Again, I have no problem drawing the line elsewhere to pull such firearms within the scope of the law.
Oh sure. And all you need to make a nuclear weapon is some Uranium, a few wires, some kind of metal case and a plane to drop it from. Easy.
Where you getting all this straw, Mints?
What does muzzle velocity have to do with the gun, anyways? If you want to have a limit as to what velocity a gun can fire the bullets at, you ban the high velocity rounds, not the guns capable of firing them.
-I think we’ve already established that Mints, but the topic involves why such weapons deserve special treatment by forcing an idiot law to be extended.
I believe it’s already been mentioned that handguns are involved in considerably more crimes than any of the weapons listed in the AWB law, yet said law ignored handguns completely (with the exception of the Tec-9, a very large and unweildy handgun) in favor of disallowing cosmetic features that you yourself have acknowledged don’t affect the lethality of the weapon.
To add yet another tangent, I assume you’re also for the proposed California ban on .50 BMG rifles?
They kind of go together, you know. The weapon is designed to fire a certain caliber round with a certain size cartridge. It’s primarily the size of the cartridge that determines how much force is imparted to the round when it is fired (although the type of gunpowder and how it’s loaded can also have some effect).
Doc, the name thing has become tiresome. As have you.
What makes you think I’m going to do your homework?
You made the claim, go ahead and prove it.
-Couldn’t agree more, Mints.
You’re telling us that the Government banned those weapons due to their apparently-greater-than-usual lethality, but you don’t want to explain why they specifically exempted other firearms with near-idential mechanical function and caliber, in favor of the latter’s lack of ugly cosmetic features.
You further say that one of the reasons those ugly weapons were banned (another reason not enumerated or even hinted at in the law) is ease of conversion to full auto, yet you can’t explain how said conversions are so easy.
(Just as a little clarification, your quoted explanation is just as detailed as saying “eggs, butter, some flour, a hot oven and viola`! A cake!”)
Very tiresome indeed.
I certainly don’t think I implied that – I remember enough high school physics to recall F=ma – but even if I did, you overlook the point: namely, that there are plenty of non-banned rifles that impart the same degree of power to a bullet as non-banned rifles. Whether that relative lethality is a function of large caliber, high escape velocity, or some combination of the two is irrelevant. The point is that the lethality of a bullet fired from similar banned and non-banned weapons is the same.
And so the next logical question is, why are these two types of weapons treated differently? Why is a Ruger 14 OK but an AR-15 isn’t? The only real differences appear to be cosmetic: the AR-15 looks nastier than the Ruger 14.
And you get the same jarring silliness when you consider the act’s other provisions. Why is it OK for me to have a folding stock, but not OK if I add a bayonet lug to the same weapon?
Yes, yes, I know: you’re perfectly willing to “draw the line elsewhere to pull such firearms within the scope of the law.” Well, great. But we’re not discussing some hypothetical future law. We’re discussing this law and whether or not it makes any damned sense at all.
This law is bad policy even if you tend to favor strong gun control. Because this law draws distinctions between particular types of weapons on non-performance related bases, and because this law draws distinctions based on gun features that have, at best, an extremely tangential relationship to their actual lethality, it undermines respect for the law generally. The law should make at least a little bit of sense. When the law commands our fellow citizens to traipse through the looking glass, our fellow citizens are bound to become more cynical about the institutions of government. And that to my mind is not a good thing.
How on earth can you claim that I “overlook” that when I’ve specifically acknowledged it multiple times? Sheesh.
True, but you’re only looking at the bullet. Me, I’m looking at the individual bullet, how many friends it has in the clip, how quickly they can be effectively fired, etc. As I said above, the muzzle velocity of assault weapons is only one of the features that make them disproportionately dangerous, and other weapons do not generally share those additional features.
Forests and trees, guys.
I also note that minty green has declined to elaborate on the distinction he draws between the ‘incidence’ and ‘societal cost’ of crime.
Banning the very high velocity rounds will have more effect on the small-caliber “varmint” guns, say .22L or smaller. Those suckers really move, due to the extremely long-range shots they have to take to hit a gopher or prairie dog, who are notoriously skittish.
-None of which are referenced in nor affected by the Law for which this entire topic is based. They are your straw men, not the law’s.
Well, except the magazine capacity, the limitation of which, for example, didn’t seem to affect the so-called “Beltway Sniper” last year.
