The Eastern Cougar was a “population” not a species. The cougar is listed as “least concern” which means there’s a fucktonne of them.
No, not really but the AR 15 happens to be a excellent varmint rifle, good vs coyotes. It is also quite good for personal protection.
Sure, and there are reasonable limitations on weapons. You can own a flamethrower or a howitzer, or a bazooka, or a machine gun* or a handgrenade, or many other such weapons.
There isn’t a single US civilian weapon “designed for the purposes of killing large numbers of people as quickly as possible”, so great. Some of them are designed for marketing appeal for some survivalist that imagines himself defending hs homestead from hordes of zombies or whatever, but that’s mostly marketing. Remember there are 300 MILLION guns in America of which maybe 10000 are used for crimes- almost all of which are handguns. “assault weapons” are very rarely used in crimes. Maybe 2%.
So think about that- if there are guns ““designed for the purposes of killing large numbers of people as quickly as possible”,” then only one in 30000 are fulfilling that design.
Sometimes the difference between a “hunting weapon” and a “assault weapon” are purely cosmetic. Take the Ruger ranch rifle for example:
In the early 1800s, when the laws and justice system told slaves that they had no right to freedom, no right to anything I would say that was wrong. The right of people to not be enslaved always existed, even while it was systematically being violated. The argument you are advancing would say that these slaves had no right to life but which the government would grant and protect, and absent that protection their rights and lives were forfeit, they had no claim to them because they were subject to the whims of the government. That’s the problem with the view that rights are granted. I don’t hold that view.
As King said quoting Aquinas - An unjust law is no law at all.
Recent developments suggest to me that some changes and sacrifices need to happen.
I support a total ban an all semi automatic rifles. My thinking is that society seems to accept th3 possibility of lethality of up to a dozen people being in the hands of an individual. You could probably kill a dozen people with a car, or a handgun, or a homemade bomb, or any of a dozen other ways.
A semi-auto rifle gives you the stand off ability and range combined with a rate of fire that makes it possible to kill multiple dozens of people.
A semi-auto also has questionable utility for hunting or target shooting. Gun owners are giving up very little to take this tool out of the hands of those nuts who would misuse it.
I also think that all gun owners should need to register and have their firearms insured against liability the way we do with cars.
At the same time, some stupid gun laws need to be repealed. The law against silencers is founded in ignorance. Silencers should be legal, so people can shoot without damaging their hearing or disturbing those for miles around. Anyone familiar with silencers knows they don’t do what they do in the movies. You can still hear them. It just doesn’t Hurt to heAr them.
Except that you can get a really high RoF from bolt or lever actions.
And, yes, the Semi-auto rifle is the gun of choice for mass shooters. But they are used very rarely in murders, etc, I think that last stat i saw was 2%.
So, in murders 2% of the time they’d have to pick something else. Big whoop, they’d be no significant reduction in murders.
And I dont think there’d be a reduction in the number of mass shootings either. Yes, perhaps a small reduction in body count, but this last one, he “only” killed four, and he could have done that with even a double barreled shotgun as well.
So, we’d ban a lot of guns- (and do you mean ban on new sales or a ban on possessing?) and there would be no significant reduction seen.
Just like pretty much all American gun control laws.
I bought a gun, once. Back in cab-driving days, many years. A couple drivers had been robbed, one injured, and I knew a guy. Tidy little .32, fit neatly in my driving pouch. Young black man jumped into my backseat, wanted to go to an intersection. One chemical or another, he was somewhat messed up. Driving, I kept glancing in the mirror and then I noticed him fumbling in his coat, pulling out something dark and…I was driving, my gun was zipped up, i would have to pull over, unzip, and turn about before he pulled out his…wallet. He was counting ones to be sure he had the fare.
I am a calm and reasonable man, but I was afraid, and I was armed. This is not a good idea. Fear is morbid, it is a cancer for the soul. For me, it is the culture of fear that guns embody that I oppose.
