And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the pro-gun position in a nutshell. To hell with everyone else, I got guns to play with! Yee haw!
I hate to break this to ya, but tightened supply of a commodity increases its cost in the marketplace. Whether the market is legal or illegal has no effect on that simple equation. Econ 101, dude.
No, that’s tthe definition of value in a marketplace. A risk-benefit analysis has nothing to do with the monetary value of the commodity, except to the extent that greater or lesser cost alternatively increases or decreases the amount of the commodity capapable of posing the relevant risks and conferring the relevant benefits.
That’s certainly a benefit of assault weapons. But remember, you need to weigh the costs and risks against the benefits. And with all due respect to Phoenix Dragon in the other thread, I would suggest that if his fellow student had been armed with an M-16 instead of a .22 long rifle, there would have been a lot more dead kids that day.
Moreover, nothing in the assault weapons ban impacts the ability of ordinary citizens to arm themselves adequately to protect their persons and property. In fact, assault weapons have significantly less utility as a means of self-defense than other firearms. So there you have it–low utility that is easily surpassed by other commodities, and higher costs/risks. Regulate away, Congress.
It’s easy to convert an AR-15 into a full-auto. You need the M-16 hammer, trigger, disconnector, selector and bolt carrier; and you have to machine a “full-auto sear” that consists of a sear, a holder for the sear, a pin and a spring. But you have to have a Class-III license to buy these parts. It is against the law to buy them without a license. It is illegal to manufacture an automatic sear.
An HK or a Mini-14 is more involved. IIRC, you need to have a part or two that you may not legally purchase or make. In addition, you need to do some machining on the receiver. This would not be an “easy” operation.
As Riboflavin said, you can make a submachine-gum from scratch. The WWII-era STEN gun was very cheap and easy to make. Of course, there were government contractors with full machine shops making them, so it’s a relative thing.
You can turn a .22 semi-auto “plinker” into a “machine gun” if you take the time to study how the mechanism works. I heard that a long time ago someone turned a lever-action Winchester into a machine gun.
Or you can mix diesel fuel and fertilizer together to make a bomb.
What a lot of people who want to ban semi-automatic sporting firearms overlook, either intentionally or through ignorance, is that making a machine gun is against the law. It doesn’t matter how easy or hard it is to convert a gun, it’s still against the law.
Nice caricature. The “Yee Haw” was a nice touch. :rolleyes:
Your position in this thread has been pretty bizzare. You keep rambling on about risk-benefit analysis, but as Riboflavin points out, you never really define what risks you’re talking about.
As near as I can tell, you’re saying that regulating Scary Looking Guns ™ will reduce the incidence of crime with Scary Looking Guns. Well, OK, fine. But what you’re completely ignoring is that criminals will just turn to less-regulated Not-So-Scary Looking Guns – guns which are just as powerful, fire just as fast, and are otherwise performance-wise exactly the same as Scary Looking Guns.
In a cost-benefit analysis, you don’t get the benefit you seek, unless that benefit is just a reduction in “crimes with Scary Looking Guns” – hardly a benefit, seeing how, thanks to Non-Scary substitutes, it doesn’t affect gun-related crime overall . A bullet will kill you just as dead regardless of whether the gun has a frickin’ bayonet mount or not.
You would impose costs – and the denial of access to law-abiding gun owners to firearms they enjoy shooting is assuredly a cost – for no meaningful benefit.
If you want to argue that certain types of guns should be banned based on their performance characteristics, I can understand your argument. I’d still most likely oppose you on constitutional and policy grounds, but at least your argument would make sense. But the assault weapons ban is a horse of a different color – it is feelgoodism at its worst, legislation that does no discernable good other than to allow lawmakers to pat themselves on the back.
Actually, I think assault weapons have more utility for self-defense, precisely because they are Scary Looking Guns ™. A home intruder might well be more intimidated by the Scary Looking Gun and run off without a shot having to be fired.
I’m from Texas. What do you want me to say? “Good show”? “I say, what a lovely firearm”? Nope, “yee haw” it is.
The ordinary risks posed by firearms–crime, deaths, injuries, property damage–multiplied by the extra firepower associated with assault weapons.
I’m not overlooking that at all. In fact, I’ve argued above that the line should have been drawn to include those almost-but-not-quite assault weapons as well. Nevertheless, I regard the existing assault weapons ban as a step in the right direction, though obviously less than perfect.
Oh wait, you’re not talking about assault weapon substitutes at all, are you? Are you back to the fallacy that one gun is equivalent to another gun? Nope, sorry, ain’t buyin’ that at all. The increased firepower of assault weapons makes them disproportionately dangerous to the public at large, while at the same time offering no increased social benefits (indeed, they’re generally less useful than other firearms for hunting and self-defense). And while a bullet from an AK-47 will kill a person just as dead as a bullet from a 9mm Glock, that AK-47 is designed to fire a whole lot more bullets a whole lot more accurately than any handgun. That’s why we give assault rifles to soldiers, you know?
