It’s hard to get something passed that is meaningful. But the chosen alternative often seems to be to push for things that are not meaningful.
Bump stocks are largely a red herring except insofar as showing how wary some of the grassroots pro gun rights part of the electorate is of slippery slopes (and you wonder why, it’s not as if the internet/social media is full of comments and proposals to ban guns or anything, who’s ever heard that?). The NRA’s position is that bump stock restrictions would be OK. Trump says he will administratively. And one (too many of course but still just one) mass shooting used them.
Otherwise ‘spray’ is loose overstatement in line with the general theme of bogus terms like ‘assault’ and ‘military style’. The problem with many past or existing ‘assault gun’ bans* isn’t ‘real world comprise is never perfect’. It’s virtually meaningless laws in some cases, as would be the case with ‘ban on AR-15’.
Actually the 2A is mainly an obstacle to internet proposals of laws that are light years from legislative political feasibility in the US at federal level. It’s relevant in case of some real state and local laws which can be argued to virtually prohibit private gun ownership. The only laws ever overturned on 2A pretty much amounted to that. Neither the federal ‘assault gun’ ban nor state ones have been thrown out on 2A grounds. And the self inflicted harm of slogans like ‘military style’ and ‘assault’ on rational laws have no particular relevance to the 2A either.
So fanciful internet debate ‘let’s be like the UK, yes or no’? OK, 2A a big issue. And sometimes with very blue state/local gun laws. But laws with any real political chance at the federal level, not a big stumbling block, a huge political change would need to happen before it was.
*not all. Just objectively assessing various laws whether for or against, I’ll repeat a comparison I gave before: the NYS limit on legal box magazine sizes is rational. NJ’s current law on ‘assault guns’ is clearly not (though the legislature might take up a magazine law).
No. But I would like to see that there is a higher level of responsibility in their owners and users.
Licensing and registration, of course. The more lethal the gnu, the harder it is to get. The more courses you have to take and the more tests you have to pass. Instructors would also be trained in determining if people are stable enough to be entrusted with these devices.
I think I’ve laid out my “dream” gun control in other threads more than once, but a quick recap. (From my position and authority of gun king, having complete control over all gun laws and regulations)
6 shot revolvers, bolt action rifles and breech loading shotguns require just a clean record. As long as you don’t have a specific legal reason keeping you from guns, you can have these. I would even make them subsidized or even free to lower income people who need the same protections and ability to hunt as people who can afford guns.
For other stuff, you need to qualify for it. From what I know of you, and what you have said about the responsibility you take towards guns, you would probably qualify for pretty much everything, even machine guns when we reopen the registry to well qualified individuals. Maybe not stinger missles, I don’t know if we should got that far.
In exchange, I am fully prepared to remove all the fees and such, essentially making it free to own and use guns, other than the actual cost of the gun and ammo from private suppliers. I would even say that training should be free, and gets free use of the gun you are qualifying on, as well as the ammo you need to train and qualify.
Gun pointed at you? Yes, indeed the AR 15 is fine for home defense, altho yes, a handgun or short barreled shotgun might be better. Still, the Ar15 is fine.
You mean “magazine” not 'clip" . How can you propose to ban things when you dont understand them?
So, all bolt action and lever action rifles too. In others words- all the guns. :rolleyes:
Not as much as you think, it is as fast as the blink of a eye.
No, not at all, I knew more had been shot- but who said anything about only 15 bullets?
Has it occurred to you that gun owners and Second Amendment proponents are as affected by safety concerns as anyone else who lives in this country? That gun owners don’t have children whose school might someday be targeted? The huge difference between gun owners and gun control proponents is that the pro-gun people think of safety in proactive terms: being able to confront and defeat a danger.
In the case of school shootings, if armed responders were on site not only would school shooters be stopped more quickly, but homicidal narcissists would quickly be disabused that attempting a school massacre was anything but a way to ignominiously be gunned down like a mad dog.
We consider that not only a more desirable but also a more successful solution to the problem than trying to create a hermetically “safe” environment.
About? :dubious: Look, 18 years old is a bad way to define age of consent because it’s only ONE DAY away from 17. But we need to have some law about it.
Because the discussion has largely been on gun control in general. I haven’t heard anybody suggest 1. only, 2. banning, AR-15s, so we’ve all ignored that proposition.
No they’re not designed to get people “worked up”.
People who are not gun experts are scratching around for a term for a gun that can fire many rounds a minute, especially if those rounds are high caliber.
Yes these terms are loose but that’s how the real world often is. And often when a government wants to ban some kind of dangerous device, there are some general rules as well as just a list of specific models that are banned.
So in fact we never need to find the perfect single term. It’s a complete red herring.
All I was saying is that the vast majority of people do favor gun control, and against the argument “If people were against gun control, so the politicians would be” I was saying that on a number of topics politicians can be at odds with the majority view, particularly when their donors are on the opposite side to the majority view.
I’m not really sure that anything you’ve said there counters those points.
The NRA *does *deserve criticism and they *are *a big donor.
So I don’t even care if there are people out there singling out the NRA or criticizing them alongside other social factors. Either way they should engage on the actual debate.
For what it’s worth, my hunch is that even if the people advocating for a ban on AR-15s don’t have the technical familiarity to fully articulate their goals, they probably want something like a ban on all: (1) semi-automatic (2) rifles (3) fed with a detachable box, magazine, or clip, (4) firing centerfire rounds. If you really wanted to cover the theoretical gamut, you could also propose to ban similar rifles that: (5) are belt fed, (6) have an internal magazine capacity greater than 10 rounds, or (7) fire a rimfire round greater than .22 caliber or exceeding some specified energy. I would also suggest that they recommend prohibiting guns that could be readily modifiable into such arms, so no welding a wire across the magazine well of a AR-15 and claiming it’s a single shot.
