…says the man who has already admitted to not arguing in good faith in gun threads.
Would it be fair to say that you two at least are not against gun control per se, but find the risk of government overreach too great to attempt? That in another parallel universe with a better government, you’d be for gun control? I ask that to see if you see any restriction as too much, or if you guys can accept some restrictions as good policy but are simply afraid where it would lead
For the record, I do not think someone who merely believes gun restrictions are bad is a rational person, but I can at least understand the fear of one who believes restrictions would lead to worse
And by the way, I don’t agree that its a “trap” to strive for that level. You can still say you don’t want to risk it. Someone like me, who has used that argument, is not seeking to trap you in hypocrisy but figure out why you wouldn’t support a level of gun control that you admit you don’t have a problem with
I have 2 issues with that argument. One, its not simply that there’s no market for it, but pro-gun people actively try to punish manufacturersfor it. It would be different if they simply didn’t buy it but leave the makers alone. I mean, I don’t eat Cocoa Puffs but I don’t tell others not to buy them. And two, why can’t you just settle for the Gen 3? As pro-gun people always say, there’s too many guns to effectively do anything about them. Why not let manufacturers develop a smart gun without resistance and you guys can still keep your non-smart guns? Why must all guns be available to you? If they make a gun that can only be fired by someone with a 500lb grip strength, or one that only pygmys can use, why oppose it?
If I had to keep guns legal but design sincere restrictions (and not just ones indirectly designed to restrict guns out of spite), I would include magazine restrictions. Why do you need something with so many bullets? To me, that only promotes shootouts and mass murder. In self-defense scenarios, I don’t believe that people need large capacity magazines. Unless your sincere fear is that someday you’ll need to take on the government’s paramilitary troops, why the large magazine sticking point?
Why is it so important for you to be able to buy these new guns when you have near unlimited access to older ones?
I don’t think that always looking out for the slippery slope means that pro-gun people can negotiate in good faith. If you are always on the lookout for how the system will be abused rather than if it will be abused, then how can you say you are negotiating in good faith? When pro-gun people claim that others want to ban guns, you do understand that only a tiny fraction of gun control advocates want that, right? I’m the exception, I want a total gun ban. But it seems like pro-gun people universally want unfettered access to guns. Why is one extreme to be feared and seen as suspicious while the other is a proud goal? Why can’t your goal be the same as many gun control people: restrictions on some type of guns and background checks, as you say you would like
Just like liberals ignore extreme leftist groups like ALF, these people have little to no power. Don’t you think you are guilty of overestimating their influence and basing an irrational opposition to gun control on a non-existent opponent?
Do you think life’s better now after these progressive reforms or was it better before?
Could you please show that large magazines promote shootouts and mass murder? Thanks in advance.
This is part of the basic misunderstanding between pro-gun and anti-gun people.
The right to keep and bear arms is established by the Constitution. Any infringement on that right needs to be well-justified in advance. The burden of proof, IOW, lies on those who suggest some infringement. It is not enough to say “if you don’t come up with an argument that convinces anti-gun people, then the infringement is justified”. You have to demonstrate the compelling public interest that allows the infringement.
It is not enough to convince you that it is not a bad idea. You have to convince the rest of us that it is a good one.
Regards,
Shodan
Why do you guys care about magazine size? I want more rounds available for the same reason that police officers would oppose magazine restrictions on them: self-defense situations are unpredictable, and not every bullet fired hits its target, and not every hit incapacitates a target. Getting attacked by a couple of guys? You could go through 10 rounds in a hurry and still find yourself facing a pissed-off guy with a crowbar.
The reason I care is because while, as you say, self-defense situations are unpredictable, we simply don’t have scenarios where you’re fending off waves of attackers. One or two guys maybe try something, and they will be scared off with a shot or two, even if you miss. What guy with a crowbar is going to dodge (or you shoot and miss) 10 bullets and still come after you? A shot or two, or even pointing the gun at them, will suffice. That, to me, is the best reason why you only need a few rounds. The other reason is that only people going on offense use a lot of bullets. In the mass murders or public shootings we’ve had, the attacker expends tons of bullets. Limiting magazine capacity makes it more likely he’ll have to reload, leading to, like that guy who shot Gabby Giffords, someone taking him down while he’s reloading.
