Note to self: pick up helmet and Kevlar on way home from work.
:rolleyes: right back at you. Can you point me to one person who’s said in this thread that gun ownership should be restricted to the government?
??
You don’t appear to have the slightest goddamn idea of my point
MY point is that training and licensing firearms similarly to but somewhat more strictly than cars (in which they are in the same order of magnitude with regard to deadliness)–including legislation whereby all guns are re-registered every year and gun owners pay a nominal license upkeep fee and retest on the more deadly firearms if they hold such licenses, and gun owners must pass a skills test similar to a driving test in scope and difficulty, and also including legislation making unsafe storage an automatic crime if unsafely stored arms are involved in an accident or stolen, and also including legislation such that crimes committed by an unreported stolen gun make the gun owner an automatic accessory to those crimes–would be a much better and less insane solution than “ban all guns because some people are idiots.”
“Ban all guns because some people are idiots” is functionally equivalent in my mind to “ban all <anything more dangerous than nerf> because some people are idiots”, and cars are among those anything. Private planes, for that matter. At some point you can argue that only professional chefs should have truly pointy kitchen knives (and by “you” I mean “Great Britain was kicking this around a few years back, IIRC”).
Got it in one! They also threw them for distance. You can do a lot of things with a clay disc.
As far as I’m concerned, targets in general most likely existed before anything specifically built as a projectile weapon–you don’t need to design a rock to throw, but you might need to set up a rock on another one in such a way that it’ll make a satisfying “thunk” and fall over when you throw a rock at it and hit it.
Borderline. He’s *asking *about general public access, but that’s not the same thing as saying that *no one *but the government should have access to guns.
Start races. Signal for help. Throw lines over long distances. Ivan, you really don’t know a thing about guns, do you? Why are you even discussing this?
I doubt that starter pistols or flare guns are what anyone is thinking about here, and you’re being deliberately obtuse.
I actually am vaguely annoyed by this statement, given that it’s not commonly understood that blank rounds (like fired from some starter pistols) are potentially lethal at short range. For that matter, a flare gun will probably hurt whatever you’re pointing it at pretty badly.
Frankly, I’d like them to be treated like any other gun and not treated as trivial because they weren’t purpose-built for putting holes in various classes of object.
In a perfect world, private people should have have the need for guns - Full stop.
However, I can understand, that once they are out in the public, they have to be - some people are just mad enough to use them for robberies, etc… meaning bad stuff in general.
Your point is, to regulate them better, sure I’m getting this.
Where did I say, that they do not need to be regulated?
Why are you arguing with me?
And what else is a gun good for, other than shooting?
Sure, people need protecting and some use it for sports.
Don’t you think that 13.000 gun related accidents are a bit high?
I know it’s a wiki link, but look at it anyhow.
Actually, the accident rate is 600 in 2007, gun deaths are overwhelmingly homicides. I would argue that we need to address the causes of homicide as strongly or more strongly than the methods used to commit any given plurality of homicides.
Also, Canada’s firearm death rate is what, 30% of the US? Last data I can find (which is from the mid 1990s, same as your wiki cite), has 30% of Canadian households and 40% of American households owning firearms. The problem here is clearly not “access to guns”.
Especially when you figure that the highest homicide rates tend to happen in the places most likely to ban some or all guns outright–that is, in the urbanized centers of large cities.
Tying it back to the OP, we don’t appear to have a huge problem with accidental gun deaths in this country. We may have a “gun violence” problem, but I’m pretty sure given our comparative rates of violence and gun ownership with Canada, we actually appear to just have a “violence” problem.
Oh, certainly, they have the *potential *to cause injury; but *not to the same degree *as a gun designed for actually shooting things.
No argument here, but can we extend this to my clay shooting 12-gauge (with #8 target shot that might seriously annoy a squirrel at point blank range as the only ammo I have in the house) not being in the same class as an AK-47?
And AN AK-47, M249 and M16 not being in the same class as an AR-15.
Aren’t we covering that end of it in the Mexican gun smuggling thread?
Sure. And a U.S.-legal semi-automatic AK-47 isn’t in the same class as an illegal, fully automatic one, either.
Probably, I am avoiding that thread though. All the same, it bears restating.
I was under the (probably mistaken) assumption that like the AR platform, there’s a separate designation for a semiautomatic AK in the USA. Come to think of it though, I’d have probably heard of it by now.
Typically what I see is that semi-auto AKs are referred to by their manufacturers/sellers by manufacturer model number in official sales literature, and then called AK-47s in general use. For example, I’ve seen people in day-to-day usage refer to both the Arsenal Inc. SA M-7 of the Century Arms WASR-10 (which is technically an AKM clone) as “AK-47s”. It’s not as common a distinction to make as the AR-15/M-16 differentiation, probably because far fewer people in the US have laid hands on an actual AK-47 vs. an actual M-16 or M-4.
Most AKs sold in the US are given a designation depending on which country they’re from, e.g. Hungarian AMD 65, Yugoslavian Zastava M70, etc. Some of them are AK-47 based, some AK-74, some AKM, and possibly RPK. Usually the AK is just for advertising purposes.
Also, things like the vz. 58 and Saiga are referred to as “AK-47” even though they are decidedly not, because they fire 7.62x39mm.
ETA: Curse you Zeriel!!!
I dont pay so much attention to AK variants in the USA. It’s an obvious and giant gap in my firearms knowledge…
Thanks for the info guys.