Your ignoring everything I wrote an repeating irrelevancies. I already explained how a rifle becomes a handgun. It should be pretty clear that all these definitions of different firearms and the restrictions placed upon them is an attempt to limit their lethality.
If instead of lethality you choose to restrict a firearm on some other criteria like whether or not it is an automatic, you haven’t changed anything except to create an interesting engineering problem, like the bump stock. Now you have something that is technically not an automatic because the trigger is pulled for each round fired. The only difference now is that the movement of the gun pulls the trigger continuously. Therefore it is not an automatic and it is legal. The lethality has not changed. How the trigger gets pulled, whether or not it is technically a handgun, a rifle, a flyswatter, or a hairdryer is irrelevant.
I am not trying to solve all problems with all handguns forever with this suggestion. Just the biggest problem. What do you have to limit to stop a crazy determined person from killing huge numbers of people with firearms?
The lethality is by definition the only thing that matters in this context
Yes, obviously banning all guns would have prevented this incident. It wouldn’t prevent all incidents, but it would have prevented this specific one. Of course, a blanket ban would be unConstitutional, and we’re a long, long way from being able to repeal the Second Amendment, but if we did, it would work.
I can think of lesser measures that would also work. For instance, we could ban all magazines above some (very small) capacity. This guy would have been a lot less lethal if he had to reload after (say) every third shot, but a three-shot magazine wouldn’t have a very large impact on a significant segment of legitimate gun uses like hunting. That probably also wouldn’t pass Second Amendment muster, but it’s still far short of a total ban.
Not sure why we need to demonstrate a ‘lower’ incidence of ‘mass killings’ - even in the US, the number of mass shootings is extreme and gets all the press, but it only highlights how quickly we are to simply ignore the thousands and thousands of people killed every day in non-mass shootings.
But anyway, if you want incidents of intentional homicides? With levels of gun ownership? Sure, we have that:
Intentional homicides per 100,000 / estimated guns per capita
US: 4.88 / 90
UK: 0.92 / 6.6
Japan: 0.31 / 0.6
Denmark: 0.99 / 12
Ireland: 0.64 / 4.3
Australia: 0.98 / 24.1
Switzerland: 0.98 / 24.4
New Zealand: 0.91 / 22.6
Finland: 1.60 / 34.2
Sweden: 1.15 / 31.6
Norway: 0.56 / 31.3
A totally rigorous and completely scientific regression analysis puts R2 at 0.86. Loosely speaking, it would seem to suggest that 86% of the homicide rate is explained by the level of gun ownership.
Yes, I understand this is not ‘scientifically rigorous’, but come on - we have more way more guns than other developed countries and we have more murders than other developed countries, yet some other developed countries have slightly higher rates of other forms of violent crime - assaults and such. The difference is they have the violent crime without all the death and dying and stuff.
And this is all before we even get into the whole unintentional homicides. How many kids do you think die each year overseas from unintentional stabbings?
And yet, the data above shows that without guns, fewer people die overall. So no, people don’t just start murdering with knives, hammers, chainsaws if they don’t have guns. It turns out, having a tool built specifically for killing is really really convenient for killing people. Who knew?
You make it as hard as possible for them to turn their hunting rifle into an automatic. As far as I’m concerned you could only sell them without clips for all I care. Make them put each bullet into the chamber manually. What, you say somebody made a device that makes it easier to fastload and fastfire? Make that illegal too and shut him down.
I get what you’re doing. You’re waving your hands frantically in the air and crying “you can’t fix everything so you shouldn’t be allowed to fix anything!” This is a typical conservative tactic for avoiding changing anything for the better. And it’s bullshit. It’s perfectly legitimate to reduce problems in ways that, despite being largely effective, will not completely stop that determined psycho that will create a nuke in his basement if he has to.
Bullshit. You accuse me of ignoring what you wrote?