What I meant by “promote” is that it is easier to have scenarios where a large number of people are shot. Limit the magazines, increase the number of times the guy has to switch guns or reload, and it lessens the impact of mass shootings when it happens.
I gave my 2 reasons above to HurricaneDitka, feel free to respond to that.
Additionally, I think that it also helps each side to understand the other if we try to mutually state what we believe in and why. In a court of law, sure, I’d have to prove my side and you can simply sit there in silence. In a discussion, I think it helps our understanding of each other if you wouldn’t resort to the 2nd Amendment each time and sit in silence. I really want to know why you think bigger magazines are a good idea. Let’s say you had to sell that to, I dunno, the new government of South Sudan who’s writing their first Constitution. What would you say that would convince them of your side rather than just accept large magazines as default? Or, if that’s too crazy a scenario for you to care about, sell your idea to those fencesitters who are reading this topic and don’t live in America. Why do you need bigger magazines?
Sure a total gun ban would reduce gun crimes over time (and would virtually eliminate accidental gun deaths) because there would be no significant inflow of guns into society but it would be a really really long time. Guns are not disposable items, they last a long time. My friend collects historical guns and he has guns that were used in WWI that work just fine today.
Privately held guns would be held almost exclusively by criminals and while the number of outstanding guns would drop over time as criminals got caught with guns in their possession or in their homes, there would be a long period of time when criminals had guns and law abiding citizens did not. You seem to totally ignore the benefits that privately held guns provide in society.
A licensing and registration regime would be almost as effective as a gun ban in preventing guns from getting into the hands of criminals and would have the added benefit of not requiring the repeal of the second amendment.
The Department of justice does it every year. The GOP has banned the study of guns by people at the NHS and the CDC, largely because of a pretty biased report funded by the CDC.
I think we have too much gun violence RIGHT NOW. I have supported licensing and registration for years. I am not afraid that the federal government is EVER going to confiscate my guns, it will NEVER happen.
If your question is how many deaths would I be willing to accept before supporting a repeal of the second amendment and a total gun ban, then I would have to be presented with a case where everything else has been tried and I believed that a repeal of the second amendment and a total gun ban would make a huge difference. I don’t think that fact pattern can occur.
And part of the problem is that no one on the gun rights side believes that the gun control side will stop somewhere in the middle ground. You might be satisfied with those things for now but gun rights folks have had experience with gun control activists taking half now and coming for the other half later. It makes them resistant to even consider the reasonably GOOD ideas because they will quickly be followed with bad ones.
No one says that guns make you IMMUNE from crime just like any other deterrent it only reduces the incidence of that crime. Do you think that criminal penalties for rape deters rape? I mean we still have rapes so why would rapes increase if we got rid of criminal penalties for rape?
When guns are owned exclusively by criminals, you get more crime (I am assuming cops don’t have guns in your world either, or do you think that guns held by cops have some ability to deter crime that a gun held by a security guard or a private individual does not).
So do cops deter just as much crime by being armed as they would if they were unarmed?
Criminals would still have guns during those 200 years.
Yes. Carjackings that go horribly wrong for the carjacker. Robberies that go horribly wrong for the thief. etc.
We have had real world cases of states implementing stricter gun laws with no attendant decrease in violence generally. The criminals still get their hands on guns and still commit gun crimes. Of course the guns could leak in through state borders in a way that they cannot leak in through international borders but the fact remains that taking guns out of the hands of law abiding citizens didn’t significantly reduce crime.
[quote=“Moriarty, post:209, topic:725345”]
So you discount a study, but you didn’t really bother to look at it? From my second cite:quote]
No, I read it. I was not addressing suicide. I was addressing the murders. Suicide is a different story.
