The “certain cosmetic features” are what define a “assault weapon”. There is no other definition.
Not hardly.
Someone carrying a tool of death openly is, by that very action, proclaiming his willingness, and therefore some amount of desire, to use it that way (and the ones who carry them concealed have the same desire but not the courage to say so). Yes, someone who announces that he’s a threat to public safety is someone you should call the police on.
Range, effective range, accuracy, rate of fire, caliber of bullet, stopping power, penetrating power, standard number of rounds of ammunition, ability to be used with expanded capacity, ease of modification to use for full auto or for use with bump stocks or other after market modifications?
All guns are identical in all of these ways?
You claim that there is not a spike in gun sales after mass shootings? You agree with HD’s assessment that people are just buying these guns to upset liberals?
So then, in a state where many people open carry, you’d call the police on all of them? :dubious:
Like, dozens of times a hour in a area with lots of people. :rolleyes:
Hoplophobia is apparently is a real thing. 
Range & effective- pretty much all centerfire rifles have the same range. Deer rifles have the same range as “assault weapons”. There is no way to determine a “assault weapon” vs a hunting rifle based on Range, which is why legal definitions of "assault weapons’ don’t try to…
Accuracy- pretty much all standard centerfire rifles have the same accuracy. Deer rifles have about the same accuracy as “assault weapons”. Specialized target rifles have more. There is no way to determine a “assault weapon” vs a hunting rifle based on accuracy, which is why legal definitions of "assault weapons’ don’t try to…
Rate of fire: pretty much all semi-automatic rifles have the same range. Semi-auto Deer rifles have the same RoF as “assault weapons” (and you can get almost as fast with a bolt or lever action)- but usually a smaller magazine due to game laws. There is no way to determine a “assault weapon” vs a hunting rifle based on RoF, which is why legal definitions of "assault weapons’ don’t try to.
Caliber of Bullet: the AR15 has a .223 caliber bullet. About the same as most .22 plinker rifles. Most deer rifles have a larger caliber, usually .30, but some people use .22 centerfire rifles for deer hunting, they are very popular for varmint hunting. The second most popular “assault weapon” would be AK47, which uses a .30 caliber bullet. There is no way to determine a “assault weapon” vs a hunting rifle based on caliber, which is why legal definitions of "assault weapons’ don’t try to.
"Stopping power": The Ar 15 has somewhat less “stopping power” than many deer rifles. The .223 round has around 1,282 ft⋅lbf whereas the 30.06 has 2,913 ft⋅lbf . There is no way to determine a “assault weapon” vs a hunting rifle based on “stopping power”, which is why legal definitions of "assault weapons’ don’t try to.
Penetrating power. The Ar 15 has somewhat less “penetrating power” than many deer rifles. The .223 round has less penetration than the 30.06. There is no way to determine a “assault weapon” vs a hunting rifle based on “penetrating power”, which is why legal definitions of "assault weapons’ don’t try to.
- standard number of rounds of ammunition*: Semi-auto rifles use magazines, which have a capacity from 3- 40 rounds, or even more.There is no way to determine a “assault weapon” vs a hunting rifle based on " standard number of rounds of ammunition", which is why most legal definitions of “assault weapons’ don’t try to.
ability to be used with expanded capacity: Semi-auto rifles use magazines, which have a capacity from 3- 40 rounds, or even more.There is no way to determine a “assault weapon” vs a hunting rifle based on " ability to be used with expanded capacity”, which is why most legal definitions of “assault weapons’ don’t try to. In some states, such as CA, all magazines over 10 rounds were attempted to be banned. Yes, most 'assault weapons” are designed to be used with extended capacity , but they make 50 and even 100 round magazines for several .22 rimfire "plinker’ rifles.
ease of modification to use for full auto : There are several designs of semi-auto actions, some are easier to convert than others, but rarely is it easy. In the USA doing so is a crime.There is no way to determine a “assault weapon” vs a hunting rifle based on " ease of modification to use for full auto", which is why legal definitions of "assault weapons’ don’t try to.
Assault weapon - Wikipedia (my comments in italics)
"Common attributes used in legislative definitions of assault weapons include:
Semi-automatic firearm capable of accepting a detachable magazine[10][13] (which includes many deer rifles)
Folding or telescoping (collapsible) stock,[13] which reduces the overall length of the firearm[15] (cosmetic)
A pistol grip that protrudes beneath the action of the weapon[13] (cosmetic)
Bayonet lug,[13] which allows the mounting of a bayonet (cosmetic)
Threaded barrel, which can accept devices such as a flash suppressor, Suppressor,[13] compensator or muzzle brake (cosmetic)
Grenade launcher[13]* (unusual and illegal to actually use)*
Barrel shroud, which prevents burning of shooter’s arm or hand as a safety device.(cosmetic)
So no, not all guns are even close to identical in those ways. But other than cosmetic features, there is no way to define a “assault weapon” vs a deer rifle.
