Back to the OP. It appears California wants to ban .50 BMG caliber rifles. What is the legal definition? Will they also ban a .50-70 caliber Alin convertion trapdoor carbine? That’s fifty caliber? If I create a wildcat that changes the shoulder dimensions so my rifle can’t fire .50 BMG military ammo is that banned or not?
“Why is this the one subject that people are excused for total ignorance while spouting out plans for sweeping social legislation?”
Maybe it’s because it’s my pet peeve, but many times a person is struck and killed by a train, you get a sound-bite from some local official calling for the trains to be slowed down. Never mind the 300K people who ride Metra each day. (Yes, I’m Chicago-centric. :)) Never mind that if a significant number of those people choose to drive b/c of slower trains, there will be MORE traffic deaths. Never mind that the tracks were on an embankment several feet above ground level so some neighborhood kid isn’t simply going to wander onto the line. :rolleyes: Never mind that the trains weren’t going at “the speed of light.” :rolleyes::rolleyes:
It’s not only gun violence that triggers the full heart, empty head instinct that “I’m a legislator, I’ve GOT to do something!”
They have already banned them in LA. I would imagine the rest of CA is not far behind.
Not sure, but I think it’s only .50 BMG.
http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/news/092402_nw_ban_sniper_rifles.html
Well… I looked at the Montgomery County (MD USA) website earlier today, and they had pictures of “some of” the rifles of one may have been used in the Washington area shootings of late. Only one is what would be generally considered a “sniper rifle” (it’s actually a target rifle; police and miitary snipers wouldn’t usually use anything less than a .308 [7.62 x 51mm NATO]). The rest are what are commonly called “assault rifles”.
Clarification: The one rifle I refer to is a bolt-action, scoped rifle with a bipod. It’s probably a Remington or Winchester; I can’t really tell. The rest are a Colt AR-15, Armalite, and Galil (IIRC).
Point being that if the MCPD is right, then the “sniper” is likely not to be using a “sniper rifle” at all. Nonetheless, California will try to ban “sniper rifles” once they come up with an arbitrary list of long arms supposedly defining the term. Maryland will try to follow after a while.
Also FWIW, Washington DC has what are among the most strict gun laws in the whole US. Look what that’s done for them.
Is it the one with an AirSoft CAR-15 as the first gun?
I’m back, and I’m still anal over that 20,000 gun law thing. 
I’ve been trying to get some facts, but I’m not very good at this research thing. No patience.
But I searched “firearm” on the Berkeley Municipal Code and got 53 hits. Some of those were repeats in the same law, and the laws covered everything from personal ownership through dealers to police officers.
Then I did the same for the California code and got 427 hits. Same story as the local site, some multiple and covered pretty much everything.
OK, let’s call that 500 laws. Total, so far. That leaves 19,500. About.
Then I went to the federal site and got totally lost. I told you I wasn’t good at this. 
What to do when you get lost? I sent a query to snopes. Fat chance they’ll ever get back to me, but we’ll see. Hey, they covered cabbage, right?
Nobody ever answered my question about the penetrating power of the .50 caliber round compared to a more common round. Like maybe a .30 cal. from a German MG at Normandy. Boy, I blew that one.
BTW; can’t a sniper jusr be someone who shoot’s from a hiding place?
Peace,
mangeorge
I’ll try to dig up some info on penetration. Standard ball ammunition is not considered armor piecing. Most AP ammunitiion is banned from civilaian sales but curiously .30 cal as used in the M1, BAR and a couple of machine guns is exempt. Not sure what it could pierce but I don’t think half inch steel plate is out of the question. Curiously it doesn’t taik as much as you might think to stop a .50 BMG round. A couple of feet of sandbags will do it.
FWIW the Germans did not use .30 cal ammunition in WWII, their standard caliber since before the turn of the century was 8mm.
Milton De La Warre writes:
> Also FWIW, Washington DC has what are among the most
> strict gun laws in the whole US. Look what that’s done for them.
I’m not sure what point you’re making here, but if you’re trying to say that the strict gun laws in Washington didn’t stop the recent Washington-area sniper, that’s certainly irrelevant. Only one of the 11 shootings was within Washington itself. The gun laws in Virginia are fairly lax. (I’m not claiming that gun laws have anything to do with stopping shootings. I’m just saying that when you’re trying to draw conclusions from a series of shootings that extend over three jurisdictions, at the very least you would have to look at the gun laws in all three of those jurisdictions.)
Indeed, if I wanted to make a pseudo-clever argument about the sniper shootings, it would be that what this proves is that the suburbs aren’t nearly as safe as they are supposed to be. Nearly all these shootings have taken place not just in suburbs but in well-off suburbs. Two of them took place in Fredericksburg, so far from D.C. that it’s only dubiously a suburb of D.C. at all. But, as I said, that’s just a pseudo-clever argument. To make any reasonable argument about shootings, you would have to look at yearly averages, not just a single series of shootings.
Apparently the shooter was seen getting out of his vehicle, firing a shot, and departing. Has anyone said what type of rifle he was using? That is, is it a bolt action or semi-auto?