Or its not the guns that cause the violence but the prospect of violence that causes the purchase of the gun?
There are lots of cases where people on defense use a lot of bullets too. Because they’re generally well-documented, police shootings offer plenty of examples of this. There are tons of cases where police are doing their job, get attacked by someone (or perceive a threat by someone) and they use lots and lots of rounds trying to defend themselves. Sometimes even that isn’t enough to stop or kill their attackers.
In another thread, I have been discussing the Torrance, CA shooting of a blue Tacoma where the police fired over 100 rounds and merely wounded the two occupants.
Gunfights often don’t go as you imagine, where one or two shots ends the thing. It’s not uncommon for police to expend dozens and dozens of rounds trying to take down just a single bad guy with a gun.
http://www.khou.com/story/news/crime/2015/01/26/30-gunshots-exchanged-in-tomball-home-invasion/22355763/ is an example of a (fairly recent) home invasion in which 30 shots were exchanged and no one was hit. Lucky for the homeowner he wasn’t limited to just 10 rounds. I’d hate to think what a home invasion team might do if you fired off 10 rounds and then they got to you while you were reloading.
No - this wouldn’t be a fair characterization. I would never be “for” gun control. There are hypotheticals you could pose where some elements would be tolerable. I find those hypotheticals to have a close enough to zero that they are effectively zero chance of ever occuring.
These people are part of the market. Attempting to influence others is a viable strategy. The reason this is done is because at least two states have laws that trigger bans once these products come on the market. Convincing enough people to not purchase or sell this product and the subsequent lack of sales of the product means definitionally there is no market for it.
(bracketed numbers added for organization)
There’s a lot of questions here so let me try to answer each:
[1] The Gen 4 has superior features to the Gen 3. It has a different grip, trigger, and comes with 3 magazines instead of 2.
[2] Manufacturers are free to develop smart gun tech if they want, and people are free to oppose them and punish them in the market place for doing so.
[3] Ultimately unless there is a compelling reason to ban something, the default should be to allow it. Guns should be available as a default, and only if there is compelling reason should they be restricted.
[4] Opposition to any ban is a strategic play because it aligns the interests of groups that may not otherwise be aligned. Strength through numbers and solidarity.
For example, gun control advocates often try to separate hunters from non-hunters. They do this by proposing things that only impacts non-hunters. By dividing the opposition, the goal is to limit resistance. Opposing all restrictions is a strategically better alternative than picking and choosing because it gives more power to the opposition. This is similar to when unions go on strike together.
I’ll speak to this at a high level. #3 above applies of course, but there is a practical argument against mag limits. In another thread about military bases you stated you didn’t know they weren’t allowed to be armed. Here are additional relevant facts you may not be aware of:
[ul]
[li]Most people take multiple hits to be effectively stopped. It’s in the neighborhood of 2-4.[/li][li]People’s ability to hit targets in stress situations is not great - 30-40% hit ratio is a fair estimate for someone who is well practiced.[/li][li]Self defense scenarios are usually not known in advance - people in their homes, or out and about conducting their normal business have limited time to prepare and react[/li][li]When a desicion to fire is made, rounds can be expended very quickly.[/ul][/li]
If a firearm is needed for self defense when I am home, I’m not going to have time to get the dozens of magazines I have in a safe. ** I’m going to be able to get what I have readily available - one firearm, the magazine in it, and a flashlight. ** If I’m lucky maybe I’ll be able to grab a backup magazine. CA has a 10 round magazine limit. A scenario with 1 attacker and 10 rounds would yield maybe 3 hits. 3 hits may not be sufficient to stop the threat. If there are two attackers you’re out of luck. With a 17 round magazine, your tactical situation has improved greatly. This is the benefit of larger magazines.
The cost as you say would be those that want to commit violent crime. Those people who prepare, can have 2, 5, or 20 magazines with them. If they have time to prepare, time to choose when they would perpetrate their crime, magazine limits will not be a hinderence. It takes about…1.5 second to reload with a mag drop. This is nothing - especially with multiple firearms. Mag limits will not hinder this person because they have time to prepare - but they will hinder the person defending themselves.