Lethality matters. Concealability matters. Rate of fire matters. Numbers of targets matter. Ease of use in a crime matters. Ease and convenience of use in suicide matters.
Unless, of course, you want as many people dead as possible.
As I have mentioned before, humans are just giant water balloons. The theory that we’re all that hard to kill has more to do with our feelings of invincibility and reluctance to kill others. It doesn’t match the reality. Someone who wants to kill a lot of people has a smörgåsbord of implements to choose from, bomb, car, jackhammering in to key points in some key item of the infrastructure (dam, overpass, etc.), poison, arson, etc. A gun is often chosen in the US, but that’s as much a cultural point as one of availability. Bombings are on the rise here, as people have been cultivated by ISIS and other foreign terrorist groups.
You pulled a number of bombings, stretching back 25 years, with a combined death toll of less than 200.
More people were killed by guns in the US in the past week.
And I don’t think I have to point out the stupidity of equating terrorist attacks with gun violence in the US.
He might have used a bomb. Bombs are harder to buy than guns, and so some people who want to mass-murder, but who don’t have access to guns, would be unable to obtain a suitable weapon.
Put it this way: Why didn’t he use a bomb? Presumably he considered guns a superior method for dealing out death, for some reason.
And to be honest, if all you want to improve is massive deliberate preplanned terrorist events, then you’ll have to do a bit more than restricting access to handguns and (semi-)automatic weaponry. But a hefty percentage of America’s spree killings, and an even heftier percentage of america’s homicides, and a truly massive percentage of america’s accidental murders, are rather spontaneous affairs that are significantly facilitated by the presence of handy guns.
I really think this is a bad approach. Once again, all you do is create an interesting engineering problem. A three shot magazine limit reduces the lethality of the firearm, right? Now every gunsmith and gunmaker goes to work for a way to restore that lethality, because the one that figures it out first makes out big time.
We’ve seen bump stocks and all kind of trigger adjustments and gimmicks that take a semi-auto and turn it back into something with fire rate of an auto. Nothing changes from a lethality standpoint.
Your suggestion might actually produce a worse effect than already exists. For example the selector on a really well designed assault rifle, tha AK-47, goes single shot, auto, 3 bullet burst. Why? Somebody stressed out and panicked is going to press the selector all the way without thinking and if the end stop is auto he will pull the trigger hold it and spray all his bullets at once. So, the no thought selection preserves bullets and gives the guy a chance to think before he’s empty.
Suppose your restriction forces the shooter to re aim every three shots instead of simply spraying all his bullets wasting most of them? You’ve increased lethality.
Take the case of the switchblade. Some legislators saw West Side Story and it made them sad and they didn’t want that to happen to their kids so they banned switchblades (you can’t make this up). Never mind that switchblades were cheap and poorly made and unreliable and not really a problem, suddenly they were cool. All the knifemakers went to work and they came up with all these cool ways to make switchblades that aren’t technically switchblades. You have flippers and assisted openers and all these cool really made knives that open handed faster and easy than any switchblade before. Now basically every knife is equivalent to a switchblade in terms of its speed and ease of opening.
So you assert. I can point to data on the question of total homicides. Neither of us has any data on mass killings.
Knives and vehicles are fairly commonly used in Europe as ‘cheap and easy’ murder implements. For all I know, there’s a large number of people who toss bowling balls off overpasses in the UK, massively larger than the US, that is going unreported. As previously noted, humans just aren’t that hard to kill. You don’t really need to think for very long to come up with any number of options to go out and kill a few.
I don’t understand the necessity for someone to own dozens of guns and high power rifles. I know some little boys love to play soldier, but that’s no justification for putting the rest of us in danger.
A small handgun with limited ammo should be IT. And there should be both a background check, a psychological evaluation and mandatory training plus evaluation on gun safety and proper use, including local legal regulations on when you can and cannot use it, etc. And you need to renew your licence every 3-5 years.
