I don’t think BATFE needs legislation to approve or disapprove of it. They’ve decided not to though. It may or may not be a technicality, but also it is my understanding that FA is more controllable.
I’ve seen some videos of these, I’m not impressed. Keeping your aim is hard enough just squeezing off rounds as fast as you can, aiming is out of the question if your gun is bouncing around. Besides, if it was all that great and cheap, why didn’t fruitcake from Orlando use one?
Just how fast can you squeeze the trigger? 4 times a second? Bouncy things gives you 6 … M16 spits rounds out at 12 a second …
thelurkinghorror is right, sure you can machine up the parts or buy them on the black market … if you get caught you’re going to prison … there might be printer code on the dark web …
Well, he didn’t need to, did he? His LiveScan clearance allowed him to handle classified material as well as being able to purchase a Sig MCX. In a target rich crowded environment like that? The results speak for themselves. I still maintain he got the idea for a nightclub from the Paris theatre shootings however. That’s the nature of copy cat crimes, they inspire each other.
Martin Bryant at Port Arthur for example, in his arrest interviews couldn’t stop asking about high his score was, did he set the record? Did he set the record? He constantly kept mentioning the Dunblane massacre. The perpetrator of the Queen St massacre kept press clippings with red underlining of the Hoddle Street massacre some months earlier. In the entire history of Australia, the only mass murder shooting sprees where a nutjob started firing on random strangers and created a body count equal to 5 or higher, all five of them occurred between 1987 and 1996.
It’s all well and good to say our gun laws have resulted in zero mass shootings, but the complete absence of news article saturation on local homegrown shooting sprees down here has played a major role too in my opinion, but obviously, that’s hard to quantify.
What is interesting - and I believe I’m on record here as saying Australia’s gun laws are too strict and we should be emulating the New Zealand model - is that with semi-autos banned, we (thankfully) haven’t seen people going on shooting sprees with lever-action rifles or old military bolt action rifles or modern pump-action rifles. And I honestly hope we never do.
There’s something about Military Style Semi-Automatic Rifles (as they’re known in New Zealand) that appeals to nutters; I don’t support the extraodinary restrictions on those firearms in Australia but I understand why they exist, if that makes sense.
Loads of examples where that isn’t the case obviously, like Virginia Tech in which 30+ died but large clip handguns were used. And then someone will give more examples which substantiate the military style rifle, and someone will give more examples which supports the hand gun evidence. And on it goes.
In the past week I keep asking Australians, how is this your problem? If it’s uniquely American problem (supposedly), what’s it to you? Why do you feel the need to lecture Americans on what they’re doing wrong? And my theory is this, Australian’s are so “joined at the hip” into American TV culture these days they’ve subconsciously reached a mindset we’re now the 51st, 52nd, 53rd, 54th, 55th, and 56th states of the Union. A tragedy in America is now a tragedy in Australia too. The news saturation is over the top, it consumes us.
Here’s where it gets out of hand in my view… in all these conversations this past week about the Orlando shootings, about how only America has killing sprees and how messed up the Americans have become blah blah blah, bugger all people have remembered peaceful sleepy Norway in 2011, when Anders Breivik legally obtained a semi auto handgun and a semi auto Ruger rifle and killed 65 teenagers on an island, plus he was a bomber too. In every way, that guy flew under the radar prior to his killing spree, he passed every imaginable check, in a country that had strict gun laws. Hardly anybody mentions him, only America.
But what about the school shootings in Pakistan a few years back by the Taliban? I think it was 165 young buys were killed. Not a person has mentioned that tragedy once in these discussions. Oh that’s Pakistan, that was terrorism, that doesn’t count, that place is a shithole. It only counts if it’s in America. That’s the way the media is driving these stories nowadays, they’re the people who are influencing this. The amount of time the Orlando shooting is occupying in our conscious thoughts, in our news bulletins, in our news papers. It’s over the top. It’s an American problem which the Americans will solve in their own way. The rest of the world should express sympathy, and then shut up and simply get on with their own lives.
The Queens St massacre in Melbourne is THE lesson people need to learn from these shootings. The sooner you put your own life on the line and phsyically tackle the shooter, the sooner you ensure it’s a low body count instead of being a high body count. With regards to the Orlando shooting, I still cannot believe in a nightclub of 300 people, a location where you could smash a bottle of beer and glass someone in the face, that nobody took him on.
Bumpfire stocks have been around for a while. Do you know what they are?
They basically put a spring in the stock and when the gun jumps back from the recoil it pushes the gun back forward into your finger so the trigger is depressed again. A bump fire stock would work just as well with a revolver or revolver rifle, I think. Should we ban revolvers as well not?
