And even then, that gun was huge. I’ve seen it in a museum and little old me could never lug it around.
How legal were BARs in Clyde’s day?
I think they were legal at the time, and even after the National Firearms Act of 1934 (NFA) could still have been legal to possess if the owner registered them according to the law.
I agree laws banning particular types of guns, which are judged to be specially socially negative on average, must focus on what is really viewed as negative about them. A general law banning ‘assault weapons’ would be entirely ridiculous because that whole term is meaningless outside the civilian gun control debate. Under the military meaning of the term semi-automatic AR15’s are not ‘assault rifles’ (there isn’t even military term ‘assault weapon’). In fact even the original selective fire (ie semi auto/auto selector switch) AR15 (the weapon later designated M16 by the Army, when adopted by the USAF and in trial quantities by the Army prior to 1964 it carried the military designation AR15) was not an ‘assault rifle’ under the prevailing military definition. That term was first used in English as a translation of Sturmgewehr, the German term for selective fire rifle firing ‘intermediate length full caliber’ (.30 cal-ish, 7.92mm nominally in that case) cartridge. The AK-47 followed that pattern. The AR15 was ‘small caliber high velocity’, a smaller caliber (5.56mm) but cartridge case relatively long for the caliber cartridge, which later became the pattern in most armies.
So if you invent the term ‘assault weapon’ for gun control purposes, and it is invented for that purpose, not to say it’s wrong in invent new terms, you must logically define what it means. And it should be in functional terms. I don’t agree that ‘the pro-gun side’ was the one inserting ideas like defining these guns in meaningless terms like ‘flash hider’ or ‘pistol grip’. Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity, or in this case ignorance. And the latter two are the answer why some ‘assault weapon’ laws focus on cosmetic trivialities on semi-automatic rifles. There’s room for the laws to simply be better thought out.
The ‘pit bull’ case is not really a good analogy because not only is there no scientific evidence that dog breed is a casual factor in dog aggression toward humans, it’s entirely nonsensical to assume you can predict the behavior of mixed breed dogs (the overwhelmingly majority of dogs affected by such bans) by which of their component breeds they more closely resemble, or are said to resemble by people who don’t know much about dogs, which is the standard case in practice. That’s in contrast to rifles where there is an inherent reason to say a semi-automatic rifle with X round standard detachable magazine can fire Y rounds in minute in hands of average shooter (stopping to switch magazines Z times in that period) which has basically zero to do with flash hiders or bayonet lugs. But that ROF is reasonably arguably relevant to the mass shooting problem, if not perhaps as relevant to the overall problem as some proponents of such law imagine or pretend to (eg. what about automatic pistols if allowed big magazines, where one person can carry a brace of them). But some rational basis anyway, as opposed to BSL for dogs, which is essentially wholly nonsensical start to finish.
Except that he stole it from a National Guard armory, as I recall.
I haven’t seen any proposals that are better thought out, though. I think the popular comparison between the AR-15 and the Mini 14 is pretty apt in pointing out that the AR-15 is not functionally different between anything that would reasonably be considered a hunting rifle, and makes the previous assault rifle ban seem pretty silly. But at the same time, it’s hard to look at the arsenal the Mandalay Bay shooter had up in his crows nest and not think, “Jesus Christ, how is this OK?”
I just don’t see how you put a limit on that without affecting hunting rifles. You’d have to ban any semi-automatic weapon capable of firing rifle rounds, which would piss off a lot of people. Are there any other reasonable proposals?
“Illegal as hell” only in California (maybe a couple other states). And even then, there are ways around it. For most of the country, there is nothing illegal about shortening or removing the buttstock of a rifle. It is only illegal to shorten the barrel to less than 16".
They’ve been around for quite some time. At least since the late 1990s.
They’ve been legal for longer than bump stocks, though. I think it would take a mass shooting with one before the general public would be informed and enraged enough to pressure the legislature into banning them.
When the M16 was first issues, it came in SAFE-SEMI-AUTO. Shortly after, it was issued as SAFE-SEMI-BURST (3 Round). We’ve come full circle in the recent years, as the M4 is once again issued in SAFE-SEMI-AUTO configuration.
Congratulations on a sane and intelligent gun thread.
I heard a suggestion on the radio that just as machine guns required an expensive license, a license may be the answer to the “scary gun” problem.
I didn’t realize until I saw a guy buying his son a rifle in a gun shop that AR-15s were used for hunting. I hadn’t thought the cartridge powerful enough to bring down a deer.
With the right bullet and proper shot placement, yes. I’d rather a .44 Mag rifle, though.
They are super popular for small game and and pests, like feral pigs, jack rabbits, prairie dogs and coyotes.
That pretty well takes the tax out. My kid would take one out out to shoot rabbits.
Some states now have what are I believe rational* ‘assault weapon’** bans. A 100% clear law isn’t possible. But if a law specifies semi-auto action, magazine of greater than certain capacity, and perhaps exclusions for very low power (.22 etc) cartridges that’s 80/20 wise a reasonably rational law. Mentioning stuff like bayonet lugs just isn’t rational that I can see, but some versions of those laws have done that.
As for as hunting, a large proportion of quasi-single issue pro-gun rights voters are not mainly seeking to protect hunting rights. They are mainly seeking to protect self defense rights as they see them. One doesn’t have to agree with their opinion, but it’s kidding oneself to think it’s a lot about hunting. Hunting vis a vis gun control is mainly what pro-gun control people talk about to each other to show they are being reasonable. Sure, some additional opposition to various gun control proposals sometimes comes from people who only use guns to hunt, but most of it is from people who don’t see guns only as hunting tools or don’t hunt.
Which is true even in the accurate comeback that AR15 clones are actually popular hunting tools. They are popular varmint guns, where it makes no difference if the animal ‘has a fair chance’, a consideration which anyway is probably exaggerated in game hunting: some actual game hunters care about that, others don’t. But anyway people who don’t actually care about hunting will often make that comeback. But it’s usually not the main reason they are so opposed to new sale bans of such guns, nor is it why confiscation (‘mandatory buy back’) would lead IMO to an entirely counter productive further decline in social cohesion especially if pushed through on a narrow legislative majority. And that’s the only even remotely likely scenario for such measures nationally in the US IMO.
Then the other basic truth is that there’s no remotely politically feasible way, in the US, to ban (not just sale) all the guns and accouterments people could ‘effectively’ use for mass murder. Newly bought AR15 (and similar) with big magazines are only moderately more dangerous against unarmed victims than various other choices (newly bought multiple automatic pistols, illegally obtained rifles, etc).
So the strictly policy/rational goal of ‘assault weapon bans’ has to be pretty limited, not ‘solving the mass shooting problem’. Which doesn’t mean don’t do it necessarily. It just means any law that can pass will have holes, holes wrt ‘assault weapons’ (but they don’t have to be stupid ones is all), and banning new sale of ‘assault weapons’ will not ‘solve’ mass shootings. It might help enough to be worth doing. That IMO can be reasonably debated.
*not meaning necessarily ‘ones I agree with’ just ones with some consistency between what they purport to do and what they say, unlike ‘it you make a gun functionally equivalent to an AR15 but no flash hider etc, it’s fine’ which some real bans have amounted to.
**a term probably too widely used now to stop using, but it is misleading, both the pretense that it has some meaning in military terms which it doesn’t, and the suggestion to ignorant people external appearance of guns is important.