Not always the case. Few years back, went shooting with some distant cousins. Open sight, of course, you need a scope you should play video games. Pleased that I was still a pretty decent shot. Not a thing wrong with that. Of course, I would never shoot anything that might prefer otherwise. Good clean fun, the absence of fear.
A roundabout way to say I mostly concur with friend Scylla’s remarks, above. And if he and I agree on something, the bank will loan you money on it.
Democrats could exclude guns and abortion from being a big part of their party platform and their stated goals, and still be Democrats, yeah. And it’s important that they do so, at this point in time. I don’t think people really understand how much of a victory this Korean thing was for Trump. His base is very enthusiastic about him; I do not think Muller’s investigation is going to have serious repercussions for him; and I think his chance at re-election in 2020 is quite high.
Thousands are killed every year with guns, and hundreds (?) perhaps with the hated AR-15. But hundreds of thousands could die from the long-term consequences of environmental pollution that will occur if the Republicans are allowed to stay in power and continue enabling reckless treatment of natural resources and the environment. And hundreds of thousands will be “customers” of the prison-industrial complex which treats humans like cattle and persecutes minorities with the pointless war on drugs, if the Republicans stay in power. There is much more at stake here than gun rights or gun control…if Democrats need to stuff that on the back burner in order to win in the here and now, so be it.
I think saying what you really mean, and following through is the way to go. Particularly when you are right.
I held my nose and voted for Hillary even though I felt that she was just saying whatever it was that she thought would get her elected. Trump and the Republicans have at least seemed admirably clear about what they intended to do.
I feel that that sentiment was shared by many, not just of Hillary but of the Democratic Party in general, and that perceived lack of faith with the American people was no small contributing factor in the last election.
Sorry, wasn’t trying to get into it, just making a joke at the expense of an extinct population.
So are bolt action rifles.
Assuming you meant “can’t” there, rather than “can”: Yes. There are reasonable limitations on 2A. Which means that the argument that 2A cannot have reasonable limitations is already over.
It’s just a question of where those reasonable limitations are.
And a big reason for this is that they were hard to get for quite a while. That 2% was a stat that was bandied about around the time of when congress refused to allow the AWB go to the floor to be voted on for renewal.
I haven’t seen updated stats, but anecdotally, I do see such weapons in the news much more often.
Also, if we are talking about mass shootings, then we should be talking about mass shootings. What percentage of these are performed with an “assault weapon” vs a handgun? (Or bolt action rifle)
Sad when guns don’t live up to their full potential.
The one in 30,000 statistic may make more of impact if we didn’t have 300 million of them. The fact that there are a bunch of guns in the hands of a few people who stockpile them doesn’t change the numbers that are in the street posing a danger to others.
If we kept that statistic, and reduced the number of guns, we’d have less gun violence.
Yeah, I get that gun manufactures make guns in such a way that minor modifications change their role.
Slavery was an institution in nearly every culture for thousands of years. We, as a species and as a world culture have grown more enlightened, and ended the legal practice thereof. But, given how universal it was until governments stepped in and outlawed the practice, I certainly see being prevented from being placed in bondage to another being a right that is granted to you by an authority, rather than some sort of natural or pre-existing right.
The very constitution upon which this country was founded had constitutional rights granted to slave owners and their ability to retrieve their “property”. They certainly would have seen their right to maintain and retrieve their slaves as a pre-existing right, and they would point to the part of the constitution that justified it as “proof”.
I strongly disagree with slavery, and were I around back then I would hope that I would have been on the abolitionist side of things, which was considered to be unconstitutional and immoral and against god and nature and all that. I would have been fighting against culture and history for what I believed to be right, pretty much the same attitude I take towards the culture and history that is used to justify the widespread and easy access to guns.
But, not as high as a semi-auto.
But, in mass shootings, say if they decide to shoot a bunch of people in a concert across the street from their hotel, a handgun isn’t going to do quite the same.
Yeh, this “last” one. the one a few days ago. But what about the one a few days before that?
