Excuse me, your bias is showing.
Perhaps because I am not a fucking criminal?
I was a little put off by LinusK’s question at first, but it makes some sense to me. If assault weapons are rarely used in crimes, then law abiding citizens don’t need them to counter balance the firepower of criminals.
Whichever way, it’d be nice if you found out what the poster meant before you got all offended.
Every male in Switzerland is issued a weapon when he enters military service. He may keep it when he leaves the military. But first he must surrender it so that it can be changed from being an automatic weapon. Those and semi-automatic weapons are banned in Switzerland (except for the military.) Officers may keep their pistols.
Citizens are expected (required?) to keep their weapons at home except for all of these shooting contests. Permits are required.
Those laws don’t sound lax, but they do sound reasonable. (And there are more stipulations too.)
In the United States a gun is more likely to kill someone in the household than it is to kill an intruder. I know that there are many responsible gun owners out there. Some of those who have become paranoid or prone to fantasies are just way over-charged about not making any changes in gun laws. I’m more frightened of those people than I am the federal government. I do see efforts to change some of our rights. The Patriot Act and all of its invasion of privacy is an example.
State government is another matter. I’m tired, very tired, of those on the far right who try to throw elections with gerrymandering and voter suppression. I don’t see many gun owners that are standing up in DOL about these issues. Those things are much more likely to change our government on the federal level in the immediate future.
Gun owners are being being fed a lot of horse manure about the left wanting to take away all their guns. I don’t believe that most liberals want that at all. And it’s not going to happen unless the 2nd Amendment is recinded. And that’s not going to happen either.
Finally, how many of you gun owners have had someone actually hold a gun on you? It has happened twice when I was alone with a threatening person. I surprisingly held my cool and even got my purse back on one of those occasions.
Because:
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I never use my guns for crimes. Taking them will have zero effect on the crime rate, because I’m not a criminal. (Criminals will still have them though.)
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Even if all “assault rifles” disappeared, the crime rate would remain essentially unchanged, as there are plenty of viable alternatives.
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Although “assault rifles” offer no advantage over other guns when attacking a group of unarmed children, they do offer some advantages when facing a numerically-superior force of attackers. They are a plus in situations of societal breakdown, or, if worse comes to worse, governmental tyranny.
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The big one: There will be NO change in the crime rate if “assault rifles” are banned. There will still be mass murders, and some of these will be committed with other weapons, and have very large numbers of dead. The anti-gunners, instead of admitting the obvious failure of their ban, will instead call to ban even more types of weapons. Through incrementalism, they will achive their goals.
I’m sure you wouldn’t use anthrax to poison people either. That doesn’t mean we should let you have it. And when, oh when, will gun lovers get off the “if guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns” meme? Yeah, and if rape is outlawed, only outlaws rape. If crack is outlawed, only outlaws get crack. And so on.
So you’re saying that until we can ban all means of committing crimes, that we should not lift a finger? Doesn’t make sense.
Sure they do. He was able to mow them down rapid fire because he could achieve rapid fire. In case of societal breakdown, I don’t want people of your political persuasion to be in charge by virtue of their weaponry. And the governmental tyranny argument is just nutso fantasyland stuff.
Too bad your “big one” didn’t have any credibility. Again, the concept of “we can’t do anything about crime unless we stop all crime” is ridiculous. If we can slow down the slaughter, that’s better than doing nothing. There is no reason that American mass murderers have to be the best equipped mass murderers in the world.
Please, do You really think mass murders are normal criminal activity and not a part of American gun culture? There are criminals everywhere, but not so much mass murders.
And these mass murders with other weapons? I haven’t seen much of them in news lately, but while this thread have been going on, in The USA there have been at least two or three rampages that have been reported in the papers here and I live in the other side of the world. How many have been gone unreported…
What the fuck are you on about now? What “rapid fire” weaponry are you referring to?
Are you referring the AR-15 that shoots (just as fast as any other semi-automatic weapon or revolver) as fast as you can pull the trigger.
There are some folks who should just refrain from participation in threads such as these, you are one.
That stems from the juvenile concept that the world is full of “good guys” and “bad guys”. Perhaps a more useful question would be “How can you tell the difference? What is the definition of each? According to those definitions, which category covers you?”
Well, as fast as you can pull the trigger is rapid fire. If he didn’t have such a weapon, there would be more children alive today.
If you don’t want to read my opinions on guns, just put me on ignore. I’m not going to stop preaching against them.
If you count all the gang members and drug dealers who shoot each other, yes. As I pointed out in my thread on personal behavior vs. statistics, responsible law-abiding people hate being tarred with the same brush as criminals.
