JB99, this is an official moderator note to dial back your tone multiple notches. You’re allowed to feel strongly about your opinion and to express yourself, but it needs to stay civil. You are far over that line at this point. Make your points, but do so without hurling insults at others posters here (yes, even as a broad group).
If you could ban all semi-automatic weapons (magically) then that would certainly take a large bite out of murder…especially if you could equally magically ban then AND get them all off the streets. It would be substantially more than 4%, as semi-automatic weapons include a huge range of weapons, and make up a large percentage of the total weapons. Yeah, semi-automatic rifles are a subcategory of that, and yeah, they don’t make up a large percentage of overall murders, but taken as a whole if you could wave that magic wand and make them all disappear you’d take a big bite, initially at least, out of total murders in the US.
The trouble is that it’s not feasible to do that, as you’d be banning a huge range of guns, which would be completely against the 2nd Amendment, and if the government tried that they would be taken to court on those grounds (aside from the fact that the individual states in many cases would oppose it as well).
There aren’t any magic solutions, despite the opinions of several posters in this thread. Limiting magazine capacity isn’t going to make any real difference in total murders. Getting rid of a few types isn’t going to do that either, since as you noted the guns most brought up in these kinds of threads or by the media when the latest mass shooting occurs aren’t the guns that actually kill the most people annually…they are simply the most spectacular and get the most attention (until someone uses something else like a pistol or shotgun in one of these rampages). Even if you could somehow get more rigid gun control in place on a national level it’s not going to make a huge difference as there are so many guns out there. Look at California…they have some of the most stringing state level gun control out there, yet mass shootings happen there as often as any other state…probably more often than many states. Even if, somehow, California was able to ban all guns, or all semi-automatic guns it probably wouldn’t stop mass shootings since finding all those guns would be a huge challenge, and as long as folks can just drive to another state they can always get more. I mean, if you can get cocaine or heroin into California I’m thinking you could probably smuggle guns from Nevada or Arizona or other bordering states fairly easily as well.
A good handgun is about $300-$700 and keeps going up. Ammunition isnt cheap either. One should also own hearing protection and a gun cleaning kit. Also one should go to a gun range every so often and practice.
Here in Kansas City one of the best places to learn to shoot guns is a place called The Bullet Hole. You can see on their site range fees are $11 a day.
I also like single action revolvers simply because they are simpler to maintain, you dont have to worry about pinching your finger, and its easier to tell if its unloaded. No worry about that last round in the chamber you dont see.
Question: On Australian and other countries tv and in their movies, is there as much gun violence as in the USA?
Which (apart from the fact of not allowing guns for personal defence, or handguns) is more or less what we do in the UK. You just have to convince your local police you’re not unstable, that you really are likely to need to deal with vermin on your farm, or to be a competition shooter (with the relevant club membership and so on), or hunter (with the relevant landowner’s permission), that the gun you want is no more than you need for the job you want it for, and that you keep it securely when not in use for its registered purpose.
We get our full share/dose of US pop culture on our screens from the action blockbusters to repeats of John Wayne westerns. Most of the US cop shows get a run here, and the BBC variants. There was a Lethal Weapon marathon on last week.
But FWIW, the movies on prime time free-to-air TV this Saturday in Sydney are:
Queen: Days of Our Lives
No Reservations
Sully
Superman IV: The Quest For Peace
Snow White and the Huntsman
Over The Top
Most of these sound pretty inoffensive but it was the 100th Anniversary of Armistice Day recently and we’ve copped a shedload of Great War docos and memorials through the week so maybe the schedulers are offering lighter fare this weekend.
The list below are the movies currently playing on the various local cinema complexes.
A Star is Born (G)
Beautiful Boy (TBA)
Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) (TBA)
Boy Erased (MA)
Burn the Stage: The Movie (TBA)
Charming (TBA)
Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (TBA)
First Man (G)
Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween (PG)
Hunter Killer (MA)
Intimate Strangers (MA)
Johnny English Strikes Again (PG)
Journey’s End (TBA)
Kaatrin Mozhi (TBA)
Laatu (TBA)
Ladies in Black (PG)
Last Letter (TBA)
PAW PATROL: Mighty Pups (G)
Pihu (TBA)
Shoplifters (TBA)
Smallfoot (PG)
The Girl in the Spider’s Web (TBA)
The House with a Clock in its Walls (PG)
The Old Man & the Gun (TBA)
They Shall Not Grow Old (TBA)
Wheely (TBA)
It’s sort of off season at the moment, not in school holidays and HSC exams are on so maybe the offerings are a but gentler and art house than other times. There’ll be bullets & gore available somewhere for those who want to seek it out.