If you are found to violate gun safety, you forfeit your right to carry. If you commit a violent crime, you forfeit your right to carry. If you need something other than this it has to be for a VERY good reason, like you’re a licensed hunter. If you want to shoot high powered guns at a range, there could be allowances for businesses willing to provide this service. They need to pay for proper security and account for every gun at all times.
This way we don’t have to worry about your psychotic son braking into your gun vault and killing a bunch of babies at a pre k, or some rich ass-hat going nuts and killing a bunch of people with his private arsenal. It’s not motherfucking rocket science. It has worked in other countries.
Has anybody here heard about the Flint Airport Massacre? No. Because it didn’t happen. What did happen was that a terrorist did the yell and stabbed Flint police officer Jeffrey Neville in the neck. He had tried to buy a gun and could not do so. Jeffrey Neville is alive today because of gun laws and so, arguably, are many other people at Bishop Airport that day.
No, the bad guys won’t always be able to get guns. Can you imagine that schlub that committed the Denver theater shooting trying to get guns on a black market. They most likely would have taken his money and killed him.
I have to stop you there because in reality the system is inadequate, by design and by negligence.
BTW I do think that while Americans do have the right to own guns, what I can see is that there is even less adequate ways to know how many guns a law abiding citizen is piling up, when at the same time there are other issues with individuals that should limit them from making such pile ups.
I’ll give another example of gun regulations gone bad. In S.Korea its almost impossible for a civilian to have any kind of firearm. Yet people still want to hunt and defend themselves and such, so what did they do?
They started working on working on pneumatic guns, and they got really good at. They started making air rifles that could shoot .50 caliber 200 grain bullets. They designed them to stay at subsonic speeds but still deliver 230 fps. They discovered that there is all kinds of nifty things about air guns, like they are really easy to make absolutely silent, and you can run them off of what are essentially mininscuba tanks of super higher pressure air, and get tons and tons of shots, and make them automatic, and in lots of ways vastly superior Yo firearms in general except for long range for which they still suck.
They can shoot anything you can make the right size, bullets, ice, crossbow bolts, darts, all kinds of crazy stuff.
They are so good in fact that people started using them here because they are so much better and more lethal than a handgun or rifle in so many applications. For example, hunters in the south use hem on feral hogs, because they are silent and easy, and you can adjust the lethality range and hunt at night in he suburbs with nobody knowing.
I have a condor ss which is more silent and deadly than a fart in a bathysphere. I use it for plinking and I had to add backstop to my range because it penetrates better than a .22, takes out groundhogs and is basically free to shoot once you own the gun. It’s a tack driver out to 150 yards with a 16x power scope and perfect for groundhogs and coyotes and other vermin. Has basically 0 recoil so it would b very easy to shoot multiple rounds very fast with high accuracy (except I wanted a single shot model in my particular gun) It might be light for a feral hog or a deer but it’s just a toy compared to what’s available in pneumatics.
It’s not a firearm, so it’s pretty much completely unregulated. If you outlaw guns suddenly these become very attractive and they are pretty lethal, more so than a firearm in many applications.
I would be a lot more afraid of somebody with say a .50 caliber pneumatic repeater good for 30 or 40 shots with a near silent zero recoil feature than I would be with a guy with a .38 pistol.
I’ve stated publicly here before that I’m fine with the above in principle; the firearms license can be tied to driver’s licenses, a special “endorsement” on a standard driver’s license.
What I need to get on board with it is some form of legislative guarantee so that the federal government can’t pull a California.
My contribution: I would be fine fine fine with a total complete, comprehensive ban on ANY & ALL internal or external modification that turns single-shot semi-auto to full auto.
This ban is total. It applies to anything currently sitting on the shelves in stores, anything currently “out there” on various firearms, and anything that anyone could possibly think up and manufacture.
Bump stocks, trigger cranks, whatever some ingenious person dreams up next, it doesn’t matter. If it changes the firearm internally or externally such as to allow semi-autos to go full-auto, ban it.