By clip, you mean a magazine. Especially important when talking about bolt action rifles, they’re totally seperate things. The vast majority of bolt actions rifles ever made have magazines. Generally, they’re not detachable, they’re integral and attached to the receiver. Typically, the only rifles without magazines (where a round is fed into the chamber) are special target rifles.
I am guessing that this is the report that the BBC talks about. And it does prove my point, I think.
The overall murder rate in England (from 81-96), remained remarkably flat. Meaning, taking away the firearms from the 99.99% of people that aren’t murderers, didn’t reduce murder.
The murder rate in America for the same period happily swings all over the place, proving something, I am sure.
Oh, and what horrors did this evil killing machine inflict? 1 death. Sure, it’s tragic, but tell me what firearm a person can’t use to inflict 1 death?
So you didn’t even freak out about a lot of people being killed, but you saw ‘ak-47’ and freaked out.
Would you have made this post if they used a handgun?
These debates always piss me off, because both sides overlook the obvious solution: banning teenagers.
I should point out that a Colt .45 is a semi-automatic pistol.
That’s about how spooky it is. Yep. Pull the trigger (Cock it the first time by working the slide) and it fires. Pull the trigger again, it fires again. That sort of rifle is a lot easier to catch a running varmit with because you don’t have to move from the sights to reload or what have you.
And if you know Scylla, you know, sometimes the only solution is a rifle. Specially for nazi groundhogs. Or, in my experience, rabid dogs. You don’t want near them. You want them dead quickly and efficiently. Or rats down by the ducks, too.
You’re right, of course. I’m not from a big target shooting or hunting family, and I don’t happen to have any guns myself (however, if I did, my college would be happy to hold them for me.)
As a result, what little shooting experience I do have is target shooting in Boy Scouts. We used .22s, of course, none of which had magazines. Most of them were fed one round at a time right into the chamber by hand. I, since I shoot lefty (I’m right-handed but left-eyed) and all the rifles were right-handed bolt-action, got the one that had either a clip or a fully-detachable magazine (if there is a difference), holding five rounds.
Fenris, thanks for the lesson. I truly did not know the difference between many types of guns or how they work. I had always just assumed that any firearm with the word “assault” in its description must be extremely fast and powerful. Shows what I know.
Ayway, while I definitely see where WorldEater is coming from, I’m leaning toward DocNickel’s line of thinking. Putting aside the endless gun debate in the US, the fact is that pretty much anyone who wants a gun can get one, legally or not. What I always say to myself after hearing about incidents like these is a basic variation of “Won’t somebody think of the children?!” Trite, I know, and maybe it is splitting hairs, but those guns did not get up of their own volition and wander into that school. They were brought in by human beings, kids in this case, but I’m not sure that really changes anything. What is it with people? Since when is it a good idea to take out your own problems on others by killing them? I think the real issue here is what causes people to decide blowing away their peers is a viable solution? And can it actually be prevented?
I read all about the witch-hunts that Columbine inspired, where every black-clad social misfit was suddenly eyed with suspicion, and kids were forced to go through metal detectors and have their bags searched. I don’t like the idea of turning a school into a prison, and I’m not sure creating that environment is really helping the situation in any way. And I’ve posted at length about my own feelings on the ridiculous knee-jerk reactions some people have in placing blame on everything from TV to fashion trends. But I have to ask: is this really anything new? Has such violence always been going on, but it’s only in the last few decades or so that technology has provided more reliable ways of killing numbers of people at once? Were there at one time disgruntled folks picking up their blunderbusses and heading down to the local inn, but because of limited technology could only do minimal damage? And this assault rifle business is just the natural progression of a disturbingly common impulse? Or has something about the way we live, be it society or education, or what have you, changed in some significant way that suddenly shooting up your school or place of work starts to sound like a workable plan?
