It was an honest question. I guess I thought that maybe people who already owned a bunch of guns were buying up more as a knee-jerk reaction to any threat of curtailment, but I thought I’d ask. Your answer makes sense.
It probably wasn’t too smart of Joe Biden to talk about some magical use of executive order, because this reaction was very predictable.
Whatever legislation, if any, comes out of this whole effort, it will not ban semi-automatic weapons at a national level. There’s just no way that will happen.
This is only tangentially related, but I’ve never in my entire life met a white American who admitted descent from slave owners. They ALL have been descended from poor Irish, who in fact were just white slaves! :rolleyes:
Surely when reason comes to America and gun ownership is regulated to hunting rifles and home defense shotguns, Oakminister’s great granchildren will white-wash him into an anti-gun crusader of some sort.
Well, when the NRA’s response is to propose more guns after every shooting, it’s a little hard to take it and its members seriously. Then you have Joe Arpaio sending armed posses to protect schools without a) telling the schools that the posses were coming and b) not doing any background checks, resulting in a bunch of armed creeps with long criminal records showing up at schools. It makes it hard to take the pro-gun side seriously.
It wasn’t always thus, the NRA used to be a reasonable group that played a role in forming comon sense gun control legislation. They used to talk about hunting and outdoorsmanship, now you have the head of NRA talking like a crazy person and his supporters nodding along in agreement.
That kind of lunacy is doing real harm to the country. Gun deaths are set to pass deaths by autoaccidents by 2015 in the US and all when we try to talk about the problem we get the answer: more guns. I can’t speak for everyone, but I think a significant number of Americans don’t want to turn their schools into armed fortresses before we talk about other options.
Gun fetishists seem so obsessed with imaginary senarios regarding armed mobs and fighting in a revolution, that they seem to be ignoring the very real problems that their delusions are creating in the here and now.
I was responding to your comment that seemed to imply that Obama is taking unilateral action to ban firearms, without regard for public opinion or other input. I don’t give two shits what you waste your money on.
This comment where I said Obama was taking uniteral action to ban firearms?
Spot on with your reading comprehension.
Someone was saying that the current paranoia is just like when Obama was elected - people just assumed he’d try to do his part to enact gun control legislation. And I was saying that obviously the situation is different - then Obama had no interest in gun control and so there was no need to act as if there were an imminent ban. However, now that’s changed, and Obama and significant factions in congress actually are actively trying to push gun control.
So saying that this current situation (where actual gun control is on the horizon) is the same paranoid shit when Obama got elected (which actually was unjustified at the time) is clearly wrong.
Your threshold for “apeshit” is quite a bit lower than mine. A bill to ban “assault weapons” has been promised by a senator, and the VP has announced that the executive branch is examining ways it can enact gun control, therefore anyone seeking to purchase an item that could be unavailable in the near future is “going apeshit”? What do you think would happen if Feinstein said she was going to attempt to ban smart phones because too many people are dying from texting while driving? If sales of smart phones spiked, would that be “going apeshit”?
My great great grandfather fought for the Confederacy, but I don’t believe he owned slaves. His daughter was still alive when I was a little kid, but I was too scared of her to ask (she chewed tobacco!).
But that doesn’t matter, just like it wouldn’t matter if they had run an underground railroad station. The sins and the glory of our ancestors belong to them, alone.
What does matter is that we’re letting our gun policy be driven by little frightened weirdos. We’ve pretty much let the Comic Book Guy have the deciding vote and it’s time we started the long, slow walk back from crazy.
Obama is trying to work with Congress to push through gun control legislation, and he has also said that he’s looking into executive actions beyond that. My statement was factually correct.
Furthermore, his whole reply was a non-sequitor. It didn’t address anything substantial in my point.
Someone said that gun owners now are being paranoid for no reason, just like when Obama was elected and they were paranoid for no reason. I made the blindingly obvious counterargument that when they were being paranoid when he was elected, it turned out they had no reason to be. Gun control was a non-issue. Therefore it’s a different situation now, when there’s clearly reason to be concerned that there’s gun control is a real threat. It doesn’t make sense to say they’re paranoid “just like they were then”, as if it were unjustified concern.
His statement was a non-sequitor, missed my point, pulled “conspiracy” out of nowhere. His follow-up statement and defense claims that I needed to be educated about how elected representatives were involved in this process, as if I didn’t know, when my very statement specifically mentioned Obama working with Congress, and that I needed some sort of 3rd grade civics lesson instead of having my actual points addressed.
His point was wrong in about 5 different ways, starting with failing to comprehend the point I was even making. His follow up to defend that point directly contradicted what was plainly written.
It’s just a gun, and it’s not even the same one because the police have that one. Should I not buy a Chevy Malibu after someone takes one and runs over a bunch of people one fine afternoon? What is it, guilt by association? Should I feel bad?
I’ll tell you what… when I get mine I promise it won’t be manufactured by Bushmaster, thus it is not the same type, model, or whatever of gun. That should satisfy you.
Though this may be casting pearls unto swine, let me try. It took the Congress up till New Years Day to pass a measure that everybody pretty much agreed on since the election. Do you honestly think this is going to zip right through Congress? If you do, you’re a moron. And if this compels you to rush out and buy weaponry that you don’t fucking need in the first place, you’re an asshole.
I’d tell you where you can stick your “pearls”, but I’m not sure you could find it with a flashlight and a mirror on a stick.
Maybe you missed the part (pointed out by several others as well) about potential action by the executive branch? Announced by the Vice-President? An Executive Order might not pass judicial review, but it could bring sales to a screeching halt pretty quickly.
