Well, if you wanted to use the same model, you’d have to make the tax prohibitive towards ownership. Adjusted for inflation, let’s say you have to pay for a $5000 tax to own one. Then you’d have to file paperwork with several agencies, undergo background checks and - even if you pass - it’s still up to the chief law enforcement officer of your municipality as to whether or not you’re approved. So they could deny the right to own guns to everyone, or perhaps everyone that didn’t donate a few thousand dollars to their election campaign.
Then, after that, even if we legal semi-auto owners behaved perfectly - those rich, lucky, politically connected few - never committed a crime, and never hurt anyone, we could look forward to a ban passing anyway in the future for no reason.
If making it hard to get an automatic weapon removed essentially all related crimes, is it unreasonable to hope for a similar trend by restricting the ownership of other sorts of guns?
If the difficulties imposed on the ownership of automatic weapons (ranging from fees to simply being denied a permit) don’t contravene the Second Amendment, wouldn’t imposing the same difficulties on other sorts of gun be similarly constitutional?
“Not being shot by criminals”, sounds like a winning deal for everyone.
No. Making it harde to get automatic weapons had no effect on crimes regarding automatic weapons. It goes back to the fact that guns are inanimate objects incapable of murder.
If you want to stop crazy people from doing bad things then you have to deal with them as the problem. that can be through mental health solutions or more conceal carry laws.
Am I worthy of your attention again? Glorious! Now then, I must insist that you read this post.
If making it hard to get automatic weapons had no effect on crimes involving automatic weapons, it’s most remarkable that such restrictions coincided nicely with the absence of such crime for five decades, yes? How do you explain it? Was there simply a preponderance of good will at that point in history? No crazy people wandering around in the middle of the twentieth century?
I’m so weary of this straw man. Nobody has ever suggested that guns float about shooting people unassisted. And yet, we constanly hear the rejoinder that it is the person- not the gun- that does the killing like it means something.
What makes you think it did? Have you actually checked how many people were killed with automatics before the 1934 law was put in place, or are you latching onto something we told you without thinking?
Actually, yes: the National Firearms Act was passed just six months after the Twenty-First Amendment ended prohibition. Less bootlegging means less bootlegging-associated crime.
Is it your contention that there was no mass murder or other sorts of gun violence between 1934 and 1980? Do you mean to suggest that people weren’t shooting eachother before 1934? Because I’m pretty sure I can prove you wrong, if that’s what you’re saying. And taking SenorBeef at his word in this post, I feel like a case could be made that “100% of gun violence between 1934 and 1980 was committed using guns not restricted by the National Firearms Act of 1934.”
Now, I’m no historical gunologist, but if 0% of gun crimes were committed with heavily restricted guns, and 100% of gun crimes were committed with relatively unrestricted guns, can’t we infer… something… about the effect of restrictions on crime from that? Sure you aren’t objecting just for the sake of being objectionable?
And 100% of gun violence was the result of bootlegging? I’m sorry, but I really can’t sit here with a straight face and accept that the 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s, were a halcyonic period of peace because we were finally free of bootleggers. People were being shot during that period. Mass murderers were around, too. But they weren’t using heavily restricted automatic weapons, were they? Why?
Why this argument rears its ugly head repeatedly is beyond me. By that criteria any form of speech on film, the internet, or not produced on a 18th century printing press is unprotected as well, because the Constitution did not anticipate any of that, either.
I’m kind of surprised nobody has mentioned United States v. Miller yet. In that decision, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the “arms” protected by the second amendment were such military small arms as might be used by an individual soldier. It’s probably the closest thing we have to any precedent on the extent to which machine guns should be considered protected under the second amendment, and it seems to argue in their favor.
We can infer that machine guns were never especially popular implements, whether for criminal purposes or otherwise, which contributed to making such restrictions possible in the first place. We can also see plainly that even though machine guns were obviously already restricted “enough” for half a century, still further restrictions were demanded and obtained, which shows the usual progression of gun control advocates to legislate against reason (whether disingenuously or not) and guarantees that gun rights advocates will not now budge an inch on similar laws concerning semiautomatics, whether anybody thinks them reasonable or not.
TL;DR, extremism in gun control advocacy radicalizes its opposition and shuts down the debate, killing hope for any more moderate aims.
Semantics is not a solution for America’s lust for summary death dealing. Pragmatism and a desire to ensure the survival of one’s species is.
I find it difficult to entertain the notion that the founding fathers of the United States had the foresight or desire for weapons that can make the mowing down of toddlers by disgruntled adolescents idiot-proof, readily available to every yokel and his social pariah progeny.
The fervor with which Americans cling to their constitution is akin to fundamentalism–a premise the nation has been waging wars for off of its shores for decades.
I think the people who pushed the machine gun banning amendment to the FOPA wanted to ban private gun ownership in the US. They probably did so because they felt like they were doing the right thing. However, that doesn’t mean they’re interested in the efficacy of any particular law they support. They aren’t interested in arguing in good faith, or reaching a compromise solution.
They would support any restriction on gun ownership they could get to pass to advance their goal of the banning of private ownership. If they could’ve passed a law banning all purple firearms, they would’ve. If they could’ve passed a ban on all guns made in the month of March they would’ve. If they could’ve passed a ban on all guns whose model name starts with the letter R, they would’ve.
It’s just that they happened to succeed on the issue of fully automatic arms, because most people have the same reaction you did - why are these weapons with super military mass destruction abilities even legal in the first place!? I watch Miami Vice! I don’t want our police battling criminals with those guns!