Police typically carry sidearms with magazine capacities in the 17ish variety. There is proven efficacy here in the tradeoff between weight of extra rounds, and extra firepower. Any reason that supports a police officer carrying greater rounds would also support an ordinary non-police officer carrying greater rounds
Most of this is just not accurate. If I face a lone attacker, I would expect to use at least 10 rounds. In a stress situation you tend to fire a lot. Maybe it will take a shot or two, and maybe they will flee, but I don’t let my safety depend on the good graces of evil doers. It’s patently false that only people going on offense use a lot of bullets.
See number 3 above. But elaborating further - **if the law in CA is unchanged, no newly manufactured handguns will be available for sale, ever. ** In 50 years, the only handguns available for sale will be the same ones that are today. If manufacturers stop making those models, which they surely will at some point in time when their lines of products change, then there will be a declining population of handguns available. If this law was in place 35 years ago, your argument would not be affected and virtually all models of Glock pistols would be banned in CA. That’s a bad outcome, so it must be resisted.
I can’t parse the first sentence here. But it is a truism that the system will be abused. The real question is what steps are taken to prevent it. And I’m not negotiating. My position is no compromises. I may be fine with some restrictions in a magical hypothetical scenario - but that doesn’t mean I would like them.
This is compelling to me:
If we mean what a court would find compelling, I think they often defer to the foreign policy interests of the US. For that reason, and because Americans shouldn’t contribute to the ruination of other nations, American guns fueling Mexico’s gun war is compelling:
http://thinkprogress.org/security/2013/06/06/2114781/gun-dealers-trafficking-mexico/
Now, what to do about that is another question. I’d say:
– Never sell a gun in a no-background-check private sale.
– Don’t patronize gun shops that sell guns without waiting for the background check to finish:
This is a area where we can say something good about WalMart:
If you don’t want a bunch of new anti-gun laws passed when the demographic trends favoring the Democratic party start kicking in, do what you can to show the rest of us that America’s gun culture knows what a loophole is, and isolates those who walk through one.
Someone comitting a violent crime is not a social problem. Force should be a last resort.
Tell me again how active shooters are stopped? People with guns right? Often times police, sometimes it’s people going about their day.
In Chicago no less. If Moore v. Madigan went the other way, this person may not have been able to legally carry.
The NYPD are trained, and even so (in one year), their hit rate was 28%. Pistols do not have much range and require much more skill to be accurate than rifles. In addition, accuracy is greatly hampered by the stress of the situation.
I think this greatly underestimates the accuracy people under stress and assumes rational thought in such a situation. Thankfully I have no direct experience, but I could see missing. Even if they are hit, it does not mean that a determined attacker will stop. I don’t think that this argument is relevant to supporting or opposing magazine restrictions; I just am acknowledging a practical concern.
Is this cite supposed to follow the previous line? If so, that cite is already “out of date.” What happened was a failure in sharing of his legal record, but the FFL apparently took all due diligence in legally processing his purchase, and the system on the NICS side worked as intended.
Any FFL that does that “doesn’t wait” risks losing their license and prosecution. The 4 outcomes when buying a firearm from a FFL are 1) NICS approves the purchase ASAP, 2) Problems verifying delay the purchase, 3) Purchase is denied by NICS, 4) Purchase is denied by seller due to discrepancies noted (e.g. buyer suggests that it is a straw purchase, application filled out with wrong data).
Thank you for noticing my mistake. This is what we now know:
Three days is fine as a goal, but in the real world, offices close for plumbing problems and computers go down. The government taking more than three days isn’t an excuse for failing to meet car licensing requirements, and it shouldn’t be accepted as an excuse for guns either. Gun stores shouldn’t be taking advantage of normal human deadline slips to possibly sell a gun to a smuggler or other unqualified buyer. Instead of boycotting gun stores that try to sell safer guns, gun owners should use their marketplace power to insist that background checks are given whatever time it takes to complete them.