And though it will likely get me flamed, I do have to ask sort of the same question WorldEater did: are guns really all that necessary in normal civilian life? I’m not trying to be snarky- I really am looking for serious answers to this. I guess because of my own particular worldview, it’s hard for me to see the point. Any tool can be a weapon, but not all weapons are tools. A knife is a tool, and is used for far more things than just stabbing people. But a gun was designed for one function and one only: to kill. You can’t whittle with a gun, you can’t slice vegetables with one, and despite some attempts, they cannot be used safely as hammers. So why guns? Again, I’m really looking for serious answers here, not just being rude. Thanks.
What did cause internet porn? Was it floating around in the ether waiting for computers to be invented?
Divorcing the means of violence from the act of violence is a cop out and everyone knows it. I am sure GW Bush would have killed all those Iraquis anyway by sheer force of will. It isn’t bombs that kill people…
Well, assuming one follows your singular-purpose reasoning, keep in mind that killing a “bad guy”- IE, self defense against rape, robbery or murder- is in itself a rather worthwhile reason.
As is “to kill for food”. Others have debated about hunting one’s own meat, (and even the ethics of eating meat in the first place) so I’ll not rehash that. But, hunting is still a legal, accepted, and in some cases, very much needed activity. (For animal population controls, among others.)
To open the idea up somewhat, what is wrong with an accuracy competition? More often known as a target shoot? It takes certain skill to place a bullet in a target correctly and repeatably- some people enjoy that sort of thing, some don’t. For that matter, some like the sport of Curling, and some don’t.
The competitive sports such as IPSC and PPC shoots- among a large host of others, including trap shooting, cowboy events and long-distance Creedmoor-type events- often involve hundreds of competitors, almost all of whom (with the exceptions typically being police officers or military personell) have no interest or desire in shooting a human being (even though some of the targets may indeed be human shilouettes.)
Again the onus is not on the average shooter to justify their choice of pastime or sport, it’s up to the non-shooter to give a valid reason to have currently-legal-to-own mechanical devices confiscated and banned.
Porn, as I’m sure you’re aware, predates the computer by, oh, a few millenia. Just check the mosaics on the walls of the… let’s just call them fornicatoriums… at Herculaneum.
However, to answer your question- how did the porn get there? Did, as insinuated by World Eater’s assumption of blaming the inanimate object, your PC walk in while you and your significant other were amorously engaged, snap a few digital photos and upload them to the internet? Were computers, as insinuated by ratty, designed only for disseminating porn?
Hunting? Target shooting? Self defense?
No, but are guns designed only for disseminating bullets?
And a hammer was designed only for driving in (And sometimes removing) nails. What’s your point?
I’ll wait until you answer the question you asked.
DocNickel, I hear you on sporting/hunting. Thank you for the reply. I agree that guns can have other uses that have nothing to do with killing people. While I personally don’t support things like trophy hunting, I realize there are many reasons for hunting which are legitimate and even necessary.
DocNickel* said:
Maybe this was a poor choice of words. I didn’t mean to insinuate anything. I fully admit my own ignorance, and for better or worse, I’m learning a lot in this particular thread. Obviously porn existed long before computers, just as people were being killed long before the invention of firearms. I guess what I mean to say is that guns seem to have fewer non-violent uses than many other weapons, which seems to make them more dangerous and threatening.
I’m really not comfortable with firearms- frankly, they scare me. But I realize that banning all guna is not the solution. Like the bumper sticker says, if you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have them. Your average gun owner is (probably; I have no experience and no cites to prove this) a safe and responsible individual who would no more shoot up a public place than anyone else. It’s the marginal individuals, and those who obtain firearms illegally that are the problem, or so it would seem. But how can they be seperated? Can a law be written or changed to insure the protection of the rights of responsible individuals while at the same time restrict the gun-owning rights of irresponsible individuals? I doubt it. There’s no way to predict who will go off the deep end and start firing into a crowd before it happens. So what can be done? It looks to like there are few choices: severely restrict everyone’s gun-owning rights in the hopes of preventing that fringe from getting hold of guns; or relax on the anti-gun stance and accept that accidents will happen. Obviously this is very oversimplified, but I think it makes a good shorthand. It’s the same with any potentially dangerous object, and I suppose the cost/benefit analysis will differ for everyone. For instance, thousands of people are killed in car accidents every year. Banning cars would fix this right up, but the cost of getting rid of cars would be so enormous as to make the plan unworkable. Does this hold true for banning firearms, or certain firearms, or certain people’s rights to own firearms?
