Without even addressing the fact that the first AWB was itself an aberration and a departure from a centuries-long tradition of private citizens owning the contemporary infantry rifles of their day, affirmed in U.S. v. Miller as far back as 1939, the huge difference between cars and assault weapons is that the peril associated with the widespread availability of assault weapons is extremely small.
Yeah a fringe maybe that anti-statist but it wasn’t a “fringe” that was suggesting a nonsensical assault weapons ban, it was POTUS and a lot of prominent Democratic politicians.
It is exactly because the assault weapons ban would make so little difference that it is so obnoxious. It seems like an attack on gun owners purely for the sake of attacking gun owners.
If you want me to give up any ground on any of my rights, you have to justify it with some tangible benefit or avoidance of harm to society. I never saw that justification for the assault weapons ban. Its not because I got used to having a “tacticool” semi-automatic rifle, its because the folks who want to restrict constitutional rights bear the burden of justifying the restriction, I don’t have to justify the exercise of the right.
The peril associated with trucks, compared to cars, is also extremely small, just because there are so many more cars on the roads; but what happens when something goes wrong with a fully-laden tractor-trailer going 60 mph is so disastrous and horrible that it well justifies placing trucking and truck drivers under much heavier regulation than cars and their drivers.
I should have known better than the continue the car analogy, but it’s worth pointing out that one of the big reasons we require CDLs to drive big rigs is that big rigs are much more difficult to safely operate than a typical car. This isn’t true of rifles, which are, if anything, easier to maintain safely than pistols. And when a person makes a conscious decision to start shooting innocent people, they can rack up just as horrible a body count with pistols and low-capacity magazines as they can with an AR-15 – the Virginia Tech massacre, the Binghamton massacre, the Dunblane massacre, and so many others are testament to this fact.
Even so, if people were suggesting heavier regulation or some kind of licensing for “assault weapons” instead of just trying to ban them outright, this would be a different conversation. They’d still be wrong, but it would be a less inherently unreasonable idea.
See:
Cross-Border Spillover: U.S. Gun Laws and Violence in Mexico
and:
Exporting the Second Amendment: U.S. Assault Weapons and the Homicide Rate in Mexico
and:
Mexican President Calderon calls for assault weapon ban in U.S.
I cite Pres. Calderon not as an expert, but because giving Mexicans another good reason to resent us is by itself a significant consideration.
Not a single gun was taken off of the street nor were any removed from production due to the AW ban of 1994. Cosmetic features were removed to comply and production kept rolling. It didn’t make a difference because due to the very text of the law it COULDN’T make a difference.
To imply that the expiration of the ban led to a 16% rise in homicides in Mexico, while the same expiration of the ban led to an average of less than 50 homicides by AWs per year in the US, is patently ridiculous.
I think this is correlation without causation.
The fact of the matter is that pre1994 assault weapons were readily available and AWB compliant semi-automatic rifles with the exact same functionality were for sale over the counter in almost every US border state.
I think the increase in gun violence has more to do with teh increase in criminal activity than with the repeal of a law that every expert agrees was entirely ineffective in reducing gun violence in thye states. Why would repealing an AWB have no effect on gun violence in teh sttes but have such a dire impact on gun violence in Mexico? Isn’t it possible that the rise of violent Mexican drug cartels is the cause of this increase?
Maybe Mexico needs more gun rights. The guns that most law abiding Mexicans have access to are woefully inadequate for self defense.
Oh God not the Mexico Crime thing. You know when Mexico reports the guns they find used to commit crimes to US agencies it’s only a small percentage. and of that small percentage hey look they are almost all from the US.
They conveniently leave out “lost” military shipments from their side. The guns that are from their south of the border and countless other ones. The reporting is skewed. Grenades yeah I see those at the gun shop everyday. They toss those puppies out like nothing over there. So you know they are getting them for cheap. They certainly ain’t paying a $200 tax stamp on each one to have it smuggled over.
Most of the straw purchases that make it over are just status symbol guns for top guys. The rank and file get the cheap stuff.
Also like already mentioned this coincides to when things started going down the shitter in Mexico not because of US gun laws, but because of the growing Narco trade.
Did you read the link? It didn’t say that “the expiration of the ban led to a 16% rise in homicides in Mexico,” and it didn’t imply that.
As for “less than 50 homicides by AWs per year in the US,” that would put it in the same range as annual homicide deaths in countries like Ireland, New Zealand, and Switzerland which have strong firearms controls*. But even if you think 50 lives means little, I don’t see how that number can be reconciled with this:
No one’s denying that. But the numbers are far higher than for US school shootings, which I’m told (and believe) most US gun owners believe is a real problem requiring action.
- In Switzerland, it isn’t gun control, but strong bullet control.
P.S. to my last post: I neglected to give a link for the Miami quotation. It’s from a Miami Herald story that’s behind a paywall but also found here:
http://www.mayorsagainstillegalguns.org/html/media-center/mh_011408.shtml
If you can make a case that these criminals would not have done the same thing with semi-automatic rifles or other firearms, you might be onto something but the obvious argument is that these guys would not have been dissuaded by a lack of access to semi-automatic rifles that look tacti-cool.
As a matter of fact, I read all 42 pages including the charts at the end. From the conclusion (page 23):
Did I read that wrong?
I said nothing regarding the value of the lives lost. Take your appeal to emotion fallacy somewhere else. I took that number from the US Justice Dept and Senator Diane Feinstein herself:
Her math shows 42 on average anually.
This thread is getting hijacked into crime-rates and stuff, which have nothing to do with “liberty” as the OP meant it. Just to get it back on track: Attention, all American gun owners: Your personal firearms have no political value whatsoever. Whether you have them or not will never so long as you live make any difference to the state of liberty, or equality, or democracy in this country.
Would you tell the same thing to the Syrians? Cite.
Do they just like carrying around those heavy and awkward rifles because they look stylish?
It’s all part of the Arab Spring fashion line for 2013
I don’t think anyone who is sane or rational on this issue thinks we will need a popular armed revolt in our lifetime but strange things can happen. Heck we elected Bush TWICE, if things had gone just a little bit differently and the government exercised the powers granted in the patriot act to its fullest extent, it might not sound as ridiculous as it does right now.
I agree that it’s unlikely, but to suggest that firearms would be useless in the case of such a low-probability event is to ignore our recent history fighting insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, and particularly the ongoing civil war in Syria.
You might have missed my reply… I read your link and quoted where it said exactly the opposite of your claim here. Thoughts? As another poster on the message board told me, when you cite a link as proof of something, the assumption is that you actually read it first. Here is the conclusion again, just in case you did miss my earlier post:
I don’t claim to be an epidemiologist, nor a statistician, but I can read, and I also lived through the first AW Ban so I know exactly what it did and did not do. so I would like to you tell me if I am misreading both the abstract and the conclusion.
Exporting-the-Second-Amendment-US-Assault-Weapons-and-the-Homicide-Rate-in-Mexico
No, because they are fighting a civil war. What is your point?
The RationalWiki page on Gun nuts is insightful and relevant here:
They ain’t makin’ it up about about those “false flag operation” theories, either. See this Pit thread. If you believe/proclaim that the Sandy Hook massacre was staged, then you are a gun nut, and probably several other kinds of nut.