I’ve fired bump fire and they are horrible. With a semi-automatic rifle, I can hit a man sized target 10 out of 10 times from 100 yards. With a machine gun, I can get ~30% of my shots to hit the target. With a bumpfire, the first shot will hit the target and the next 29 shots will hopefully be downrange. They’re not even fun to fire, it bashes your finger and it makes the gun jump around in your hands. It basically makes your trigger finger part of the firing mechanism and has all the accuracy of a gun made out of meat.
I am pretty sure he used 10 round magazines for the .22lr pistol and 15 round magazines for the 9mm pistol. He just had a shitload of magazines and he exercised discipline in reloading.
[smiles] … it’s working …
The report I read said they found 17 empty magazines and 174 casings.
Like I said, shitload of magazines. IIRC he also followed some protocol where you left two or three rounds in every magazine both to increase reload speed and to never run dry.
For what it’s worth, I’ve had pretty much the same conversation with a lot of my left-leaning friends lately. They’re wringing their hands over what a terrible tragedy it is (and it is) and how Someone Should Do Something About All The Guns so I ask them - why do you really care? It’s America. You can’t buy that sort of gun here and haven’t been able to buy that sort of gun here for two decades. America is a foreign country and if they decide the price they pay for their gun laws is that nutters occasionally go off the deep end and misuse guns, that’s an American problem for the Americans to sort out.
By all means be sad and upset and mourn those killed in the tragedy - but don’t presume to lecture a civilised country on the subject when they’ve clearly made their minds up and don’t care what (generic) you thinks.
I also think a lot of people in Australia have no idea what our gun laws are - they either everything is banned if you’re not a farmer (not true) and are horrified when they discover that - gasp - normal, law-abiding people can obtain licences to own firearms, or they think it’s like the US where you can actually own semi-auto rifles like the AR-15 and AK-47 clones, and they don’t like that state of affairs either.
Thanks for the clarification, I stand corrected on the details. It confirms that firearms other than semi automatic rifles can produce an appallingly high body count, and it also confirms what I noted last night… for every example one person quotes to support their case, another contradicting example is easily provided by someone else.
There is an effort by the gun control side of the debate to try and paint AR-15 platform rifles as being somehow fundamentally different than other semi-automatic rifles. I have no idea what they hope to gain even if they are able to convince us of this falsehood other than to reinforce the ignorance of their supporters.
We see several people in these threads starting to adopt this notion that somehow AR-15 platform rifles are uniquely susceptible to conversion into a fully automatic gun. I see this same mistake being made by my facebook friends.
The fact of the matter is that none of the gun controlled measures that are usually trotted out after a mass shooting can really do much to prevent the next mass shooting. You have to make a more meta argument about gun control in general. I have heard that the pink pistols are seeing a huge surge in membership after the Orlando shooting. Apparently the gay community thinks that guns are an effective weapons against guns.
Sure, but I thought it was significant that at least part of the gay community responded to being targeted by gunmen with arming themselves rather than try to pass meaningless bans to prevent law abiding citizens from owning guns with adjustable stocks, bayonet lugs or pistol grips.
I noticed this in a couple of recent articles in the NYT and on Vox. There was a real concerted effort to connect the Orlando shooting back into “AR-15” even though he used an MCX. They’re like a dog with a bone.
The problem here in the USA is violence … and yes we are a violent society … with free speech, there’s always going to be a couple of guys angry enough to throw punches …
I suspect that most of the violent crime in America is not really in response to someone exercising their right to free speech, but you are right: we have a violent society. Even if all guns and all gun deaths were magically eliminated, our homicide rate would still be a good bit higher than the UK or Australia’s (probably Canada’s too, but I haven’t checked the numbers there).
I’m not so sure about that. From what I’ve read, there are certain zip codes in the country which are real problem zip codes, they’re “demographic poverty zones” where gun violence and homicide rates are off the dial, relative to the rest of the country. And by extension those key zip codes (about 20 of them is the number I’ve heard suggested) bump up America’s overall stats regarding violent crime and homicide rates. And it appears it’s consistent, year after year.
While it’s unfair to cherry pick figures just to suit your agenda, it’s not totally out of line to suggest if you pull those 20 key zip codes out of the mix? What’s left behind brings the US back in line with a lot of other developed countries. Put another way, if you’re not living in those 20 key hot spot zip codes, the probability of being involved in violent crime or homicide is much much lower.
Damn post office … I knew Mr Zippie was a commie …
Is your point that, except for some neighborhoods … widespread gun ownership is perfectly safe?