You don’t think being dead is a bigger deal than being injured?
Neither of them are ‘good’, but damn right it’s a bigger deal when someone’s killed.
You cannot make these blanket generalizations about it “not being a simple matter with most guns.” There are thousands of different types of guns, and there are just as many different ways to modify them. Guns are just compact machines made out of moving steel parts that work according to the laws of physics. For all the fearsome lore surrounding them, most guns are no more mechanically complex than a ten-speed bicycle. There is no modification in a mass-produced weapon made in a factory that someone in a machine shop cannot undo or circumvent , if they are smart enough. We’re talking about just a collection of stamped metal or plastic pieces and springs, nothing more.
Hell, 60 years ago during the Warsaw uprising the Polish Home Army built submachine guns from scratch. There’s no reason you or I (or anyone else) couldn’t do the same today.
Whether such a modification is practical is a seperate matter; it depends on how badly an individual really want full-auto. But it CAN be done, and it HAS been done, and it probably WILL be done, to all manner of weapons including rifles, pistols, etc.
I already provided not one, but TWO links to ATF information on modifying common firearms to fire full-auto. Neither of these modifications were to the trigger. The guns involved were the Glock family of pistols and the Ruger 10/22 rifle, both of which are currently manufactured. With the right part the Glock mod takes “60 seconds, and does not require tools.”
I’ve seen videos of an illegally modified Glock and a Ruger (European video though). But neither to my knowledge has been used in a violent crime in the US unlike sawed-off sporting rifles and shotguns including those sawed off far enough to make the weapon illegal.
Again, no one is talking about how often the modifications are used, they are pointing out how very easy it is to get information and/or parts to do the mods in the first place.
By the way, thanks for mention of the sawed-off shotguns and rifles. How difficult is it to do that, and what kind of special tools are needed? Is the information really difficult to find?
Right, which doesn’t support the “the people are the militia” argument constantly repeated by NRA types. In other words, saying that any old dude who happens to own a gun is part of “the militia” and is therefore protected by the second amendment would seem to be contrary to this evidence. Cecil seems to think it’s an argument for the individual-rights interpretation, which is an odd take on it.
Could be because you are incorrectly assuming that laws require “justification”. That’s not how it works. If a law is believed by someone to be unconstitutional, it can be challenged in court through some sort of test case. So far, I’m not aware of any gun-control laws that have been struck down on 2nd Amendment grounds. If there are any, it’s a relatively rare occurence.
You’re looking at it backwards. The question is not: “Is there anything in the Constitution that allows gun-control laws?”, but rather, “Is there anything in the Constitution that expressly forbids them”? If you contend that there is, the onus is on you to prove that the Second Amendment specifically protects invidual gun ownership for purposes of personal self-defense, and that therefore would make such laws unconstitutional.
And since we seem to agree that the framers didn’t intend for just any Tom, Dick or Harry to go around waving a gun and saying “I’m the militia”, I don’t see how you can make such a case.
Yeah, the Supreme Court has accepted exactly one case for hearing, and that was way back in 1939 (US v. Miller), where they made what was essentially a default ruling because the defense never showed.
The Supreme Court has shown an extraordinary reluctance to address this subject. Personally, I think they are ducking the issue to avoid setting a precedent, one way or the other.
I don’t know how it would go down if it ever did reach the SC. Both sides are cocksure of their position, but neither side seems sure enough to take it all the way, IMHO.
Bringing up sawed off shotguns is a good point. Such a weapon would be easier to make and use than a full-auto assault rifle, and probably just as effective at close range. To make a sawed off shotgun, you 1) take a hacksaw, and 2) saw the barrel off as short as you want it. That’s it. It goes a lot faster if you have a bandsaw with a hacksaw blade, but it can be done manually.
I know the law requires the barrels of longarms to be a certain length, but I’m not sure sawing off the barrel is actually illegal if the sawed barrel is still longer than the legal limit.
Practially speaking, there’s a limit to how short you can make the barrel of a gas-operated semi-automatic or pump-action gun. You can’t saw the barrel off before the end of the gas piston tube or pump handle guide (which in most pump shotguns is also the magazine).
The “onus” is not on anyone. Most states allow gun ownership in some form, and allow an exception to prosecution when they are used fr self-defence. There’s no point in making a theoretical case on this issue to you; your opinion about it makes no difference either way.
I have long since stopped trying to prove anything to people who try and tell me I have no right to my guns. If I didn’t, why do I have them? I have no intention of letting something I HAD a right to be taken away. I do not have to justify to anyone why I am able to get a driver’s license–the law says I can. I do not have to justify to anyone why I might marry someone outside my race, or vote in any local election, or have a drink when I am 21. The law says I can. I don’t owe anyone an explanation, and I don’t have to “make a case” for those things.
