You keep saying this, but have yet to cite a single piece of public policy change that has ever resulted from a rational discussion. As interestingly noted in the thread, the Bill of Rights wasn’t totally from a rational discussion, although it is usually presented that way. But I do get your point. Putting off discussion of guns until people get rational about them would certainly secure the status quo you desire.
Rationally, we know nothing about that future. We don’t even know what bills will finally be presented. My prediction is that we haven’t yet seen the actual product. So how can we talk about it?
But you are also being disingenuous. Your OP goes way beyond discussions of bills. You say that Obama will be burned by guns and that the AWB will win the election for the Republicans in 2016. “This changes everything” you wrote. Well, this is the discussion of “this changes everything.” It doesn’t and it won’t. 2016 is an infinity away.
I linked to Feinstein’s website, which shows what her proposals will be, and Obama has announced his intention to renew the AWB and ban standard-capacity magazines. That is the actual product. It’s not a mystery, and it never was.
That’s why I’m asking for your opinion on what will happen. What will happen does not depend on the legalese description of what “assault weapons” are, your opinions of gun owners, or what the Second Amendment really means. I’m asking you to tell me what you think will happen politically, which is what I did in the OP, no more and no less. I didn’t call anybody any names, I didn’t suggest editorialize my opinion of the legislation, I said what I thought would happen.
If that’s too hard for you, this is not the thread for you.
It is your conclusions that it’s essentially useless. I don’t agree. I think that depends on the text of the actual law. Banning guns or ammunition based on trivial features is useless. Banning them based on things that actually make them more dangerous is not useless in my opinion.
No, I am not.
Yet again: no.
I think you’re determined to see these ideas as being bad-faith because you decided in advance that they were offered in bad faith, and that creates a convenient objection for you. C’est la vie.
I don’t support “any gun control effort.” I’ve said in the past that any ban needs to make sense and be consistent and that the previous AWB included plenty of things that didn’t make sense. I don’t support bans for their own sake. On the other hand I don’t much care if people think a sensible idea is tainted by a related idea they don’t like.
That’s my thought too. Cho, Holmes and Lanza would all have been caught by better background checks, better meaning that their mental health issues were reported appropriately and would disqualify them for gun ownership.
That being said, the fact that Holmes and Lanza used military-style rifles doesn’t mean a damn thing; they could have used short barreled pump action shotguns or a 100+ year old automatic pistol to do the same amount of carnage, and in the case of the shotguns, possibly even more than the rifles, what with the 9 8mm pellets per shot flying out of the barrel and all. Hell, a Ruger 10/22 might have been just as deadly if they were aiming their shots.
It really is about the fact that military style weapons look scary to some people- nobody goes around wanting to ban the Remington 870 Express.
My prediction is that you are wrong and things will change in ways that make current comment worthless. We’ll see.
Right, because I determined the direction of this thread by making the 68th post and all of three more.
The real issue is that everything else you said in the OP is flat wrong. Although it is being pushed that way by the way the parties are split, this isn’t really a left-right or Republican/Democrat issue any more than gay rights was. It’s a societal climate issue. Trying to make guns work against the Democrats because the Democrats are going to confiscate your bazookas is a temporary fix just like trying to brand Democrats as gay-loving perverts stopped working. Gay rights are no longer a Democratic issue. Gun control won’t be either some day. I’ve said that will be a generation, but by itself nothing Congress does now is going to be an issue in 2016. That’s because they won’t be doing anything, even if something passes that includes an AWB.
To me that would be the only sensible argument supporting such a ban, which is why I’m surprised I don’t hear more of the ban supporters actually using it. “Look, we know these guns aren’t exceptionally dangerous and we don’t want to change anything functional about the guns, we just want them to look boring so that reckless young males aren’t so drawn to them” might actually convince some of the people currently opposed to the ban to change their minds.
(I also wonder if that isn’t an argument for reducing the “coolness factor” of guns as portrayed in the media - but that’s an entirely different can of worms.)
The kid swiped the guns from his Mother, did he not? So he didn’t pick out an evil looking gun, he took what was on hand.
Or perhaps the way the gun looked made him swipe it and kill people.
That’s disgusting, if you want to take something away you need to show a reason, but the reality is Heller is still case law and unlikely to be overturned in the next 3-4 years. It says you may not blanket ban weapons in common usage, and I suspect it’ll be hard to argue normal semiautomatic rifles are not weapons in common usage.