I sympathize with your position, and in the abstract I’m largely in agreement with it. But, and you knew there was a but, giving people in the position to deny something all the time they need to deny something can, under certain administrations, result in people being denied by administrative skulduggery by simply not running the check in anything resembling a timely manner.
Lest you think those sorts of things don’t happen in practice, I submit this. That’s why there’s a time limit.
You really think there are people who work on gun background checks, think gun ownership is against their religion, and that’s why the three day target isn’t met? I know from threads like this that some gun owners are really that suspicious of those outside their ranks. But this idea seems quite implausible to me, and to, I’m thinking, other non-gun-owners, and also many moderate-thinking gun owners.
There must be some extremist environmentalists, at the DMV, who don’t like to see more and more cars on the road. We don’t use this as an excuse for short-circuiting driver and vehicle licensing requirements. The reason for this difference between cars and guns isn’t logic, but the priorities of the gun lobbies.
As noted in my links, responsible gun merchants exist who wait as long as it takes to hear back from the background checkers. It doesn’t take forever. I expect WalMart’s Washington lobbyists will keep it that way.
Local authorities refusing to issue any gun permits under “may issue” statutes was the precise issue in DC v. Heller. It’s not a hypothetical or an analogy to speculate that licensing and background checks become an excuse to deny gun rights to everybody; it happens in hundreds of jurisdictions.
My first reaction to obtuse retorts like this is to simply unload some vitriol, but why bother? You know exactly what I meant.
But, since you’re going to play coy about it, let me spell it out for you: the reason why people don’t get held up at the DMV is because no governmental authority has an interest in denying someone from having a car.
The reason why some people are denying homosexual people marriage licenses is because some governmental authority has an interest in denying the right of homosexual people to marry.
The difference is clear and obvious.
So, when we extend it further to guns, it is clear that certain governmental authorities have an interest in denying gun ownership to people, thus the very system that facilitates the purchase of firearms is open to abuse. The time limit on the check prevents that abuse.
Stop being willfully obtuse.
PhillyGuy - Your example of Roof is actually an indictment of the current system, not a reason to double down on it. There was sufficient time to conduct the check, but due to error, and lack of response, the check wasn’t completed. But wait, that’s actually not the whole story. Even if the proper locality was contacted, there is a strong likelihood that Roof wouldn’t not have been denied. Your cite says:
But in reality, his arrest was for misdemeanor possession. This in and of itself is not disqualifying.
Theoretically he could have been prohibited as a user of controlled substances, but this is not the angle your cite is pushing.
Actually, this was Palmer v. DC that dealt with carry. Heller v. DC was about possession in the home. Heller II was about registration, mag limits, and other various restrictions that DC lifted from CA’s gun control scheme which oddly banned the very gun that Heller sought to purchase in Heller I. Palmer won. Heller I won. Heller II lost.
Here’s an example that’s more on point (published June 5, this year):
Due to delays in permitting, this person was unable to obtain a firearm. She is now dead.
And speaking of delays - Palmer above took over 5 years to be rule upon. There was no actual reason for this delay, except that federal judges have near infinite discretion on when they must issue their rulings. The judge in Palmer just would not rule after hearing arguments, and then retired. SCOTUS judge Roberts intervened and assigned a new judge, who took over a year to rehear arguments. After over 20 months, the attorneys filed motions asking the appellate court to intervene, twice asking for a writ of mandamus. Both were denied.
Around the same time Palmer was being decided, DC passed new laws and ceased defending their old ones. Now the lawsuit process must begin again. Justice delayed is justice denied.
Other times, it more bureaucratic in nature:
Essentially, if there is any way to delay, deny, or make it more difficult for gun owners to exercise their rights the gun control elements of the government will do so.
Good luck with that. Here’s an update on how that’s going just so far this year:
Hearts and minds are changing. Lots more details at the link.
I live in California and would love to have a CA CCW.
Dream on.