No, you don't need a semiautomatic rifle

Great Debates
61

So rifles of all sorts are involved in less than 3% of murders in America each year. Sure, maybe we ought to focus on the other 97%, but there I’ve got fewer ideas.

I agree that people should be able to own handguns to protect their homes or places of business. But I’m sure the people who are more invested in the right to possess handguns for that purpose have ideas on how to preserve that right while reducing the resulting carnage, right? Especially because they’re the ones who know the difference between a clip and a magazine, and all that shit, right?

Buahahahaha. They don’t give a shit about the consequences to other people.

So back to rifles. And handguns, to the extent that they fall into this category, which is the category, as I’ve said before, of weapons that enable someone to kill a shitload of people really quickly.

Sure, the total numbers of people killed this way are small. But their effect is more like that of terror attacks. Over the past 20 years, only about 150 Americans per year have died in terror attacks (and of course, almost all of them died on one single day). But boy howdy, we get all het up about terror attacks. Why?

My WAG is two reasons: one, they’re scary as shit. And two, there’s the fear that if we don’t take widespread measures to prevent them, we’ll see even worse terror attacks down the road.

So we reacted the way we did to 9/11/01, and most of the added mix of security theater and actual improved security are still there nearly two decades later. And only a handful of people have died in terror attacks on American soil since.

The business with rifles that can kill a ton of people in a hurry is the same. It scares us shitless. And unlike a terror attack, such incidents seem to happen anywhere - in schools, workplaces, nightclubs, even on military bases, anywhere people are congregated in large numbers. (Less of that congregating these days, of course.)

So we do active shooter drills in our schools and at our offices (back when we went to these places, anyway), and scare the shit out of our kids in order to keep them safe, because the threat is scary as shit.

And also, just like with terrorism, it could be worse down the road. It could be terrorism down the road. There’s some chatter that the insurrectionists had a team of people across the river with all those high-capacity rapid-firing semi-autos that they couldn’t have in DC, waiting for the word that it was OK to bring them over. Thank goodness for DC’s strict gun laws, because otherwise the insurrectionists would have been much more heavily armed on January 6th than they were.

One of these days they’re going to show up at some state capitol with their guns, and they’ll use them to mow down state legislators rather than just use their guns to intimidate.

This door shouldn’t even be open. There is no need for civilians to own guns that can take out a lot of people in a hurry, and as we’ve learned from the past year, the danger from them is great - much greater than a mere lone gunman killing a few dozen people. Next time it might be a few dozen people doing the shooting, and hundreds dead.

62

You’re conflating semi-auto rifles and magazine size. Not all semi-auto rifles can fire 30 rounds.

Friendly Curmudgeon is in Canada, where semi-auto rifles are limited to five cartridges.

https://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/en/firearms/maximum-permitted-magazine-capacity

63

Well shit; my numbers are way off. Make that one death per 140k computers. That’s just from the electricity, so ignoring climate change, manufacturing, e-waste, etc.

64

No, it doesn’t. Any linkage between gaming computers and “killing thousands of people a year” is at best a long and convoluted series of indirections, and the culpability rests mainly on those who continue to build and operate environmentally dirty power plants and on those who support them. No reasonable person would argue that the solution to power plant emissions is to continue to operate dirty power plants while trying to use as little electricity as possible.

Whereas the linkage between the most dangerous types of gun and killing people requires only the single element of a deranged, murderous, drunk, or angry individual, and as we see every day, the world is full of those. And in the US, unhinged crackpots are a major gun-owning demographic.

I would further point out that in Ontario, more than 96% of electricity is produced from zero-carbon emitting sources: 60% from nuclear, 26% from hydroelectricity, more than 7% from wind and 2% from solar; some of the rest comes from biomass. The last of the coal-fired plants was demolished years ago. If it can be done here, it can be done anywhere.

Your comparison is ridiculous on several different levels.

65

The OP’s straw-man was about “need”. And later came back to tell us that if you don’t need something, “any harm they cause is pure harm”. The use of US grid mix for entertainment harms people. Owning a firearm, if I were to have one, does not.

66

Possible solutions to irrationally disproportionate fears are education, therapy, mockery. New laws are pretty far down on that list, if at all.

67

Nvm, no need to be a dick

68

Abuse of statistics 101. If quote an incredibly low percentage rate makes the problem look trivial, then do just that. Vice versa, quote absolute values if they look better.

I am not a hunter, but from what I have heard, the only (non-human) animal that requires a semiautromatic weapon to be used on it is wild boar. Seems the Russians use Saiga semiautomatic shotguns (based on Kalashnikovs) to hunt wild boar in Siberia.

Otherwise, from a European perspective, why do so many people want slightly repurposed military weapons? (Yes, I have heard the usual justifications.)

69

As I noted above, to the extent that electricity production harms people, the proximate cause is the backwards nature of US power generation. An argument that seeks to blame electricity consumers for pollution while producing electricity with 19th century technology powered by 18th century power sources seems more than a little disingenuous.