I have Once Upon A Time in America in the DVD at the moment.
- What purpose do assault rifles serve that could not be adequately served by some other gun? Hunting can be done by bolt-action rifles and shotguns. Defense can be done by revolvers and shotguns. Sport shooting is utterly irrelevant, and your insistence that shooting these guns is “fun” drives home my point that people treat their weapons like toys.
The only thing that leaves us is actual combat and mass shootings, where maximizing the RPMs is the most important factor. Neither of which is a legitimate civilian use.
-
Why do you keep thinking I am talking about assault rifles? The word “assault rifle” is a meaningless bullshit phrase invented by politicians and the media in a vain attempt to categorize an idea rather than the weapon’s objective function. I’m ready to ban all automatics/semiautomatics, handguns and long guns, anything with more than six shots, and anything with a detachable box magazine. That is the definition I’m working from.
-
Stephen Paddock, 64, of Mesquite, Nevada, fired more than 1,100 rounds from his suite on the 32nd floor of the nearby Mandalay Bay hotel, killing 58 people and leaving 851 injured from gunfire.
Look at those numbers. 1,100 rounds fired. 909 people shot. How does ONE person cause 900 casualties? It’s because they had a weapon with a high rate of fire and a fast reload speed. That’s how. It’s not because they were using a Mosin Nagant, that’s for sure. I explained this to you at length and I notice it was met with absolute silence, which speaks volumes about your position. (And in fact, the shooter possessed more than a DOZEN AR15’s. What legitimate purpose does ANYONE have to own that many guns??)
But here’s the thing: I don’t care how rare these incidents are. I truly don’t. The fact that it was allowed to happen even once is absolutely horrifying, and should horrify anyone with a soul. If you own one of these guns because you think it is fun, that tells me that you consider your personal amusement more important than the lives of 900 Americans. Which is morally depraved.
I’m not interested in comparing the USA to Mexico, Botswana or Haiti. If you want to take solace in the fact that our murder rate is better than Lesotho’s, by all means do so, but I won’t. I already know that there are a host of mismanaged third world violence wracked nations in existence.
What I was getting at, is that when the laws you are analyzing deal with fringe issues like banning “assault weapons”, changing concealed carry laws, or banning firearms in schools, you aren’t going to impact gun violence in any meaningful way, because the laws themselves don’t address meaningful issues.
Gun laws in other first world industrialized nations (there I am, cherrypicking again! :rolleyes: ) do impact gun violence in meaningful ways, because the laws impact gun ownership in meaningful ways.
According to you, we could reduce murders by 4% by targeting them. That seems like a reason to me.
But we won’t because they’re fun to shoot.
That’s NRA logic right there.
Nope, there isn’t (in Australia). But your movies are about 90% of the movie real estate in Australia, so no difference really.
He said might. The 3% includes all rifles and not just Semi-Automatic. It also assumes that even if you had the law changed to ban them, that people would turn them, which is highly doubtful. It then assumes that even if we could get rid of them that people would not use other weapons. One of the largest mass shootings in the US was perpetrated by a guy with two pistols.
Given the unlikelihood of either premise the actual number of murders reduced by a ban on assault weapons is likely pretty close to zero.
That would be 440 murders, approximately (probably on the high side there). While that sounds like a lot, consider what it would entail to actually try and ban all semi-automatic rifles…and what the potential maximum gain be. Then consider…would we really save 440 lives for all that effort? :dubious:
Gee whiz, I know 440 lives sounds like a lot, but golly, it’s just so hard to pry away a bunch of fucking toys from people.
They’re just so much fun to go Bang Bang Bang with! And then you have to pass LAWS, and ENFORCE them, it’s just so much effort, I need a nap just thinking about it.
BTW, the only reason it’s so golly gee whiz hard to make this change is the fact that gun lovers think it’s more important to play with their toys than save hundreds of lives a year. THAT is the amoral part of this argument.