How many could the LV shooter killed with a 6 shot revolver?
Ah, so we should scrap 'em all, then. Get rid of background checks, allow criminals to have guns. Keep guns in a house with domestic violence. Allow bazookas, grenades, machine guns without a license, flamethrowers (wait, aren’t those legal? musk was selling them), and handgrenades? Allow not just teachers, but anyone at all to carry guns in school, as well as in our courtrooms and jails.
Are there any gun laws that you would allow us to keep, or just pitch 'em all? If there are some that you would like to keep around, how do you justify that against the dual entreaties of “2A says I can have them” and “I really want them”?
Democrats also lose on the environment, on crime, and on drugs.
If you are going to lose anyway, why abrogate all of your principals?
I’m kinda curious what constitutes a right when you have no way of enforcing it. But I’m even more curious what great moral philosophers of history have declared that gun ownership is a fundamental right, of equal standing with life, liberty, and the purfuit of happineff. Is there really more to that position than declaring that you need to own guns to protect your right to own guns?
And would that right still exist if the Second Commandment were repealed? Where else in the world does this fundamental right exist, and why isn’t there a widespread demand in those places to stop it from being infringed?
We can all distinguish between reasoning and rationalization, but it’s obviously hard for the person proposing it.
They don’t need to abrogate their principals, but in the leadup to the election, they should campaign primarily on the economy. And they need to bust ass reaching out to the Rust Belt and the Midwest. Really. I know this is getting far afield of the thread’s original topic, but really. For better or worse, Trump just scored a major PR victory with the Korea deal and his base thinks the world of him. Nothing is sticking to him. Muller can stay up every night chain-smoking with a bottle of Scotch and a pot of coffee, going through all the files and doing everything else he’s trying to do, and I don’t think it will come to anything. It will be Trump running in 2020 with a very enthusiastic base of support.
How do Democrats peel off some of those votes - votes they need to win? Just talk about the economy, about how they’re going to make average peoples’ day to day lives easier and put a little more money in their pocket, and have a charismatic candidate that people can connect with emotionally. That’s all they gotta do!
Not many. But honestly mass shootings arent really the problem, they are quite rare. Murders are.
Not necessarily.
No, you’re right, the LV shooters couldnt have killed as many with a revolver. Or a shotgun or a pistol. But he could have killed plenty with bolt action rifles.
Sure, all the bans vs flamethrowers or a howitzer, or a bazooka, or a machine gun* or a handgrenade, or many other such weapons.
In Testing bolt action rifles in the 1927 the Marine Corps believed a well trained able bodied shooter could put 10 rounds per minute on target. A gifted marksmen could do as many as 15.
That’s from “Hatcher’s Book of the Garand”
Different cites suggest that the number for an Ar-15 Semi-auto ranges from 45-150 rounds a minute.
Why the wide range? Depends on the parameters. At the upper end you can physically pull the trigger that fast if you don’t care too much about aim and just want to spray bullets in a general direction, or, say into a crowd. The lower end is what is claimed by the manufacturer as to what is its effective maximum. That maximum will be similar to the bolt action test where a target actually needs to be hit.
That makes the semi-auto at least 4.5x as lethal as a bolt action, in a shooting at targets situation. In shooting at a crowd, working the bolt will still take the same amount of time, whereas the trigger pulls on the semi will be much faster.
From just playing with it in my head, I would say that I could hit a car at 100 yards with a bolt action maybe 20 times in a minute. With an ar-15, i feel I could get more than 100.
Does that sound about right?
A semi is a much better weapon for shooting at a crowd, and it will not require much skill or practice to do so. That’s why I favor a ban on semi’s.
Even if this was accurate with respect to the Scotus (I don’t know, but going by what Bone said), your feelings on what types of weapons should be banned depends on what the Scotus says? You don’t have your own opinion?
I suspect if the Scotus came out tomorrow and said “We now believe that all semi-automatic weapons can be banned”, you would change your agreement with the Scotus.