If you were Mitt Romney, I’d bet you $10,000 that Obama will not try to ban assault weapons by executive order. I’d welcome it if he did, but I don’t think it would happen. So all of you gun freakazoids are going apefuckingshit about the prospect of losing a weapon that nobody in his right mind would want to have.
I was reading an article on the ‘Gun Show Loophole’ and this quote jumped right out:
That’s right folks, the same idiots who proclaim that the world would be safer if everyone had guns and that the only way to avoid school shootings is to arm teachers (and then pupils when some vice-principal goes psycho) does not believe that the segment of population who should have the most expertise in handling their weapons are actually competent enough to do so.
So to summarise:
[ul]
[li]Carrying loaded guns in schools = good[/li][li]Carrying loaded guns at gunshows = bad[/li][/ul]
I’ll try again using smaller words. The EXECUTIVE BRANCH of our government has SAID that they are EXPLORING THE USE OF EXECUTIVE ORDERS for GUN CONTROL.
So, a citizen who has been contemplating the purchase of a semiautomatic rifle should react to this with “I bet they won’t”?
What is it about a black rifle that makes it something “no one in his right mind would want to have”? Does it emit serial-killer-rays that twist the mind to eventual inescapable mayhem?
Haha. So you have to be insane to want to own an AR-15? Because it’s ooooooooooooh black and plastic, scary?
You know, the civilian marksmanship program run out of Camp Perry run by the national guard of Ohio has been one of the premier competitive shooting events for over a hundred years now. They used to use an old 1906 Springfield, then the M1 Garand, then the M14, and now the AR-15. They’re all just the service rifles in the Army. Of the bunch, the M14 is actually the most overall effective and lethal at killing things. But it looks like a pretty normal rifle with no scary black stock, so I’m not sure if it would trigger your insanity list.
It’s just a rifle. It doesn’t fire like a machine gun like you see in the movies. It doesn’t have special physics-defying bullets that are somehow both “high powered” and yet controllable in rapid fire at the same time. The rounds have such poor terminal ballistic performance (in terms of their lethality) there’ve been factions in the armed forces that want to replace them over and over again. These are the guns that became famous in Somalia for shooting people 5 or 6 times without even knocking them down.
So the guns don’t function like their military counterparts, shooting full auto like you see in the movies (not that they’d be any more lethal if they did), their bullets are so weak that you’ve got about as good a chance of surviving a hit by them as any rifle you can be hit by besides a .22lr, and they have no capabilities that a thousand other common rifles don’t have (and it’s significant less lethal than most of them). They just look scary to people who don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about.
And yet you feel that someone would have to be out of their mind to own one.
You keep talking about gun owners going apeshit, but you’ve done nothing but insinuate owning a gun is right up there with one of the worst things you can possibly do as a human being to freaking out over a rifle and calling everyone insane for even coming within 10 feet of one because it has magical demonic properties. And you undoubtedly view yourself as a rational, calm, voice of reason. It’s a good mix of funny and pathetic.
So why is it that if a person collects guns he’s a ‘nut’ with a small penis who dreams of shooting people when anarchy comes, but a person who collects Katana swords, or Star Wars figurines, or shoes, or anything else is simply a hobbyist with a passion?
I’ve had many guns in my life. I currently own two, and if I had the money and time to shoot them I’d probably own a few more. But you know what? I also collect camera gear. And certain hard-cover books that I’ll probably never read again. I have more musical instruments than I need. I don’t even play professionally and I have four guitars, two keyboards, five Irish Whistles, a MIDI wind controller, and a few other things. I don’t need any of it.
Speaking for myself and for people I know who collect guns, we don’t do it because we want to be part of some Canadian militia or entertain fantasies about the collapse of civilization. We collect guns because we like guns, because they are wonderful pieces of engineering, they’re fun to shoot, and because every one of them shoots differently. We have debates about the best calibers and the best pistols in exactly the same way and for the same reasons that we have debates over whether the Ford 289 was a better engine than the Chevy 327; because we’re geeks. We love the hardware, and we love using it and talking about it.
There is nothing strange about this. I’ll bet just about everyone here has their collectibles or their specific passions they love to debate about. I knew a guy who collected fishing reels, and wouldn’t shut up about them. Was he any crazier than a guy who owns guns?
It’s so easy, isn’t it, to be self-sure when you take the careful precaution of classifying your opponents in terms as denigrating as possible. Once their nature as real, breathing human beings with thoughts and feelings and beliefs and opinions has been safely buried under a layer of comfortable hatred, you don’t even need to critically examine your own beliefs, because they’re unanimous. Only sad, misguided mental incompetents oppose you!
I could do the same but I don’t. I expect better of myself. I always try to examine and understand the reasons I believe in anything, and I always acknowledge that I may be wrong, or that in time I may come to think differently.
You folks aren’t my enemies by any stretch of the imagination. We have many of the same goals. I don’t think you’re insane, or insecure, or stupid; you’re not servile authoritarian lackeys clamoring for the chains of slavery rather than brave the perils of liberty; you’re not any of the things I could easily dismiss you as if I wished only to remain perfectly secure in my own beliefs. You’re compassionate human beings who see suffering and wish to end it, who think differently than me, and who have reasons for thinking differently. My goal is not to attack you but your reasons and your arguments, and maybe persuade you; or if I can’t persuade you, to persuade others by refuting you. You’re no less of a person even if I think you are sometimes ignorant.
I know you from non-gun threads and have seen you to be a generally reasonable person, and seeing you assert that non gun owners are “feminine” and not “real men” seemed wildly out of character. If I am biased it is towards wanting to believe that you are a reasonable person who recognizes how ridiculous and stupid that claim sounds. I’m still assuming you were basically going for over the top parody because otherwise, yikes.
