But...Obama Was Going To Take All The Guns!

[SenorBeef]

@Hentor_the_Barbarian

When speaking of the assault weapons ban of 1994, most gun advocates:

a) Deride it for stupidly focusing on a circumscribed subset of weapons that was easy to evade through very insubstantial modifications

and

b) Assert mockingly that it proved that banning these weapons had no effect

If (a) is accurate, we can draw no conclusions in regards to (b). In fact, since the AWB was also described as significantly difficult to implement, even with all the inherent holes, it’s safe to say that we’ve never tried really implementing a ban on these weapons.

This is a variation of the “oh they just found loopholes in the last assault weapons ban” bullshit argument that I’ve already thoroughly handled in this post in the other thread.

@SenorBeef

The fact that people were able to get around the AWB with cosmetic modifications of their gun was not a “loophole”, because the entire point of the AWB was to ban the look of certain cosmetic features. This gun is the exact same one as this one. Your visceral reaction may be that the second one is somehow more dangerous than the first, but they function in exactly the same way, with the same capabilities.

The AWB does not concern itself with the function or capabilities of the weapons it tries to ban. It tries to ban weapons that look a certain way. They try to define an assault weapon by the things they have compared to more conventional looking rifles, like combinations of bayonette lugs, barrel shrouds, telescoping stocks, etc. They do not attempt to define the weapon by its capabilities, because those weapons have the exact same capabilities of thousands of models (and tens of milliosn of owners) of non-assault weapons that look like more conventional rifles.

So saying that people got around the AWB through loopholes misses the entire point. The AWB bans a guns look, so if you modified them not to look that way, and now you’re okay. What would you do to improve the AWB? Put even more cosmetic features on the list? Ban black guns? Ban guns using polymer stocks? Then people would give their guns wood stocks and paint them lime green and you’d again be saying “loophole!”

The regulation that they want people to think they’re implementing is to ban “machine guns” and other military weapons, and the public is mislead to think that these weapons are like those, since they look the same, but of course those weapons were heavily restricted since 1934 and new production banned in 1986.

The public support for an AWB hinges on the lie that these weapons are somehow more capable and more dangerous than other weapons. They are not. The whole thing is a lie.

Both the fact that you are willing to continue lying to mislead the public, and that you’re focusing on banning guns based on how much you can sway the public with your lies rather than the actual usage of these weapons in homicide and crime indicates that you are not giving a good-faith effort to create laws that serve the greatest public good. Rather, you are trying to pass any law that bans any gun you can, and the public’s ignorance about “assault weapons” makes them politically viable to ban while more conventional looking weapons may not be.

The features which defined an assault weapon (rifle) were:

Folding or Telescoping stock
Pistol Grip
Bayonet Mount
Flash Suppressor or barrel threading to mount one
Grenade launcher (not what you think - an adapter at the end of the muzzle to allow WW2 style rifle grenades to be fired, and those sorts of grenades are already largely illegal.)

It needed 2 of those features to qualify, because a lot of rifles would have one feature (say, WW2 era rifles would have a bayonet mount) that they didn’t want to ban.

That’s what constitutes an “assault weapon”. If it didn’t have 2 of these features, it wasn’t an assault weapon.

Now gun rights advocates will point out the absurdity that these features somehow make a rifle particularly deadly.

But in order to comply with the ban, rifles were modified not to have these features. This doesn’t mean the law was toothless - it set out to ban these features on rifles and the post-ban rifles complied with the new law - which means it was working as intended. It’s the fact that the whole thing was fucking absurd that meant this had no particular impact on the suitability of those guns for use in crime. The actual crime rate with them was negligible as is, so any impact in the rate was probably random noise anyway.

The reality is that defining a class of weapon by features that don’t significantly affect the functionality of the gun results in post-ban weapons that don’t have their capabilities significantly altered. More importantly, since those guns had the same level of capability as other rifles that did not have those features, it did not actually impact the capabilities of guns available to people, even if somehow they made every scary looking gun dissapear.

Seriously, you guys need to give this up. You are either dumb or disingenuous if you feel that this is really a point you should be focusing your energies on, and I know some of you aren’t dumb.

If you come to the table with greater enforcement of current laws, expanded background checks, stuff that might actually make some degree of sense, you might be listened to. If you fucking keep going after your nonsensical “assault weapons” bullshit - stuff that you know to be bullshit - then no one can take you seriously. You are not arguing in good faith to attempt to compromise to improve public safety. You are simply going after whatever guns you can based on how you think you can score points with public sentiment.

Get some fucking sense and integrity and go after shit that might actually make a difference. Stop lending your support to what you know to be stupid.