I think I’ve addressed all of your objections, and yet still proved that the gun control advocates and legislators involved in incidents like the '86 machine gun ban are willing to support nonsensical, ineffective laws quite gladly. I’m sure they feel they’re doing what’s right? Who doesn’t? But that doesn’t mean they’re acting in good faith, nor is their goal setting good public policy.
No. The sort of guns that were banned were not particularly suitable for crime. Hollywood has taught us that the effectiveness of weapons relates to how many rounds you can fire down range while flexing your bicep and splitting a log in half with your dick. But in reality, fully automatic fire isn’t magical. The military uses it because almost every round fired in anger isn’t aimed at an individual intending to kill them, but to establish fire ascendancy and suppress the enemy. These are factors that aren’t really relevant to committing crime or even massacres. “Machine guns” aren’t particularly deadly.
The biggest factor for criminal usefulness is concealability. Handguns are, by orders of magnitude, the most useful criminal weapons available.
So “machine gun” ownership became restricted to a select few, who were rich, lucky enough to live in an area that would approve of their ownership, were willing to jump through hoops, and IIRC, willing to allow the ATF to search them and their premises at any time as part of the agreement to own them. The only people who could afford and would be willing to go through this whole process were extreme hobbyists, the sort of people who are generally not particularly inclined towards criminal activity.
So you can’t simply apply the same logic to the rest of gun ownership. You’d make gun ownership prohibitively expensive, at the whim of local police chief who’s more a politician than a cop and you’d end up in a situation where large areas of the country would have police chiefs who either never approved of this ownership, or only did it for political donors/friends/family. You’d give the ATF an unreasonable ability to violate the rights of gun owners.
Criminals aren’t going to go through the hassle to illegally obtain “machine guns” - they’re simply not that useful for crime and they’re not that easy to come by. However, if you applied the same restrictions to all guns, criminals would certainly seek them in other channels. They wouldn’t go through the ridiculous cost and hoops to acquire them through the proper channels. You’d reduce gun ownership to criminals and extreme hobbyists. It wouldn’t quite be a ban, but it would dramatically reduce the availability of guns to the common person.
So no, you can’t just apply the same rules and expect it to have the same effect.
But even if you could - and let’s assume the best case scenario, no one ever committed a crime with these newly regulated guns - history shows that your kind would try to ban them anyway.
The machine gun ban of 1986 is a real example of gun control in action. It’s an example that the gun control side will not stop even if the absolutely best possible outcome for current legislation happens. The fact that you’d try to look at machine gun ownership in the US as some sort of model to follow is extremely ironic, since it’s one of the clearest examples of the true agenda of gun control.
If you put the whether or not you can excercise a right arbitrarily into the hands of a person or government agency, with no due process at all, that absolutely would clearly be unconstitutional.
Yes, the survival of our species is certainly at risk.
Did I miss something? Wasn’t this shooting that everyone is in a big tiff over done with completely run of the mill handguns? Why are we using a shooting committed with the most vanilla, common guns as a springboard to talk about assault weapons?
This is why no reasonable can take you guys seriously. You are going crazy after guns that look scary - guns that don’t even have any special functions or special deadliness or any real non-cosmetic difference at all, guns that are used in a negligible amount of crime. It’s quite frankly ridiculous.
Do you feel the same about how rabidly Americans defend freedom of speech?
Yes, good to know that gun nuts are nothing if not consistent.
I hope you gun freaks say a little thank you to the 20 little kids that died at Sandy Hook so that you could continue to overcompensate. Maybe you can pin a little Purple Heart to each of their little blown-out chests to show the world what patriots they were, so willing to die so that you can play Rambo with your little death toys.
Gun owners aren’t interested in ‘safety’ and ‘self defense’. They want to feel manly.
I don’t know about the survival of the species, but certainly the survival of US kids is at risk as long as Rambo-wannabees are allowed to wander about with penis extensions strapped to their hips. If it was only gun owners that were hurt, I’d figure hey, you got what you asked for. BUT IT’S NOT. It’s innocents, it’s other family members, it’s kids.
I guess there’s no need to regulate hazardous materials, poisons, chemicals, dynamite & other explosives - after all, dynamite doesn’t kill people, people kill people. And we know that all dynamite owners would be responsible people, except the ones that weren’t, but who cares if thousands of people die each year due to dynamite, it’s a small price to pay for our freedom!
Um, I’m a gun owner and pretty much nothing you say here has anything to do with my personal life. I don’t carry a gun or even keep guns out of locked safe, if someone breaks into my house I would not even have one ready for self defense. I think there are reasonable regulations and gun controls we should impose. Banning specific types of weapons by and large is stupid, especially when the specific weapons getting banned are defined in very strange and specific ways that leaves massive numbers of similar weapons on the market. For example the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban banned “assault weapons” which is a silly legislative term. You could still legally buy AR-15 variants under the AWB as long as there were minor differences from the prohibitions in the AWB. You could still buy a Ruger Mini-14 which is semiautomatic rifle that take magazines and can be reloaded with a new one in seconds, but most models of the Mini-14 on the civilian market have a wooden stock so in the eyes of the people who wrote the AWB that means they weren’t a dangerous or scary firearm (because synthetic stock is obviously more dangerous because it “looks” more militaristic.")
The problem America has in getting gun reform is it appears the only people who care about it are zealots. Gun owners that believe there should be no regulation and gun control advocates who do not want reasonable gun control ala Sweden or Norway but just want to ban all guns and call gun owners names. Pretty much the moment I hear someone advocate we can’t register firearms because it’d allow the government to take them or I hear someone say gun owners are using guns as penis extension I pretty much k now that person isn’t really worth listening to on gun control issues.