And as I pointed out in another thread, gun-control advocates seem to trust the government more than they do their fellow citizens; for gun owners, it’s usually the other way around.
I can’t say for “most” liberals but a vocal and militant minority do. And until the Heller and McDonald rulings they claimed the Second Amendment was no obstacle at all. It’s still uncertain how firm a floor Heller put under gun rights; the court did not rule on gun possession in itself but peripherally under the general right of self-dense; the court upheld virtually all federal gun laws in effect at the time; and specifically did NOT rule what standard could be used (strict scrutiny or a lesser standard) to justify limiting the right to be armed.
You specifically attributed to “assault weapons” the “rapid fire” ability to gun people down. Then when challenged on that you redefined it as any weapon that isn’t single-shot. Dishonest.
I am somewhat handicapped by a lack of technical knowledge. As I understand it, the weapon in question was able to shoot rounds in quick succession and also had a magazine that enabled a prolonged shooting spree. Whether that makes it an assault weapon or a semi-automatic or both or neither I simply don’t care. The point is that civilians don’t need the ability to shoot so many rounds so quickly unless one adopts the fantasyland nonsense about defense against tyranny. Let’s express it as the ability to fire X rounds in Y seconds with Z rounds between reloading. If we could agree on reasonable values for X, Y, and Z then we know what weapons should be banned.
Cue asinine response to the use of the term round vs bullet with a side helping of pedantry around the term cartridge…
Which is why people who actually know how guns work get exasperated at people who don’t proclaiming what should be banned.
Well for starters, policemen- that’s ordinary patrolmen, not SWAT team members- feel nothing less than 17-round semi-automatic (“rapid fire”) pistols with rapidly switched removable magazines will do; mandate that police go back to 6-shot revolvers, and you’d have a nationwide police strike. So since that’s what the experts feel is a minimum when faced with a potentially armed or violent person, let’s take that as a start.
Fair enough. It was late, and I was tired. I pre-emptively apologize to LinusK if he was not implying what I thought he was implying.
This is the best You could do? Cops? Really?
People are talking about disarming criminals and psychos and getting overkill guns from people who don’t have sensible need for them… and You talk about cops.
Well, You said You don’t trust government much, but this little?
The firearms in the link below are 12-gauge shotguns. Both designs are over 100 years old. The side by side holds two rounds. The pump can hold five, plus one more in the chamber.
A standard self-defense load for the 12-gauge shotgun is 00 buckshot. Each shell typically contains nine pellets of .33" diameter, travelling at about 1300 feet per second. All nine pellets are discharged at the same time.
Are these guns incapable of being used to mass murder large numbers of defenseless children? Or will you need to ban them too, after the “assault weapons” ban proves ineffective?
Why do you include the qualifier “between reloading”?
Crack and rape are objectively bad, guns are not. The whole point of the “meme” is that legal gun ownership is not a problem, illegal gun ownership is, and that therefore additional onerous restrictions on legal gun ownership will not solve any problem.
You are just being intentionally obtuse if you claim not to understand this.
No, that’s not what he’s saying at all. He’s saying assault rifles are hardly ever used for crimes, and thus a ban on assault rifles will be largely ineffective in preventing crime, and grossly disproportionate in its effect on legitimate gun owners compared to the reduction on crime.
If societal breakdown is really such a crazed fantasy, you have nothing to worry about. If it’s not, it is incredibly selfish of you to expect other people to sacrifice their own well-being in such a scenario because your political persuasion is somehow preventing you from preparing for it yourself.
I don’t know why you are so obsessed with mass murder. 88 people died in the US in 2012 in mass shootings. Yes, each one of those was a tragedy. But we are a huge country, and if those people had died from any other statistically separable cause, we’d all understand that it’s statistically negligible and move on. So why do you insist on restricting the rights of 75,000,000 law-abiding gun owners in order to prevent what is, literally, already a one-in-a-million risk?
You are not reading very carefully. First of all, no gun owner objects to disarming criminals and psychos. The problem is that most gun control proposals simply involve disarming everyone.
Second, the point of the post you are responding to is that many people say that a semi-automatic weapon with a 7-round magazine is sufficient for self-defense, and that anything more than this is “overkill”. Some people in this thread feel a semi-automatic weapon of any kind is overkill. Yet, the police strenuously object to anyone placing such restrictions on them - as they did in New York just recently when the incompetent, grandstanding lawmakers failed to include any exceptions in their new gun control bill for the police. The police prefer to carry high-capacity semi-automatic weapons even if civilian ownership of these is banned. Why might that be, I wonder? Perhaps so they can defend themselves against criminals? Nah. The police are just crazed psychopath gun nuts, I guess.