How about you jump off your moral high ground and quit attributing moral depravity to law abiding citizens. You could make your same argument against pressure cooker owners, who continue to purchase them because they enjoy cooking, when they are evil devices of terror used to severely injure and kill hundreds of people at the Boston marathon. Oh the moral deprivation!!!
I’m sure your arguments sound good in your head as you type them, but you’re not coming through. Sure they sound good in the echo chamber of this site, but you’re not changing minds with these types of arguments.
You can be as snide and nasty as you like, but reality is real, sadly. 440 lives is pretty small, all things considered (more people die falling out of bed or due to autoerotic asphyxiation a year), and while you and others might feel that guns are useless kill machines the reality is that not everyone agrees…and in our system, that means they get a say as well as you. When your side outnumbers theirs THEN you can decide that guns should be banned and then go about enforcing that…and perhaps figure out that it’s going to be a lot more difficult than you think. And probably won’t end up actually saving those 440 lives in any case.
Let me ask you something…is the decision to allow folks to drink alcohol an equally amoral argument? Because a fuck load lot more people die each year because of that decision than do than 440. And for what? So people can get drunk. Same argument for tobacco…amoral as well? As a society we do a lot of things that will cause a non-zero number of deaths…and a LOT of those decisions that kill a lot of people are pretty much irrational when you think about it. Yet we do it anyway. And not like we are the only ones who do irrational seeming things that cause non-zero numbers of death simply because some folks want to do or use something.
The police feel the need to utilize weapons other than revolvers and shotguns for defense purposes. Seems that undercuts your argument.
That’s a lovely sentiment right there. It’s heartwarming, really.
You know what I think is pretty small? The right to own a toy. All things considered, your right to own a toy to play with, that’s pretty small. The fact that you rank that right higher than the right of people to not be shot and killed, is pretty telling.
Thanks for voting to ensure that I don’t have the right to not be shot and killed so that you can own some toys. I also thank you for voting “Pro-Toy” to ensure that my son gets to practice active shooter drills at school. I love when those emails come home, school is where kids are supposed to learn important life skills, like where to hide when some kook with a toy breaks into your school.
We did try it once, didn’t work so well. Of course, the government HAS spent decades working to reduce the number of people harmed by alcohol.
Again, the government has worked very hard to reduce the number of people harmed by tobacco. The nice thing about tobacco is that you really only harm yourself with it. If only that was true with guns…
The fundamental question remains of what can we actually do to lessen the deaths from these mass shootings? I know that the majority of firearm homicides are not part of mass shootings, but for all intents and purposes mass shootings has become the face of gun violence in this country, it has become a major issue that there is a collective desire to address, and it amounts to a form of terrorism to the public which other kinds of shootings don’t. There’s no denying that there has been an increase in mass shootings even if other forms of violent crime have done down; and there’s no denying that it’s a public safety issue and there needs to be actual progress in dealing with it, not just proposals, not just ideas.
The question is what to do? From my perspective, any kind of gun ban is not politically feasible. That includes banning certain categories of guns, the ones classified as “assault weapons.” I also don’t think that the goal of reducing the number of guns in circulation is achievable in America. The fact that it happened in other countries does not mean that it can happen in America. It may be deeply upsetting to some people that it not going to happen, and they may feel compelled to vent about it, which they are entitled to do. (I don’t think think this particular thread is the best place to do it, because there is good discussion going on here and it shouldn’t be derailed.)
What kind of laws can be passed, what kind of checks can be imposed on access to firearms and on potentially-dangerous humans, in the here and now, to do something to reduce the violence? I don’t see the kind of activism that has an explicitly anti-gun message as being able to make any political headway. Especially not right now! So the question is what is most likely to actually WORK?
As I see it, the most achievable strategy involves the background check system and the mental health support system, and they are intertwined. I realize there is already a federal database that is used to run a background check when a firearm is purchased. I know because I have bought guns before. It checks for a criminal record. It checks if you’ve been convicted of a felony. What I am not aware of it checking, is whether or not you have demonstrated psychological red flags outside of something that would be ruled on by a court or a judge. It doesn’t have any way of checking if the buyer has expressed violent tendencies or psychopathic murder fantasies to people in the past, even if these incidents have been reported.
A system for flagging people who exhibit mental instability that could potentially become violent, could be established. I think it’s something that can actually be achieved.
Due process, how quaint.