I don’t think such a ban would have any meaningful effect on crime rates. Although similar rifles have been used in some of the highest-profile attacks in recent years (San Bernardino, Orlando Pulse nightclub, Sandy Hook and Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland, FL), there are millions of these guns out there and they aren’t going away for a long time. The bigger crime risk is easily concealable handguns in any event.
You say that the handgun may be better, then you say that the AR-15 is “fine”. Don’t you want what is best? If what you are using isn’t the best for its purpose, and it also has externalities that are negative, then both you and the public is better off if you are not using the AR-15 for defense, and instead rely on what you consider to be better.
You note that I put that in quotes? I had actually put in magazine first, then went back and put “clip” into quotes, specifically to see if someone would attempt to derail the conversation and make your exact claim that, because someone uses an incorrect term, then they cannot have an opinion on the matter.
I really thought that the fact that I put it into quotes would tip people off that I was using it intentionally in an “incorrect*” fashion.
and it is only really an incorrect fashion to people who have decided to define the terms and pedantically defend their definition. By the actual dictionary definition, I used it correctly. I usually try to humor the gun advocate crowd by using the terminology that they prefer, but sometimes I don’t care quite enough to bend over backwards to make them comfortable.
Why is that?
I have no idea what you are referring to here.
You did, when you said that if he had had a smaller “clip”, there may have been fewer dead.
It has occured to me, yes. There is a difference of opinion on whether more guns will reduce gun violence. I am aware of this difference of opinion, but I am still of the opinion that more guns will not reduce gun violence.
There are more than a few problems with your statement. The first is that the shooter cares what happens to them. For many of them, it is a form of suicide, and if they are not killed by responders, they take their own life. I don’t think that threatening to kill them is as much of a deterrent as you think it is.
You also have the fact that no matter how skilled your armed teachers are, they cannot respond faster than the attacker can attack. At best, you end the spree early, but as they usually get the vast majority of their targets in the first minute, cutting the spree short will have very little effect on the overall casualty rate.
Now, if they were limited to less powerful guns with more times they have to reload, then they won’t be able to kill as many as quickly.
But seriously. Here is the scenario. Kid opens up on the playground, the lunchroom, the auditorium during an assembly or a game, and because he can fire off several shots per second with little recoil to throw off his aim, and can fire off quite a number before having to change the clip, no matter how fast your armed teachers are, he’s gonna kill a bunch of people before he is “gunned down like a mad dog”. If he’s smart at all, he shoots the teachers that he knows are armed first.
Take that up with the people who think that we need to install bulletproof bunkers in classrooms.
And can you tell me what advantage he had with the AR-15 over a handgun? Why he could not have defended his home without a semi-automatic rifle?
Given the events, where he was surprised in his home when he heard them breaking in, he would have been better off with something that could maneuver at closer ranges.
There is also the fact that with higher power rounds, you are putting your neighbors in more danger in case they are inadvertently being used as your backstop.
(This ignores the fact that the teens were not there to harm him, but only to steal some stuff. Had he no gun, or not been there, then they would be alive, and the family would be talking to the insurance company about their claim. I know that there is disagreement on this, but I don’t consider bulgarly a capital crime.)
I suspect that they understand those points equally as well as people opposing the ban but that they are trying to do something productive rather than shrugging their shoulders and pretending that the only things that can be done are to promote more guns in society even though all reputable evidence says more guns will just make things worse.
You have posted this a number of times, so I decided to actually look it up. It turns out this is another instance in which “common sense” doesn’t align with reality. Quite a few people have conducted tests which show that the .223/5.56mm ammo used in AR rifles actually penetrates less through walls than common pistol ammo like 9mm and .45 Auto.
Real World .223 Testing
It appears that bullet construction (fully-jacketed vs. hollow point vs. frangible) as well as shape and velocity all impact the likelihood of over-penetration. It seems logical that the fast, small .223 would penetrate more than the slower, larger 9mm/.40/.45 pistol rounds, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. .223 Ammo fired from AR-15 rifles often penetrated less through walls than typical pistol rounds. The reality is, no matter what the gun or caliber, you need to buy frangible (or, less so, hollow point) ammo if you want to significantly reduce the possibility of shooting through walls. Frangible ammo is sold for just this reason.
Bone, you earlier mentioned some soul-searching (my term, not yours, IIRC) on gun control. Can you get into this further? If you want a new thread, I’m happy to start one.
Have I? Maybe, this is the first I remember having done so.
From your article:
So, we are going to only use smaller rounds for your home defense?
I note that the .22 and 9mm also had poor penetration.
So, it would be agreed that only “safety rounds” should be sold for home defense, and that anything else is not being used for that purpose?
And in any case, I was not talking about over-penetration when I was talking to HD, I was talking about missing (“inadvertently using your neighbors as a backstop”). How much is the round slowed if it doesn’t hit anything? In that case, the rifle round travels much further, and has a lethal velocity for a much greater range.
I disagree, actually. I do think that such things can be quantified.
But this time someone was home, and the intruders brought weapons with them. But you feel confident asserting they were not there to do anyone harm - because the surviving perpetrator said so. Okay well good luck with that.
You mean the Welcome Wagon in your neighborhood doesn’t come wearing gloves and masks and carrying weapons, and invite themselves inside when nobody is home? These teenage rascals were obviously just having good, clean fun.