As for “owning a firearm does not [harm people]”, 38,658 deaths (2016, a typical year) beg to differ. On the entire planet, the only countries with a worse gun death rate than the US are Venezuela, El Salvador, Eswatini, Jamaica, Honduras, Guatemala, Brazil, and Colombia. Most civilized countries have gun death rates an order of magnitude or two orders of magnitude lower. Some of the unhinged yahoos who own huge arsenals of guns in the US wouldn’t be allowed to own a popgun in these countries.

70

To answer as factually as I can: because hunting itself is tightly regulated.

There is nowhere that’s open to anyone to come and shoot free-for-all at anything; to have a gun for hunting, you have to have the landowner’s written permission. and the gun and ammunition have to be appropriate for the intended quarry (and the Home Office guidelines to local police go into this in some detail).

The upshot is, hunting is either farmers using a shotgun for vermin on their own land, or shoots organised by a landowner (by invitation or often for very high fees), either for driven birds, or stalking deer. For deer-stalking it’s usually part of a managed cull.

(Nor, of course, do we have apex predators that attack humans - apart from other humans).

71

Thank you for the detailed answer. All in all, a much more civilized approach than the one we take here.

Speaking of irrational fears;

For all practical considerations, neither do we - animal attacks in the US are incredibly rare, much rarer than shootings. And as noted, bear spray or similar deterants do a far better job of keeping you safe than a gun.

72

How much electricity we, individually, use is a choice. Power is generated to match demand. And the harm resulting from that choice is therefore something we have control over.

Whereas whether my non-existent rifle is semiautomatic or muzzle-loading or actually non-existent harms nobody.

73

Why do you assume that all semiautomatic rifles are military weapons?

Here’s the web-page for the Ruger Mini, which is popular with farmers and ranchers. It’s a semi-auto. Would you say it’s a military weapon? To me, it just looks like hunting rifle.

https://ruger.com/products/mini14RanchRifle/models.html

74

Thanks for the compliment. I can see that history has its part to play here: we start from the inheritance of feudal laws over land ownership (and treating poaching as a serious crime against property), whereas my impression is that you start from having to take control of what was seen as a wilderness, or at least land without owners in the sense those early settlers were leaving behind.

75

This sounds to me like a reasonable reason for using a semi-automatic.

I do have a question - why is the recoil less with a semi-automatic, and could that same technology be used with a bolt-action rifle?

Yeah, you answered yourself. The ecosystem is so broken that you can’t restore it, especially if you want to continue with people living in the same area.

When there’s 30 targets in a small area, then shoot-reload-cock-shoot is inefficient. Now the question is - how often are you in a situation where there are 30 targets in a small area? Rarely.

Yeah, 35% of Americans play CandyCrush. A much much smaller % play on ‘gaming’ PCs. I’d say cut your number by a factor of 10, maybe 20. However, I do applaud your inventiveness for calculating how gaming computers are killing people.

That seems kinda backwards to me. Why would you need more cartridges for a handgun than a long gun?

76

And that’s exactly what Stephen Paddock would have said, all the way up to September 30th, 2017. The next day he couldn’t say this anymore, of course, but that’s of little help to his 60 victims (and the hundreds more who were injured).

77

You definitely can’t restore it. Can you reach a new equilibrium, with reintroduction of select keystone species and careful management of populations? Not if people feel the need to keep running out and shooting anything that moves, you can’t.

Eta: nor if people respond to initiatives like the reintroduction of the wolf to Colorado with fear. Being afraid to live around wolves, who very rarely harm humans, but happy to love around guns, which very often harm people, is entirely irrational.

78

You missed the opportunity to show that anything I wrote was incorrect. Do tag me if you get around to it.

79

In a democracy, we also have control over the policies we want to see enacted. As I said before, 60% of the power generation in Ontario is nuclear, and almost all of the rest is zero-carbon. Continuing to generate power by burning coal or other dirty fuels is very much a policy choice.

Your last sentence is also wrong, as evidenced by gun death statistics. It’s the fallacy of believing that your hypothetical gun, hypothetically kept wherever you might keep it, will “obviously” never be used to harm anyone, either by you or by anyone else. The reality says different.

The reality says that when a country is awash in guns like nowhere else on earth, some of them particularly dangerous due to a combination of semi-automatic fire and large magazine capacities, then it should be no surprise that the incidence of unhinged, drunk, angry, or otherwise mentally unstable individuals being able to easily perpetrate gun violence is far greater than in other countries. Every gun in circulation can easily end up being used in an act of gun violence, either be being borrowed, bought, or stolen by someone else, or by the legal owner himself, for any number of the reasons that can befall us imperfect humans.

80

Incorrect about what? Climate change is obviously the number one issue facing humanity and needs to be resolved by switching to renewable energy, there’s no question about that. You are also correct that if you had a gun, it likely wouldn’t harm anyone - until the day you snapped and shot someone, or until the day you left the gun out and the neighbor’s kid shot himself in the face, or a thousand and one other tragedies that happen in the US on a daily basis. You may claim that you are emotionally stable or intelligent enough not to be negligent with your gun, and that may very well be 100% true, but every one of the people who uses their gun to murder someone else, or whose gun is involved in an accident, or who has a bad week and offs themselves because of how easy it is to do with a firearm would say the same thing.