If shotguns are so easy to modify, why are they legal to own? Seems like a silly question on the face of it, but a lot of trouble was put into making the AK-47 a difficult weapon to modify, and until the advent of the internet they were not easy to get a hold of. A shotgun, on the other hand, is damn easy to find, and you don’t need special instructions to make it fit under your jacket-just a vise and a hacksaw.
Because the sporting uses of shotguns are much more common and clear-cut than those of an AK-47. It’s pretty much impossible to shoot ducks or doves in flight with anything except a shotgun. Furthermore, a shotgun fires a lot of pellets, but the velocity of those pellets is no higher for most loads than a single 9mm bullet. (This is one reason why a shotgun is a short-range weapon.) Becasue a shotgun is not a high velocity weapon, they are the only longarms allowed for hunting in some states with higher population densities. The reason for this is that shotgun slugs or buckshot just don’t travel as far as rifle rounds do, cutting down on the very danger I mentioned in an earlier post.
A more philosophical answer to your question could be that regular civilian shotguns don’t look “dangerous,” like the AK-47. Hunting with shotguns is an old cultural tradition, and doesn’t have the negative connotations brought out by the very appearance of a military-style rifle. It’s common to see laws regulating certain things (such as flash hiders, bayonet lugs, etc) that really make no practical difference in a weapon’s deadliness in a shootout. But they look scary and militaristic, and are therefore regulated. Hey, no one said the law has to be logical.
This has less to do with the advent of the Internet, and more to do with the fall of the Iron Curtain, which happened at about the same time. For the last 15 years former Warsaw Pact countries and China have been shipping boatloads of surplus weapons to the United States to sell. These countries need money, and the U.S. has by far the world’s largest and least-regulated civilian gun market. The same thing happened with surplus weapons from WWII, but those guns were not as different from civilian guns, and the gun crimes were both less common and not as widely publicised in the 1940s and 1950s. (Read: No 24-hour-a-day cable news channels.)
So, is there a solution to the Russian surplus weapons problem that the NRA would get behind? And by solution I mean something preventative, not an after-the-fact “Put them in jail for life if they use a gun!” type of solution.
Well, it would be the same solution that would end all cancer deaths due to smoking: outlaw the item in question, i.e. tobacco or the AK-47. But it has about the same chance of happening. Let’s face it: Some things continue not only because there’s money to be made both by the government by taxing it and other powerful entities, but because they’re serving an eager market.
That would seem to be a total non-sequitur. Again, what I said was:
That has nothing to do at all with what you wrote. If one is making the claim that gun-control laws are not justified, it is contingent on that person to demonstrate why.
Huh?
Non causa pro causa. It does not necessarily follow that because you are currently allowed to do something, that you have an incontrovertible right to it. You need to bone up on the difference between something that is a right vs. something that is simply legal.
You may argue that you have a right to own a gun, but to argue that having a gun proves you have a right to a gun is incorrect.
I fail to see how this relates to my exchange with Steve MB. He made the positive assertion that gun-control laws aren’t justified. As such, he needs to “make the case” for that assertion. The status quo is that such laws have been upheld in the courts. So, to use your argument, “the law says they can”.
If I were to claim that you can’t marry someone outside your race, then the onus would be on me to back up that claim. But I have made no such claim.
This thread contains a misconception regarding the point of BATF rules requiring that full automatic conversion require modification the the rifles receiver.
The point is NOT especially to make such illegal conversion more difficult, though that is probably considered a side benefit. The point was to remove legal ambiguity in the definition of what constitutes a fully automatic weapon.
In the case of a long arm (as opposed to a handgun) the BATF considers the receiver to BE the gun. You could swap out every single part except the receiver, and in the eyes of the BATF, it is still exactly the same gun. If the receiver is rendered non-functional and non-repairable, the gun is considered destroyed.
Thus the BATF wants the receiver, which it considers to be the gun, to reliably determine if that gun is fully automatic or not.
There are also enforcement implications to this. If conversion to full-auto is simply a matter of swapping in a different trigger group, it causes a lot of legal ambiguity:
-Joe has a fully automatic trigger group. But he does not own a rifle which it fits…thus he doesn’t have a machine gun.
-Bill has ONE fully automatic trigger group, and owns THREE rifles into which it will fit , but it is not, and there is no evidence it has ever been installed in any of them. Is Bill in trouble for owning a machine gun? If so, should he be charged with owning one machine gun, or three?