I find most American gun control proponents to be ignorant, frankly. And I’ve by the way proposed a very strict, probably stricter than any Republican on these forums, gun control regime in another thread. It was modeled after regimes in Scandinavia and Germany, that have rigorous controlled ownership but which by and large don’t ban guns for cosmetic reasons. (Germany has some stricter-than-America but still moderate magazine restrictions.) And that’s what real, effective gun control looks like. You regulate ownership, and based on the ultra-low gun homicide rates in the countries in question, there is no demonstrable reason why we’d want to have stricter laws. Why should we ban stuff even Norway doesn’t ban?
The incremental changes we need on gun control relate to the actual control of gun ownership, universal background checks and further measures along those lines are where we need to expend our energy. While not true in every country, in our country it is simply true that silly bans based on cosmetic features just serve to make good men criminals.
That is also why I’m mostly opposed to leaving gun control up to the States, I abhor any law which makes someone a felon when they cross State lines.
Actually it would not have been banned. You could still buy AR-15 variants during the ban, newly manufactures. You clearly do not even know what the 1994 ban was and thus you should not say another word about it while you remain ignorant.
The 1994 ban only banned manufacturers from selling the prohibited weapons to the civilian market. Weapons of equal form and function were immediately developed and released, including AR-15 variants that complied with the ban.
The 30 round magazine ban was also a grandfathered ban, what that means is, again, limitation on manufacturers selling them to the civilian market. It was still absolutely, unequivocally legal to buy “pre-ban” 30 round magazines. It was extremely common to do and the ban did not in any way make them prohibitively expensive. So even the 30 round magazines could have been easily acquired.
Would Lanza have had access to them? Hard/impossible to say, but to me signs point to yes. Why? Because his mom appears to have been a prepper who hung out with gun people at gun ranges. That’s the exact type of person who was in the market for pre-ban 30 round magazines during the ban.
Also note that pre-ban weapons also remained legal, and while they were functionally no different from legal post-ban weapons, even a pre-ban rifle could have been purchased easily as well.
Would you care to spread more ignorant lies about the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban or should you perhaps admit you know nothing of its stipulations and educate yourself a bit?
The Assault Weapons Ban of 1994 is really best understood as not a ban at all. No weapon was criminalized. All that was prohibited was manufacture for the civilian market of a list of proscribed weapons or weapons meeting two criteria of proscription. That’s it, it was a prohibition on what weapons manufacturers could produce for civilians. Prior to the ban few people owned these weapons so demand was not great for them, but many were sold immediately prior and thus the relatively small market actually grew because of the ban. AR-15 variants produced to comply with the ban were more popular than pre-ban variants and the weapons received more attention and sales after the ban. The thirty round magazines were widely sold at gun shows and resold and were readily available to anyone who wanted them. This wasn’t like the NFA that truly made automatic weapons extremely expensive and difficult to get.
Of course. And if all that was on hand was 3-shot rifles or 9-shot pistols, how many kids could he have killed?
Again, we are back into debating gun control in general, but why is this implausible? He was crazy, for one. He loved paramilitary video games for another. Why is it out of the realm of possibility that the ability for him to put on body armor and brandish a military-style weapon was a very attractive fantasy-fulfillment opportunity for him?
My gun control regime would mostly make questions like that irrelevant, because getting licenses to own those kinds of weapons mandate strict storage requirements, verifiable by local law enforcement and subject to inspection. Further, Lanza’s mother would not have been legally permitted to allow him to use her weapons at the range, and thus he’d not legally have been taught to shoot. My regime also imposed stricter rules for people under the age of 25 (this is based on German law, which used the logic that in Germany males under the age of 25 are disproportionately the ones who do bad things with guns, so they have to be subjected to a mental competency evaluation to get a firearms license.)
On the contrary, young men have an exemplary track record. Of the twenty million or so males aged 18-25, only, what, four or five committed mass shootings last year? That’s a “didn’t go crazy and shoot everyone” rate of 99.999975%!
It is my considered opinion that requiring that every AR-15 sold be equipped with hot pink furniture and painted with a My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic theme would not violate the second amendment. However, it might just violate the first.
I believe the AWB will pass the Senate. I think there are some Dems that won’t vote for it, and some Republicans that will (remember, in 1994 some Republicans voted for it. Not one got booted out for it).
I think it will not pass in the House. And I believe the Democrats will use that to decry the Republicans as favoring child killers and such.
After it loses in the House I think there will be a push to get the BATF to classify many semi-autos as “Any Other Weapons” requiring a tax stamp. Whether that push is successful or not I haven’t a clue.
I do think some pols will pay with their jobs for supporting this stuff, but it will be nothing like 1994.
Perhaps we could say “exotic looking” instead of ugly, and “firearm enthusiasts” instead of gun nuts.
I am curious whether an exotic looking firearm made the kid think of using it. One can, after all, fire a single action revolver as fast as a semi auto. There’s a clip on youtube somewhere.