Why would you believe what you are suggesting is reasonable if you both don’t know or care about the subject you are opining on?
Comparisons to cars are not on point since cars are not fundamental constitutionally protected.
First off, nearly everything that makes a firearm effective for defense will also make it effective for offense. Limiting the effectiveness means limiting defense. One of the big reasons that it’s difficult to do what you suggest is because there is no trust between opposing sides. Combine that with the numerous suggestions of so called reasonable controls by people who are both ignorant and proud of their ignorance with regard to firearms and there is very little common ground.
Firing rate is controlled by trigger pulls. Faster the trigger, faster the firing. To limit firing capacity, something in the design would need to be devised to do so that would make a pretty simple device more complicated.
Capacity is a function of magazine size. There’s a ton of reasons why limiting magazine size is undesirable. I will take a shortcut to this and say that anything that police would be opposed to with regard to the arms they use, gun rights advocates will also be opposed to. For any reason police would want a weapon or feature, a regular person would want it too.
I agree with what Bone said, but just wanted to add this: while one could certainly write laws that limit rate or capacity (capacity-limiting laws seem to be all the rage these days), I’ve never seen one that I would not consider an infringement on my right to keep and bear arms (particularly for protection). I suspect that many other gun owners feel this way too. If you have such a proposal, I’m all ears and will be happy to discuss it with you, but I imagine it’s an exercise in futility.
Imagine trying to write a law that limited media outlets to a certain word count each month, or x column inches each day, and then try to convince them that it wasn’t really an infringement on the freedom of the press. They probably wouldn’t see it that way.
So, it’s not impossible, it’s just that you don’t want such limitations? I mean, I get that private citizens want a lot of things, but limitations to what private citizens want is what laws are for.
My followup question was does this mean that there should be no restrictions to firearms in the hands of private citizens with regard to firing rate and capacity? Fully automatic should be fine?
Not a gotcha question or anything, just trying to understand where you are coming from. Is the opposition to any limitations at all coming from a place where you believe that any limitation will inevitably lead to further limitations, or is it the limitation itself?
OK, I imagined it. But I’m having a hard time imagining how a newspaper column poses a direct and lethal threat to public safety in direct proportion to its word count. The US doesn’t have an epidemic of deaths by column inches, but it does have an epidemic of gun deaths far beyond anything experienced in any other first-world country on the planet. Which makes your analogy a worthless exercise in preposterous absurdity.
And since the 2nd Amendment was written without reference to rate or capacity and at a time when the capacity of a musket was 1 lead ball rammed down through the muzzle, it’s hard to see how a limitation on high-capacity magazines “infringes” anything it says.
The idea that magazine limits will end (or even put a dent in) the “epidemic of gun deaths” is absurd. For starters, most of the “gun deaths” are suicides. How is a magazine capacity limit supposed to prevent those deaths?
extremely effective, if the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, terrorism at home in Europe and other insurgencies have shown us.
I guess at the point you no longer agree with it.
This is also my favorite 2nd Amendment defense argument because it presumes a scenario where otherwise law-abiding and loyal patriots rise up like Minutemen to defend against a corrupt and illegitimate government.
What it does not take into account that such widespread availability of firearms can also be used to arm radicalized extremists, militias, gangs, cults and the odd lunatic who has a beef with the government. Or that these various groups can use those firearms on each other.
IOW, it’s the same misguided paranoid reasoning they use for all their arguments against gun control. In their mind a well armed population leads to stability and a decrease in crime when the actual numbers say the exact opposite.
Actually I think we can go one step further and say that the discerning “regular person” would actually want something at least a bit better than what the police have, especially if it helped him in his job as, say, a professional bank robber or a freelance hit man, or even if he was just an amateur murderer or an aspiring young mass shooter. Or even if he was just a regular homeowner with Rambo delusions who wanted a gun for “protection”, which gun with all those nifty super-lethal features would – according to well-established statistics – be far more likely to be used in a domestic murder than for any legitimate purpose.
The question, however, is not what he wants but whether he should be able to get it. In most cases the US is the only country in the developed world where the answer is “sure, why not?”.
It’s technically possible, sure. For instance, the restrictions on owning fully automatic firearms are regulations that limit firing rates: not mechanically, but by preventing people from routinely owning full auto.
It’s also possible to define restrictions on capacity. For instance, Canada has done so in the Firearms Regulations passed under the Criminal Code. The Code makes it an offence to own a “restricted device.” That term is defined by the Regulations to include:
Now, whether such restrictions would be constitutionally permissible in the US is another matter; I don’t know the answer.
I never said magazine limits would prevent suicides so why are you creating another bizarre straw man? Magazine limits are obviously intended to address the criminals and unhinged nutcases who use guns to commit crimes, particularly the cases of multiple killings.
I think a little over half (not “most”) of gun deaths are suicides, the rest are mostly homicides, plus accidents. Counting suicides in the gun death numbers, BTW, is valid for the same reason as counting them in the homicide numbers: because in both cases, the use of a gun creates a much higher percentage of lethal outcomes than other means. You can’t argue with numbers that are so hugely out of line with any other developed country.
