No, you don't need a semiautomatic rifle

In another thread we had the following exchange which the mods have requested we take to Great Debates:

So please, enlighten us: what is so important about hunting with semiautomatic rifles that it justifies the huge number of gun deaths in the United States? And how do the British manage without?

Sorry, I asked Hari to change his message and hopefully he does.

This qualifies as a tired subject and I we really don’t need a fresh gun control debate.

This is not a warning.

Reopened, Gun Debates are not in the category of Thrice Told Tales.

@Babale, my apologies. Thanks to Colibri, we bounced this up to the Mod Loop and straighten out the interpretation of the quoted part of the rules.

Excellent - then I repeat my question, to anyone who cares to answer it:

Oh mighty hunter, please tell me how I’ve been hunting wrong all these years using a bolt action rifle and a over/under shotgun? Please bestow your mystical knowledge upon us lesser humans.

This guy is useless to talk to about this, he won’t even admit guns are weapons when he uses them to kill the ravening beasts threatening his existence. I’m not even sure this guy has been near wild animals if he thinks he needs 30 rounds to protect himself from wolves. Maybe somewhere in the world wolves are a threat to humans but it is not in the US.

Sorry @Babale , meant to just quote the MightyCurmugeon but got your name in there instead.

I think what’s behind it is the old trope that if you don’t understand all the arcane technical details that are second nature to gun fetishists, any opinion that you hold on private gun ownership in a civilized society is invalid.

I don’t know much about fusion bomb design, but I’m pretty sure we shouldn’t sell those at Walmart either.

That’s what you think…

Actually I suspect that something like the above link is the closest FriendlyCurmudgeon has come to having to defend himself from wildlife.

People (who aren’t me) like to have them. And letting them have them poses negligible danger to me or you.

Fixed quote tags.

If I remember correctly, @MightyCurmudgeon is in a rural area of Quebec, not the US.

There’s a certain level of hostility and mockery from the start that tells me to not even bother here. I won’t be changing any minds, so have fun.

The problem with negligible danger is that if there’s a hundredth of a percent chance that an american will be imperiled by a rifle, that’s tens of thousands of cases. So yeah, sure, I personally don’t expect to be threatened by some nut with a rifle, but that doesn’t mean that their presence does no harm.

No hostility or mockery was intended; I have no control over what people who replied before you did have posted.

Nonzero harm, for sure.

Nobody asked you to change minds. Just share with us why you use a weapon normally carried by someone in the military to deal with wildlife. Should be just as easy as what you already posted.

Tell that to the victims of the Vegas shooting… why are their lives less important than your (the general “your”) ability to own a deadly weapon?

Not to mention the multitude of other mass shootings, or the even more numerous victims of gun violence who were killed in incidents that didn’t involve a mass shooting?

That’s really the thing; when you look at it from the perspective of the number of guns of whatever type, vs the number actually used for criminal purposes, it’s kind of staggering how few it actually is.

From what I have read, it’s in the 1.3 million or so “assault” rifles are sold EACH year. Even if all gun murders were done by newly sold assault rifles, that would represent just a hair over 1% of those rifles used in murders.

But that’s not the case; the vast majority of gun deaths are not from rifles of any type; of the 13927 gun murders in 2019, only 364 were from rifles, with about 6400 from handguns. So even if we limit the total pool to only newly sold guns, we’re still talking about a vanishingly small percentage that are actually used to kill anyone. But we’re really looking at the accumulated total of assault rifles sold over decades, making that percentage microscopic. If we take the 13 million rifles sold over the past decade, and divide 364 by that, we come up with 0.0028% used in a homicide. That’s tiny. I’m guessing lots of other things kill people at a higher rate than that which nobody is concerned with.

It’s just that when they are used, the killings are typically very prominent.

But that ultimately doesn’t trump people’s right to own them- it just seems absurdly restrictive to crack down on that type of weapon which is overwhelmingly used for normal purposes, just because one guy out of 325 million MIGHT do something illegal with it.

“Important” wasn’t even on my mind, but the remote possibility of someone killing me or anyone else with one of these things is so low that it is unimportant.