I believe we finally have enough straw to make a whole bale, guys!
A) Define “disproportionally dangerous”. It’s already been noted that handguns are used in considerably more crimes than so-called “assault rifles”, yet you say the latter is somehow more dangerous.
B) Muzzle velocity is a factor of the cartridge alone. The only affect the firearm itself can have on it is by barrel length.
You seem to be particularly worried about the .223 Rem of the AR-15/M-16. Okay, how about This? It’s totally legal by today’s laws, including the '94 AWB in discussion. It’s only a little more than a third the length of the AR it’s based on, fires the same cartridge, has the same effective semiauto rate of fire, and only a slightly diminished muzzle velocity due to the shorter barrel.
But, since it has no stock to fold, no “flash hider”, no bayonet lug, and no way to attach a grenade launcher, it’s totally legal to own and operate.
If the '94 Law, as you keep repeating, were indeed interested in controlling esoterics like “lethality” or “excessive dangerousness”, why isn’t this pistol banned?
The fact of the matter is, the law had nothing to do with what you think it does, no matter how many times you repeat it. It concerned itself with cosmetic features and only cosmetic features.
And, just as an FYI, that same .223 Remington can be had in thousands of firearms, including the single-shot Thompson-Center Contender, a rare Brazillian-made six-shot revolver, (!) Savage, Remington, Winchester and Browning rifles, in semiautomatic, bolt-action and even falling-block and pump styles.
If, as you purport, the law had indeed to do with muzzle energy, power, lethality, excessive dangerousness, whatever, those guns as well might have been effected, but they are not. The closest analogies to the evil black guns (semiauto, detachable mags, etc) are in fact specifically exempted.
Thus I can only conclude, your protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, that the law was in fact soley concerned with irrelevant cosmetic features.
Which in turn makes it a bad law, bad politics and worse “science” and should be allowed to sunset.
Here we go again. What makes the AR-15 “disproportionately dangerous” relative to the Ruger 14? What “additional features” does the AR-15 possess that the Ruger 14 does not that makes it banworthy?
For that matter, why is the Tec-9 banworthy but any number of other far more effective handguns are not?
Hell Luc, right now I’ll settle for hearing just how those “easy” full-auto conversions are done.
Mints quotes another poster and says:
And accepts that as prima facie evidence.
Oh sure, I just have to “machine a new sear”, which is like saying I just have to string some words together in order to write a bestseller.
Okay. What’s it look like? What shape? How long? What dimensions? What material? Where do we drill the pin holes? What diameter to the pins need to be? How wide is it? How does the bolt trip it? Does the sear have to clear other components as it cycles?
The AR bolt is usually about 52 Rockwell C- do we have the sear softer or harder? If the sear is harder, it’ll wear the bolt. If the sear is softer, it’ll wear instead of the bolt.
Where do we get springs the right shape? Will the springs be strong enough?
Okay, after all that and we’ve made it- a blatantly illegal procedure, mind you- and we go to test it. It fires one shot and the hammer follows the bolt down. (a pretty common problem that the backyard hammer-and-chisel type “gunsmiths” run across when working on semiautos.) So, what’s wrong? Is the disconnector spring strong enough? Whoops, we forgot a disconnector! Nobody said we needed one of those…
So what’s a disconnector look like? How do we stick it in the system and have it… you know, disconnect? (Else the full-auto would continue until the magazine went dry, as opposed to when the shooter releases the trigger.)
Oh, wait, let’s just buy the parts!
Well, we could, except that FA-capable firearms are heavily controlled, and having had further civilian production banned since '86, are priced astronomically. People who have the parts, typically have them in the gun, not sittng around loose.
In the gun, you can (after paying a $200 tax and jumping through six to ten months of federal red tape, fingerprints and background checks) buy a compete weapon. If you bought the parts, each piece is then registered and tracked as if it were a complete gun. Meaning that you’d get the privledge of filing the paperwork, paying the $200 tax and waiting six to ten months each for the bolt, the FA sear, the disconnector, the springs, and whatever else is specific to the FA version of that firearm.
That’s about $1,400 just in ATF taxes, not counting the cost of the parts themselves, to convert an AR to full-auto.
Oh, wait, we’re not done yet! The M-16 parts will not drop into a civvie AR receiver. The ATF had the manufacturers specifically change the internals slightly many years ago ('round about the end of the Vietnam War, as I recall) in order to intentionally make it difficult or impossible to “drop in” the M-16 parts.