You mean people have fun when they go shooting? Gosh, that changes everything!
No, actually, it doesn’t change anything at all. For while it’s a kick in the pants to blast away at bowling pins down at the range, I have a hard time ascribing very much in the way of social benefits to it. Compare it to other forms of recreation. If, for instance, NASCAR was killing thousands of people every year, we’d have it banned in a heartbeat, and quite justifiably. So have fun down at the range, but don’t get the idea that your entertainment in any way offsets the carnage and crime associated with the same tool that enables you to put holes in pieces of paper from a long ways away.
Again, I do not claim that the '95 ban is anywhere near perfect. It is a rough attempt at regulating a rougly-defined category of weapons that poses a disproportionate risk of harm without any increased benefits. I am arguing that the line should be drawn somewhere in that vicinity, not that the line was drawn in the correct spot. If you have some other means of regulating that category of firearms that does not also threaten to take out ordinary hunting rifles and the like, please send a letter to your congressman.
Thereby leaving the home intruder free to home invade another day? My god, what kind of misanthropic monster are you? Shoot the sonofabitch! 
Not quite as easy as that. You also need a lower receiver (which is the serial #'d part and therefore the part ATF considers the gun from a legal standpoint) capable of accepting those parts. AR-15 lowers as manufactured by Colt, for example, differ internally and in sizes/placements of various pins. Even if you had all the parts you listed, you’d still need to do some substantial work on the receiver before it would accept the parts and function as an automatic weapon. Bushmaster lowers are the closest to mil-spec, and even then you still would need to do some very precise drilling in order to install the select-fire trigger group. Converting an AR to an M-16 isn’t quite as simple as “drop in the parts and rock!” FWIW, if you have an old enough Colt AR, it is capable of accepting a “drop in auto sear” that will cause it to fire full-auto only. BATF has been running a sting operation for years offering them for sale in such periodicals as Shotgun News.
Not quite as easy as that. You also need a lower receiver (which is the serial #'ed part and therefore the part ATF considers the gun from a legal standpoint) capable of accepting those parts. AR-15 lowers as manufactured by Colt, for example, differ internally and in sizes/placements of various pins. Even if you had all the parts you listed, you’d still need to do some substantial work on the receiver before it would accept the parts and function as an automatic weapon. Bushmaster lowers are the closest to mil-spec, and even then you still would need to do some very precise drilling in order to install the select-fire trigger group. Converting an AR to an M-16 isn’t quite as simple as “drop in the parts and rock!” FWIW, if you have an old enough Colt AR, it is capable of accepting a “drop in auto sear” that will cause it to fire full-auto only. BATF has been running a sting operation for years offering them for sale in such periodicals as Shotgun News.
And that is the crux of the issue. There is no “extra firepower” associated with “assault weapons,” as that term is defined by the ban. The term describes exclusively cosmetic features. It has nothing to do with caliber size, muzzle velocity, firing accuracy, or firing speed.
I don’t think you fully grasp this. For example, you wrote:**
That AK-47 won’t fire any faster than any other semiautomatic weapon – one bullet per trigger pull (fully automatic weapons are not the subject of the assault weapons ban, and have been highly regulated since the '30s).
And yeah, it’s more accurate than a pistol – most rifles are. Let’s compare apples to apples, m’kay?
Your defense of this silly law is mind-boggling. What you seem to be saying is “we should draw a line, even if that line makes no sense whatsoever.”
Oh, and when you write:**
Cite for the proposition that significant “carnage and crime” is created by assault weapons (as opposed to guns generally)?
And BTW, yes, my entertainment might offset the negative aspects of an activity, if those negative aspects are sufficiently minimal. To use your NASCAR example: some NASCAR drivers have died while racing. Yet we still allow NASCAR races to be run, pretty much wholly on entertainment grounds.
You’re right that NASCAR would be banned if many were dying due to the races. But NASCAR-banners would still have to demonstrate that those deaths were occurring. Similarly, proponents of the assault weapons ban ought to have to demonstrate that many deaths are occuring due to assault weapons, as defined in the act, and not just guns generally.
Who cares about your rate of fire if you’re the only armed person around? As we’ve seen in the past, motivated shooters carry multiple weapons. One of the rifles jams? Grab one of the pistols. I’m as, or more, afraid of an aimed shot from a powerful weapon with a slow rate of fire. Out of ammo? Grab another 10 shot magazine, speedloader, or a fistful of rounds and load them by hand. Absent organized–preferably armed–opposition, what’s anyone to do against a serious nutball shooter?
