&highlight=assault
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=275202&highlight=assault
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=478794&highlight=assault+weapons
This is a start. To answer your question here will start a big hijack of this thread.
I’m not trying to be unreasonable, you asked and I answered. I own them because I want to and I can. That should be good enough. I do not feel that I have to justify my purchase and ownership of my firearms any more than I need to justify the fact that my cars can exceed the federal speed limit by 2x or that my PC has more computing power than I will ever need or that my satellite TV has more channels than I will ever watch.
If you are looking for a utilitarian need, other than target shooting, self defense, and wasting gobs of money on ammo, I can’t think of a thing. That does not in any way diminish my needs or desires to own such things.
Get a life.
I know it is inconvenient for you that you can’t go back now and change what you posted, but there it is.
You’ve described gun owners as “assholes” and expressed a desire to punish them.
I already have a life, thanks. You, it seems, need administrator privileges at this board.
I will give you the benefit of the doubt on this and take the time to explain the whole process to you. Don’t make me regret it.
In 1934 the United States government passed the National Firearms Act. This required any weapon with the capability of full-automatic fire to be registered and a $200 tax paid in order to own one. It also required the approval of local law enforcement, limited barrel lengths, silencers, destructive devices, and caliber (anything over .50 caliber is considered a destructive device). In order to avail yourself of one of these weapons, in addition to the Chief Law Enforcement Officer sign-off, you must also get fingerprinted, photographed, and have a background check completed. You must also make the investment into the weapon before you can legally take possession of it because the weapon itself must be registered.
With me so far? Good. In 1968 Congress passed the Gun Control Act of 1968, which forbade the import of automatic weapons in addition to limiting the import of handguns on the basis of “functional characteristics” by implementing an import point system. Each feature has a certain point value, those that do not have the right combination of features cannot be imported. Anyway, this cut the number of automatic weapons by a great deal, as domestically produced machine guns were now the only new weapons available (although the old imported ones were grandfathered in).
Finally, in 1986 Congress passed the Firearm Owners Protection Act. A last minute addition to the FOPA was the “Hughes Amendment”. This closed the NFA registry to any weapon produced after May 19, 1986, thus ensuring that there would be a finite number of automatic weapons available to the general public. This in turn distorted the market and made automatic weapons stupendously expensive. Between that and the requirements to own one, few people other than collectors ever own an automatic weapon. They are as controlled, if not more so, than anything in the United States and are not a crime factor. For the purposes of this discussion, they don’t exist.
I take that back. They do exist in the minds of gun-control advocates, who conflate a genuine “assault rifle”, a genuine machine gun, with “assault weapons”, which are nothing more than semi-automatic look-alikes. They do not have the ability to fire more than one shot with a single pull of the trigger, thus they are functionally the same as any other semi-automatic hunting rifle, they simply “look” menacing and are therefore worthy of being banned.
That’s the story.
I’m going to address this more fully.
Simply put, we don’t need them, any more than anybody needs more than one television or they need an iPod. They are owned because they can be owned, and frankly, they are quite enjoyable to operate, albeit expensive to buy and regulated out the wazoo.
I took the time to explain this yet again because I’m hoping that you might actually read this and understand why we see gun-control proposals as agenda-driven nonsense.
I’ve definitely described “some” gun owners as assholes, and I do think that many of them deserve to be punished. I have specific ones in mind, too. So go ahead and scream “YOU SAID IT! YOU SAID IT!” to your heart’s content. It’s obvious you’re cherry-picking the thread to serve your own agenda.
Airman Doors
I thank you for the serious explaination and I read every word of it.
So if I am reading you right, thse weapons are NOT involved in crime and are not any sort of social problem. Is that right?
You said that these are enjoyable to operate. Where would you do that and what are you shooting at?
Do you envision using these in any practical way as in for protection?
I can understand the position of the collector. I have no doubt that a person who is a collector and is fond of military items may consider these items as highly collectible. I have no problem with that. Is it necessary to then have these weapons in full operating condition if they are only for collecting? Is there some mechanical or technical process that can be utilized on the weapon so that it is not usable but still worthy to be owned by a collector.
Inasmuch as we have to live with current decisions by the SCOTUS you are correct. It is what it is now like it or not. That said your handwaving it away with “don’t like it but accept it” is not fair. Sounds to me like you did not buy that as sufficient when Miller was cited prior to Heller.
The Heller decision was 5-4 and indeed it is a weird contortion. Certainly there was a vocal dissent. To suppose this was decided on diehard logic and not simply the vagaries of a favorable court which could change in the future is naive.
Glad you think the decision is ironclad and not in dispute and could not possibly change in the future with a different court.
You’re welcome.
With the exception of people who break the law and illegally modify weapons to fire in a full-automatic mode, they are not a problem. Legally possessed automatic weapons have been used in exactly two murders since 1934, one of which involved a contract killing by a police officer. They are statistically a non-issue.
The only time I have ever fired an automatic weapon was at a range, and while my friend owned the weapon I had to pay for the ammunition. It wasn’t cheap.
One ohter thing about ownership: if you own one, you must have the paperwork, complete with tax stamp, with you at all times when you have possession of the weapon. Even if you legally own one, if you are caught firing one without the paperwork nearby you are committing a felony.
No.
Why would a collector want one if it is non-functional? Why would a weapon that has no impact on crime need to be disabled? With regard to automatic weapons, they are so tightly controlled that to suggest that they should be controlled further is tilting at windmills. It simply makes no sense.
First off - I do not need to justify my purchases to you. But leaving that aside, you are right off the bat confusing automatic and semiautomatic firearms. Automatic weapons are already strictly controlled, and semiautomatic firearms for military and civilian use frankly only differ in certain cosmetic or utilitarian features that make little difference to the operation to the firearm.
I can purchase a semiautomatic deer rifle in many stores - it looks like a deer rifle and shoots like one. This is a representative example. The military version of these would have things like flash suppressors and bayonet lugs - these look scary to many people but have little impact on how the rifle performs in actual shooting - this did not prevent a misguided ban on such weapons based solely on these cosmetic features during the Clinton Administration.
This particular rifle is available in a range of calibers - these are roughly equivalent to military rounds. In fact, the 30-06 was used as the standard American military round from 1906 through the 1970s, and the .300 Winchester Magnum is used in some sniper rifles, notably by the Bundeswehr. So banning “military rounds” or their equivalent would essentially ban all useful ammunition.
So there you go. I hope this has been helpful to you in evaluating your beliefs on this particular subject.