-Dave does not get along with his neighbor. The neighbor tells BATF that Dave has a machine-gun. BATF arrives, breaks down Dave’s door, rips the house apart, and finds only legal weapons, one of which could be converted to full automatic IF the required trigger group were installed, however, no such part is found. Does Dave’s ownership of this gun lend any credibility his neighbor’s claim?
By requiring that the receiver determine if the gun is fully automatic or not, the problems above are avoided.
It really doesn’t. I read your post out of context, and probably should not have replied. But what you last posted, that because something is legal doesn’t equate to a right, is tantalizing. The 2nd Amendment even uses the WORD “right,” and all arguments in favor of gun control usually are attempts to avoid the obvious implications of this. Cecil himself has weighed in on this:
“In almost every other aspect of law the Bill of Rights has been broadly construed to restrain the states as well as the federal government. Few today would argue that states can abrogate the right to free speech guaranteed by the First Amendment. Yet many are prepared to let them gut the second, on the grounds that the framers did not foresee urban violence on the scale we face now. Maybe they didn’t, but so what? Civil-liberties advocates don’t accept urban violence as an excuse to curtail other constitutional rights, such as the protection against unlawful search and seizure.”
I don’t find a problem, personally.
Cheap Russian and Chinese weapons simply means that more people can afford to buy the same type of tools that I like to buy.
Personally, I find the AK a piece of junk. Its accuracy is minimal, its weight is too high, and the build quality is lacking.
However, for a few hundred dollars you can buy a bit of history and have fun down at the range. The weapon is also made to be idiot proof and very forgiving in terms of maintenance. In other words you don’t have to keep it perfectly clean, or even well maintained and it will still do a fine job of sending a projectile down range.
In terms of the Consitution, the question is always (IMHO) “Does the government have the right to regulate this particular part of the nation?”
Remember, the Constitution specifically outlines what the government is allowed to do. They are not SUPPOSED to do anything else. In fact, much of the what the Federal government does is done only through the outridge bastardization of the Commerce Clause of the Constitution. Luckily the SC has been stopping a few of those overreaches in recent years.
Now, the BOR was written because even though the Constitution supposedly limited the government to only that which was specifically outlined, many of the folks wanted further assurances that the Federal government would not intrude into their lives. So, we get the various guarantees of personal liberties outlined in the BOR on top of the specific delination of what power the Federal government has.
When we get to the 2nd Amendment and its horribly written syntax, we find a declarative clause (The Right of The People…) and an explanatory clause (Well regulated militia). The People part of it is remarkable consistent with the rest of the People oriented amendments. Nowhere else in the BOR do we find a need to add in additional powers of the Fed. It stands to reason (again, IMHO) that the 2nd, like the 1st, tells us specifically yet another area that the Fed can not intrude. It just adds in an explanatory clause in regards to protecting the free state.
Yes, the word “right” definitely appears, and I never argued to the contrary. What is at issue (and I would have thought this to be obvious by this point) is precisely what that right entails. If you want to argue your right to participate in an armed state militia, I won’t disagree with you. It’s only to the extent that you claim a right to own as many weapons as you like, of any kind, for your own personal use in personal self-defense or recreation, that we have a disagreement.
For what it’s worth, I think Cecil’s argument is interesting and well-articulated. However, there are some very good counter-arguments as well. First of all, to compare the Second Amendment, with its qualifying first clause, to the First Amendment, which contains no such opening clause, is misleading.
First Amendment:
There is no opening clause here. If the framers were in the habit of including gratuitous opening clauses that have no effect of the legal ramifications of the amendment, why no opening clause in the First Amendment? Yes, the First Amendment has been interpreted broadly, but then it isn’t specifically qualified in any way other than that it applies only to Congress making laws.
Now let’s look at the 3rd Amendment:
This amendment IS qualified, i.e. “in time of peace”. Surely you wouldn’t argue that, if a proper law were passed to make provisions for housing soldiers, during wartime that it would be unconstitutional. The unconditional aspect of this right only applies in times of peace.
To argue that an amendment that has some qualification to it, should be interpreted as broadly as amendments that have no qualifications, is misleading. The argument that Cecil is arguing against is NOT the argument I am making. It’s really a strawman. The issue isn’t whether the Second Amendment should restrain states, but rather whether it is an individual as opposed to a collective right.
You have a right to bear arms, and you can interpret this right as broadly as you like, to the extent that you are exercising that right via your participation in a state militia.
You have a right to bear arms IF you are in a militia, just as…
You have a right not to have soldiers quartered in your home IF we are at peace.