So, now that we’ve paid maybe $2,500 in taxes and parts cost and waited three or four years, we now have to pay another ATF tax as an FFL-licensed manufacturer in order to have the receiver modified to accept the parts.
Again, assuming we know where to drill the holes or mill the slots or whatever it is we need to do. Minty apparently knows, since he says it’s really easy.
Oh, wait, such manufacture/conversion was banned in '86. Phooey.
Well, let’s just go ahead and do it and just not tell anyone! Except for the records of you buying the parts, the fingerprints and the background checks, that might almost work. For about ten minutes.
Can we get any non-registered parts off the black market? Well, it’s not impossible, but the Secret Service and the ATF have been very effective against stopping such transactions, and considering that the parts in question have been strictly controlled since the day they were invented, it’s not like there’s a vast “pool” of them floating about.
They’re also not the sort of thing you put out a classified ad in Shotgun News looking for, y’know? 
But boy, it’s so easy to convert these things that they’re disproportionally dangerous and thus have to be regulated or banned, right Mints?
-It’s simply more of Mints’ straw. The Tec-9 never had a bayonet mount, a way to attach a stock (let alone a folding one) or a flash hider. It did have that evil threaded barrel though.
The Tec-9 was an ugly, oversized black gun that fired 9mm semiautomatically. However, things like the Desert Eagle, an ugly, oversized black gun that shoots the far more powerful .44 Magnum semiautomatically, weren’t even mentioned in the law, as either banned nor specifically excluded.
But the Tec has that evil threaded barrel, that makes it disproportionally more dangerous… in some vague manner that ** Mints** either cannot or will not explain.
The threaded barrel thing is another bit of idiocy: The guns can’t have a threaded barrel that can allow, among other things, a “barrel extension”…
So things like a folding stock, which can make the gun marginally shorter, are illegal, and on the other hand, barrel extensions which can make the gun marginally longer are also illegal.
Go figure.
Doc: Yeah, I know. The Tec-9 is the weirdest thing to be sitting on that list. I swear I think Congress compiled that list by watching Miami Vice reruns.
Yeah. And you’ll note that I have not called for banning high-velocity rounds, nor do I believe they should be banned or regulated or anything like that.
Another tree, fellas. That forest is juuuuussst past your sight.
And Doc, get over youself, dude. I never claimed that it was simple to convert an AR-15 to full auto. That, to borrow a term your brain seems stuck on, is a straw man. However, it is indisputable that it is easier to convert an AR-15 or most other “assault weapons” to full auto than it is for your graden-variety rifle. And as attested to by Johnny L.A., who strongly implies that he has actually done it (see p.3), “[a]ctually, it is quite as easy as that.”
I’m taking his word and his experience over your childish name-playing and snotty ranting. You and I, amigo, we’re through.
Anyone reminded of Dr. Evil when one of his associates questions him. Zip it.
You’re as stuck on the forest-trees thing as Doc is on straw.
Look, we get your argument. You’re saying that there is a combination of features in assault weapons that, in toto, make them unacceptably dangerous, and that no single such feature in isolation, standing alone, makes a gun banworthy. We get it, m’kay?
What we’re now saying is this: prove it. Prove that such a dangerous combination exists in banned weapons but not in non-banned weapons. You mentioned the power of the rifle, as measured by the combination of ammunition caliber and muzzle velocity. OK, fine, to which we respond that there are several other rifles with that same mass/speed firing combination. An AR-15 is comparable to a Ruger 14, for example. OK, so now we ask: what additional features does the AR-15 have that the Ruger 14 lacks that make it banworthy?
And to that you have no answer. That, or you just blithely assume that one gun has (to cite one example) a higher effective rate of fire than the other with no evidence to back that assertion up.
This is a bad law. It is badly drafted and guaranteed to be ineffective. While I admittedly do not share its drafters’ love of gun control, if I did I would still be annoyed by this law because it is so poorly put together. If I was concerned, as you apparently are, about guns that fire very powerful rounds (either due to caliber size or muzzle velocity or both) and have a high effective rate of fire, I would want the law to target weapons on those grounds. That would make the law address my concerns in an effective and meaningful fashion. I am amazed that you would defend this kind of shoddy workmanship on the part of Congress.