MSNBC had this, “The witness said the assailant fired an unusual weapon that looked like an AK-74, not the better known AK-47” Of course such an ID depends a lot on how familiar the witness is with firearms. People that are familiar with arms would have a hard time making that distinction even up close. A person unfamiliar could see a bolt action rifle then see a photo of an AK and say that’s what they saw.
Even those who are supposed to know better make mistakes. I saw a local police officer who was a “firearms expert” ( :rolleyes: ) hold up an SKS and tell the media rep’s “This here is an AK-47 assault rifle!”
Hell, I’m a gun nut and I have a hard time disguising between a ’47 and ’74.
BTW: I don’t understand this obsession with the type of gun he’s using. By focusing on the tool rather than the person, we are guilty of the same thing we accuse the anti-gun crowd of doing.
The anti-gun crowd wants the public to believe the shooter is using a “dangerous military-type assault rifle that has no use in the civilian world” instead of a “hunting rifle”. AFAIK they have no idea what rifle is being used, and yet I’ve seen photos on the news of M-16s that suggest that that is the rifle meing used.
I agree that the tool has no bearing whatsoever. The man is guilty of a crime; not the machine. But it would be nice to know what kind of rifle is being used. If it is a so-called “assault rifle”, then pro-choice groups can point out that there are already many restrictions on that type of rifle. If it turns out to be a “hunting rifle”, then the anti-choice groups would look silly if they kept showinf “black rifle” graphics.
I agree Crafter Man but it was a legitimate question by someone on our side. Unfortunately that information is always plays into the mistaken notion that banning or relgulating a particular type of gun will solve crime.
Mangeorge, I’ll find a source on that 20k number tonight or tomorrow (I haven’t been keeping up with the boards much this week).
Happyheathen, you really should avoid parading around your ignorance on a board dedicated to erradicating ignorance. The 5.56mm NATO round is a mild variation on the .223 Remington round (and the 5.56mm NATO round works fine in .223 rifles), so was it just some kind of magic that turned existing .223 rifles into military rifles when the US Army adopted it? If by ‘military rifles’ you just mean ‘rifles that are actually used by the military’ and not ‘rifles that are chambered in a cartridge used by a military’, then the AR-15 (popular to own, popular to ban) doesn’t qualify as a military rifle since there aren’t any militaries that use it (they use the M-16). Your comment about “A .30-06 was good enough in my day” was especially amusing to me since the last milsurp ammo I bought was .30-06. Anyway, I don’t really expect you to provide much in the way of verifiable facts, just more of the annoying rhetoric backed up by that implicit ‘if it saves one life’ thinking (even though you can’t show even that much for your schemes).
Oh, and SenorBeef take heart - the '86 Firearm Owners Protection act might have come to your rescue there. That provides an affirmative defense to any ‘possession’ laws if you were carrying the firearm unloaded in a locked container and possession of it was legal at both the places where you started and ended your trip. I’m not sure if the locked trunk would qualify (you might would need a lock on the case itself), but at least you’ve got some way to prevent taking the wrong exit on the highway from being a felony!
Amidst the good General Questions about penetration, projectile speed, etc. there seems to be a gun control debate going on here.
That will stop. Now.
(I’m not trying to debate anything, just add my opinion on this claim.)
For a person very familiar with rifles, it’s not TOO hard a distinction to make from a distance. Most models of the 74 (this varies by country of manufacture) have a much more sloped gas block (I believe that’s the term - the area between the gas port and the gas tube) than most models of the ak47 or AKM do. There are other, more subtle differences, that I could easily find if I held the rifle, but from a distance, the gas block is the best bet.
Anyway, unless this guy was a military rifle enthusiast, I wouldn’t trust him to have any way to tell between a 47 and 74.
It’s plausible the guy is using a .223 AK-74 type rifle - as we discussed either earlier in this thread or using a real ak-74 clone (or hell, a real ak-74 if he’s a ‘real deal’ terrorist.) and leaving .223 casings around to confuse the police. The bullet weights would be roughly the same, and so it might confuse the forensic scientists.
A military doctor would probably be able to tell what round caused the wound, as .223 and 5.45 can leave quite distinctive wounds - but city doctors wouldn’t have the experience.
On second thought, if the rifle was using an orange bakelite magazine, it could reasonably be identified as an ak-74. Which would be easy to tell from a distance. There were a decent bit of chinese 7.62 bakelite magazines that got in before the ban, but they’re fairly rare and expensive compared to 5.45 bakelites, which is the ‘natural’ magazine for an ak-74, which are all over the place (and probably the cheapest magazines for anything, rifle or pistol, at around $5).
Riboflavin -
again, I was speaking of ammo, not firearms. duh #1.
if the ammo is military surplus, it is military. duh #2.
the reason it exists is because it was manufactured for military use (duh #3), so skip the interchangability argument, 'K?
Mangeorge, the original source on the 20k number is James D. Wright, Peter H. Rossi and Kathleen Daly’s book Under the Gun, published in 1983 (which I’m going to dig up a copy of now because it looks interesting). The number includes both Federal and State laws.
HappyHeathen, you said “and no, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for those who want military weapons of their very own.” when you were talking about milsurp ammo, which certainly sounds like you’re talking about firearms to me. Anyway, you’re on pure debate territory so I’ll ditch that piece of the thread.