I can’t answer this question. I don’t know if anyone can. But I’m more than willing to hear various opinions on the topic.
Elimination of minor predators and target shooting, here. Can’t sneak up on the little buggers, and can’t trap them.
Keep in mind, we’ve had this same debate 400 times before in GD. Feel free to search if you want to see most of the basic arguments covered.
ratty, I’m not sure if the pit is the right place for your question, but here’s one of those “various opinions” you were looking for.
I see firearms in two groups, with some overlap. One is “tools”, and the other is “weapons”.
Off the top of my head, handguns, submachineguns, “assault rifles”, sawed-off shotguns, and the newer combat shotguns aren’t, to my mind, tools. You can use them for varmint control, hunting, opening tomato juice cans, etc., but they’re not designed for that.
I question the utility of having a lot of them floating around.
I could beat somebody to death with a toaster. If I wanted to take an easier way around the problem, I could take a skeet gun or a deer rifle and shoot them with it. I’m not convinced that there is no difference between those things and an MP5.
-A “weapon” is by definition an object used to inflict a wound or injury. A baseball bat is just a baseball bat until you swing it at someones’ head, at which point it (the bat, not his head) becomes a weapon. An Anschutz Olympic biathalon rifle was never designed for anything except accurately punching holes in paper. But were you to aim that at another person, it stops being a piece of sporting equipment and becomes a weapon.
The same can be said of rocks, chair legs, car antennae or broken beer bottles. Said bottle on the floor is merely litter. Weilded maliciously- and that’s the key to this thread- it’s a weapon.
This is true of all inanimate objects. They are not dangerous in and of themselves, but used with malicious intent, anything can become a weapon.
Then you should realize that is a phobia, an irrational fear. The term I hear most commonly used is hopolophobia, or the irrational fear of firearms. A gun cannot simply leap off the counter and shoot a person of it’s own volition, it is simply a lump of machined metal very little different in creation and manufacture from a carburetor or an electric drill.
Do you fear a gun in the hands of a police officer? Would you fear a firearm in the hands of your grandfather?
A shotgun in the hands of Eric Klebold was evil, yet the dozens of shotguns in the hands of the sheriffs and SWAT officers were benign.
Why was that? They were, in most cases, even the same brand and make of shotgun, or at least the same gauge. What was the difference?
You need no citations, you need only listen to the news. There are an estimated one hundred and eighty million privately-owned firearms in the United States, or very roughly about two for every three citizens.
How many, numerically, did you hear about used maliciously, today? How about yesterday? So far this year?
What percentage, statistically, of those 180,000,000 guns, were used in crimes today? A tenth of a percent? That would be one-point-eight million shootings. We can probably assume that such numbers would see a little airtime on the news, even on FOX.
Even eighteen thousand deaths via firearm per year (and to get that, we need to lump in even police shootings and suicides) is one-ten-thousandth of one percent.
Meaning that in any given year, 99.9999% of all firearm owners are safe and responsible.
(Numbers ballpark and approximated, of course. Please feel free to look up the actual statistics.)
Very much so. Theft is already illegal, as is possessing a firearm in a drug transaction, being a felon in posession of a firearm, and threatening another person with a firearm. Murder and assault are already illegal as well.
If laws against murder have not stopped killings, how would laws against some of the tools used to do so stop them?
Ah, there’s the rub. As already noted, being a felon already makes it illegal for you to own a firearm. Trafficking in drugs, being under a certain age- as those in the original posts’s linked article certainly were- and other factors already preclude legal firearm ownership.