I’m curious: why do you consider hunting a valid recreational activity that should be respected by legislation, but not target shooting?
I do consider target hunting to be a valid recreational activity.
Just one not worthy of the same level of legislative deference as hunting, apparently.
From minty:
Get fucked. I’m not alone, here. There’s literally millions of free citizens of these United States, law-abiding tax-payers every one of them, who go their entire lives safely, legally and responsibly owning and shooting firearms for sport and recreation.
From old-West style guns to modern machineguns, without hurting anyone.
Your fixation on us gun owners needing to justify our desire, as free citizens, to engage in our hobby to you and your ilk is back-asswards.
When you want to restrict the freedoms and liberties of free people, it is up to you to justify to us and our legislators exactly why this needs to be done.
And the basis really must be something other than, “I don’t like the way they look,” or equaly asinine, “Someone, somewhere, might commit a crime with one.”
I’ve ben shooting for 30 years, since I was big enough to hold a .22 short under the supervision of my father, uncle and older cousins. Neither I or anyone in my family have ever shot anyone, intentionally (excluding military service) or on accident. Neither I or anyone in my family have ever threatened anyone unlawfully with a firearm.
No one that I know of who owns a gun and shoots it has done so, and I’ve spent 30 years in “The Gun Culture,” and have met a lot of people who shoot. Hundreds, at least.
You, it seems, are unable or unwilling to discriminate between millions of free citizens who never commit a crime more heinous than the occasional speeding ticket (upon which the possesion or lack thereof a firearm has no bearing) and the relatively small handfull of criminals who seek firearms to give them power over their victims and their brother criminals.
A .223 is a .223, regardless of the gun that launches it; there may be some variation in accuracy from gun-to-gun based upon barrel lengths, rifling, and maufacturers design tolerances, but overall, the same caliber bullet from two different guns will have pretty much the same ballistic characteristics.
Whether it is a .233 semi-auto with detachable magazine with a wood grain stock patterned on the M-14 (the Ruger Mini-14 and legal) or if it is a .223 with a black plastic stock, flash suppressor, pistol-style grip, bayonet mount and detachable magazine patterned on the Army’s M-16.
Same bullet, same performance, different guns. One legal, one banned.
Neither used to any extent in the commission of violent crimes, as neither is readily concealable. Criminals tend to avoid announcing their criminal intentions by carrying un- or poorly concealed Scary Looking Weaponssub[/sub]
Nonsense. First, the act specifically outlawed the sale of a dozen or so specific models of military-style assault weapons. Second, the reason that they then wrote the catch-all provision with reference to military features (bayonet mounts, flash suppressors, folding stocks, etc.) is because they were targeting military style weapons on the theory that those weapons are intentionally designed to kill assloads of people. Get over the “cosmetic” stuff, guys. It’s just a shorthand way of getting to the stuff Congress really wanted to regulate.
If you’re talking about effective rate of fire the AK-47 smokes any handgun, and that’s not even considering the 2x as large clip capacity of an assault rifle.
Quite the contrary. I assert that it makes tremendous amounts of sense to draw the line in the general vicinity of where Congress put it. I’m always happy to draw such lines with greater precision, however, so gety crackin’ on that letter to your representatives.
Motorcycles. People die on them all the time. Should they be banned? Dogs bite people, maybe we should ban those too. You dont need to own a dog or a motorcycle. Deep fryers. Does anybody really need to own a deep fryer? Deep fried food is bad for your health, and you could burn yourself, or your kid could pull it off the counter on top of themself(happened once…it was in the news). Boating. Nobody needs to own a boat, and people drown every year. Im not talking about fishing boats here, just the ski boats, and waterskis. Nobody needs those things. Monsters baseball example is being iignored here. Where do you stand on banning baseball Minty?
Theres a lot of dangerous stuff we have around for our own enjoyment. Unless it is being misused a significant amount of the time, you don’t just go banning it.
Nonsense. First, the act specifically outlawed the sale of a dozen or so specific models of military-style assault weapons. Second, the reason that they then wrote the catch-all provision with reference to military features (bayonet mounts, flash suppressors, folding stocks, etc.) is because they were targeting military style weapons on the theory that those weapons are intentionally designed to kill assloads of people. Get over the “cosmetic” stuff, guys. It’s just a shorthand way of getting to the stuff Congress really wanted to regulate.
If you’re talking about effective rate of fire the AK-47 smokes any handgun, and that’s not even considering the 2x as large clip capacity of an assault rifle.
Quite the contrary. I assert that it makes tremendous amounts of sense to draw the line in the general vicinity of where Congress put it. I’m always happy to draw such lines with greater precision, however, so get crackin’ on that letter to your representatives.