Of course not. So then we have to make it Statewide or guns will just come in from over the border. But then other States have looser laws, so guns will just come in from over the border. So we have to make it nationwide, but then as pointed out by Canada and Mexico- guns will just come in from over the border. So, we have to make to worldwide… which will never happen.
It’s just an excuse. “Gun control doesnt work here”- “well that’s because guns will just come in from over the border” so we have to keep expanding to make it work… riiiight.
More mental health screening would have stopped one of the smaller "mass shootings’ in the last couple of years. That states laws were then tightened up.
No other shooting would have been stopped by any of those.
The “no fly” list is totally bogus and highly inaccurate.
The so-called "cop killer’ bullet was never sold to anyone other than Police depts.
Let me clear up your confusion.
[ol]
[li]State gun control is relatively ineffective because there’s almost no control over what flows in and out over state lines.[/li][li]National gun control works.[/li][li]Being right next door to the US is going to make things worse for neighboring countries than they otherwise would be.[/li][/ol]
All those things can be true simultaneously.
#2 is one of the main reasons (though not the only one) that Canada has just 14% of the gun homicide rate of the US. #3 is one of the reasons that the UK has just 1.4% of US gun homicides.
Those are not small differences. They should be as shocking as the gun death numbers themselves.
To my mind, this perfectly sums up the US gun situation:
The New York Times printed a rare front-page editorial, the first time they’ve done this in 95 years, calling for action on the epidemic of gun violence in the US.
Some gun nut took out his gun and shot holes in it.
I can’t imagine more fitting symbolism, on so many levels, of the futility of trying to address this problem and the abject stupidity that pervades every aspect of it.
The US has seen fifty plus years of lobbying, litigation, legislation, marketing and PR from the gun industry - much of it fear-based.
As a result, we have cultural and social changes that have made us fearful of guns (or the lack of them), each other, ‘the others’ and our government. In addition we have political gridlock, creation of terms like ‘Second Amendment solution’ and a coolness factor for military style arms.
I do not believe that there is any legislative solution to that polarization and fear without social and cultural changes that could take generations. Perhaps gun ownership will change as much as tobacco use has changed but I don’t expect to live to see guns become uncool…
What are you talking about? There are plenty of methods of suicide that are just as effective as guns. What numbers do you see that are hugely out of line with any other developed country? Certainly you’re not talking about our suicide rate.
I’ll assume that I just wasn’t clear rather than you misdirecting the conversation again. I didn’t mean to say that suicide numbers were necessarily hugely out of line, I was referring to the gun homicide (and accident) numbers, where as mentioned the US has 7 times the gun homicide rate of Canada and something like 71 times the rate of the UK.
The suicide thing is quite irrelevant to the topic here which is about “shootings” which I take to mean other than self-inflicted. But for the record, because it’s an important point, the thing about gun suicide attempts is that they’re almost always lethal, many other attempts are not. Accurate statistics are hard to get on suicide attempts because of reporting issues, but according to the province of Alberta, for every suicide death there were 1,833 hospital admissions for attempted suicide or intentional self-inflicted injuries. With guns, it’s so easy to do, and you usually don’t get a second chance.
Indeed the Harvard School of Public Health had this to say, in the US alone: Across states, more guns = more suicide
Using survey data on rates of household gun ownership, we examined the association between gun availability and suicide across states, 1999-2001. States with higher levels of household gun ownership had higher rates of firearm suicide and overall suicide. This relationship held for both genders and all age groups. It remained true after accounting for poverty, urbanization and unemployment. There was no association between gun prevalence and non-firearm suicide.
So that’s all I’m going to say here on that. The statistics on guns and suicide are persuasive but not overwhelming; on the general danger of guns with respect to homicides and general unintentional mayhem caused by gun nuts, though, the statistics are absolutely overwhelming, the numbers just staggering, and that’s already been shown here, in abundance. That’s the subject here, although I don’t know what more there is to say that hasn’t already been said.
And here I thought you wanted to be taken seriously. One of the problems IMO is the disconnect between opposing sides. I certainly expect that anything that comes out of Feinstein or Bloomberg to be worthless, mostly because of their history. If you’d like to build a similar history, this is a good way to start.
And here is why this is important - my side is winning. We don’t have to convince anyone anymore. One of your preferred topics is to bring up comparisons of the US to Canada, and other countries. Except that the people that you need to persuade couldn’t give two shits about those comparisons. I know I could give zero fucks about it.
If gun control folks want to actually implement change, they will have to come to terms with the fact that they need to persuade their opponents, not demonize or caricature them. Of course, YMMV. Folks like Fear Itself has stated the same idea, but in opposite terms. He believes the scenario is reversed, and there is no need to persuade. Maybe he’s right. I don’t think he is. Do you think that’s a viable strategy given the current environment?
Why are you not interested in how other countries compare? Do you think we don’t have a problem in the US, or are you convinced that American Exceptionalism applies, and we must find some unique solution?