If one passes a law to prohibit all from owning a firearm, why would that have any effect on those who already flout the law? Traffiking in cocaine and heroin- both of which must be imported from countries with less-strict controls- is very much illegal throughout the US. If we’ve made it illegal, conduct regular searches and raids to confiscate it, and yet it can still be found on just about any streetcorner, how does one expect a law “banning” firearms to work?
How about like the laws banning firearms in Britain, which has, directly or indirectly, resulted in an increase in gun-involved crime?
Those are surely not the only choices. A middle ground, realistically, would be to simply stop wasting taxpayer time and congressional effort with further laws which would only impact those that follow the law (note I didn’t say to repeal any, or to start handing guns out like condoms at health clinics, or other hyperbole) and instead spend some of that money on expanded firearms safety courses.
The anti-gunners assume that such courses are, of course, “indoctrination into the gun cult”, and fight such measures fiercely- and yet they (rightly) bemoan the inevitable firearm accident (as also noted in the OP’s linked article) as evidence that we simply need to get rid of all guns, rather than educate the kids to treat them as the tools they are, and not as toys or props from the latest cool action movie.
The vast majority of firearms are designed well and safely- an “accident” in all but the most obscure and rare cases is totally due to unsafe handling. “I didn’t know it was loaded” and so forth. Or it “went off” when the owner was ‘cleaning’ it. (The phrase “went off” insinuating that it happened on it’s own, not that the doofus had his finger on the trigger, etcetera.)
Thus, an improvement in firearms safety courses would have an immediate impact in the overall yearly death-by-firearms rate by reducing the most preventable ones, the so-called “accidents”.
Any object can be potentially dangerous. It is that operator that makes it so. Please keep that in mind.
The problem here is that “banning” firearms, besides the real and thorny Constitutional issues, is nigh on impossible. Even if one waved the Magic Wand and erased all guns from within the borders of the US, there are plenty of other countries that make all manner of weaponry. Browning rifles and shotguns are currently made in Belgium and Japan. Magnum Research imports pistols and rifles made in Israel. Most of the Kalashnikovs used in Afghanistan and Iraq were made in Russia, China, South America, Syria or Lebanon, among others. SIGs are made in Switzerland, AUGs and Glocks in Austria, Walthers in Germany.
If we can’t keep out the 200 tons per year of heroin and 500 tons of cocaine and 1,000 tons of marijuana that sneak through our borders, what makes anyone think we could keep out a caseful of true AK-47s, the real full-auto kind? (As opposed to the Chinese-import semiauto lookalike as probably used in the OP.)
It is not unanswerable, there are simply large vocal groups who simply don’t want to hear the answer. Their answer is typically based on flowery idealism- If we simply ban these all with the stroke of a pen, they’ll simply vanish, no one would possibly consider flouting this law, and all of you will be safe.
The world doesn’t work that way. One can keep hoping it does, it eventually will, or it can at least be bent to conform, or one can acknowledge the truth, warts and bad breath and all, and work within reality to actually make things happen.
I wonder how many shootings have occurred at private schools compared to public schools?
I’ve got one more answer for the uses of firearms - stress relief. I’m serious. Nothing relaxes me more than the near-meditative act of blasting tiny little holes into innocent pieces of paper. A saturday afternoon spent at the range with a coupl of hundred rounds of ammo erases an entire week’s (or several weeks’) worth of stress and anxiety.
For those who are skeptical, try it out. There are, of course, the ritualistic aspects - laying out the equipment, setting up the target, loading the magazine, taking the proper stance, etc. Then comes the breath and fine motor control aspects. Finally, the synthesis of each and every part of my body working together to perform one (seemingly) simple task - proper base and balance, proper sight alignment, proper support of the firearm (be it rifle or pistol), and timing to shoot just as the sights are passing through the bull.
I know that some who are anti-gun will not understand how something they see as so violent an act can be so calming, but I truly am more relaxed after shooting than after any other activity I’ve tried for relaxation.