The spikes occur when gun buyers have an enhanced fear of being a victim, and to a lesser extent a fear of guns being banned.
https://www.cnn.com/2017/05/01/health/gun-sales-mass-shootings-study/index.html
After a mass shooting, “the world seems to suddenly be a more violent and disturbing place than people thought,” said public health expert David Studdert, a professor of law and medicine at Stanford University.
Studdert said his latest research supports the notion that this fear is partly behind the spikes in handgun purchases that follow mass shootings.
But most of your qualifiers are based on a ignorance of guns, which is why gun owners roll their eyes when debating more gun banners, since most gun banners simply don’t know what they are talking about.** They want to ban out of ignorance.**
I know it was eons ago but you might recall an incident where some wingnut took a bunch of guns into a room overlooking the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival, shooting 422 people and killing 58, leaving many others permanently maimed and thousands more psychologically traumitized.
Being a responsible gun owner doesn’t just mean not having negligent discharges or leaving firearms where children can access them; it also means behaving in a sensible fashion to not aggravate or frighten other people by unnecessary open display in public, a point understood by professionals if not ‘Second Amendment fetishists’ who apparently revel in making people uncomfortable for their own pleasure.
Stranger
Oddly however, that wasnt open carry. In fact he snuck his guns in.
In states where open carry is common, seeing a gun does not *aggravate or frighten other people *.
And professionals do use open carry. In fact, pretty much all uniformed police use open carry. Does the sight of a policeman carrying a gun aggravate or frighten you?
A bit different from handguns, though, right?
Bolt action is much, much slower than semi-auto. Yes, there are trick shots that can fire almost as fast on a bolt action as a normal person can with a semi-auto, but those are few and far between, and they would be able to fire even faster with a semi-auto.
Quite a bit different from a handgun. And there is more of a difference between a .22 and a .223 than you think.
Only deer rifles that are capable of accepting a detachable magazine.
Which also makes it more concealable, I don’t know if I’d entirely call that cosmetic. Easy to get around if you don’t need or want a concealable rifle, but does serve the purpose of making it harder to conceal a legal weapon.
Does add to functionality a bit. But, once again, easy enough to get around.
Not sure if we need bayonets anymore.
And functional, as you said, it can accept devices that augment your shooting.
Okay, this one I disagree with, I really want a grenade launcher. 
Which only becomes an issue if you are using your gun in much more intense situations than plinking targets.
We already did determine several differences. A deer rifle uses a much larger round that is designed for hunting larger game, often is bolt action rather than semi-auto, and often, by law, has a smaller capacity.
You also have to have a hunting license to shoot at deer.
Tell you what. You go to a soldier in Afghanistan or fighting ISIS in other parts of the middle east, and you tell me what kind of guns they are using. See if you can get them to use a “deer rifle” rather than the “assault weapon” that they are currently using.
When is the last time that guns were banned after a shooting? Are you saying that these gun owners are morons to go out and buy a gun because of a completely bogus fear that they will become a victim or guns are to be banned?
Why do they often get the same exact model of gun that was used int he shooting? Why, after the Las Vegas shooting, did all the gun stores run out of bump stocks? Were they worried about being a victim in a situation where a bump stock would be necessary?
I’m not saying your wrong here, I’m just saying that you are are saying that gun owners are stupid. If they really are that stupid, then I do have a concern about their ability to safely and responsibly handle their guns.
Did you even read your quote? “partly behind the spikes in handgun purchases”. Which has nothing to do with the spikes in AR-15 purchases after an AR-15 is used to kill a bunch of people.
I am not the one that cannot tell the difference between an AR-15 and a “deer rifle”. Once again, you passively aggressively bring up “ban”, when I am not talking about bans at all.
I get that gun owners think that anyone who wants to see less people killed by guns as ignorant, it works to their advantage to be insulting and dismissive in order to not have any restrictions made on their toys.
That you would say that “they” want to ban out of ignorance is you being ignorant of the fact that they want to do something to reduce gun violence, and you telling them that it is impossible to do without banning guns.
Do you have any useful things to contribute to decreasing gun violence other than insulting those who care? If so, then contribute. If not, then all you are doing is repeating the same old stories that have been debunked time and time again about how anyone who wants to decease gun violence is just and ignorant hoplophobe.
We have decrease the number of car deaths without banning cars. We have decreased the number of deaths attributed to alcohol without banning alcohol (for nearly a hundred years, anyway). We have decreased the number of deaths associated with smoking without banning smoking.
It is only this one thing, for some reason that you insist is different from anything else, that nothing can be addressed to reduce the number of deaths attributed to it without banning them.
If you would like to continue to convince me that the only way to reduce the number of deaths due to gun violence is by banning them, then I suppose I can go ahead, stop trying to have a reasonable conversation and come to a reasonable compromise that may save lives, and join in the rest of the crowd that you have pushed into a position of wanting to ban guns.
I think it was Bone, in another thread a long time ago, that said that he only took such a strong position on absolutism of freedom of guns because there were other people on the other side that took an absolute side on the other side. I’m starting to see where he was coming from. When you come up against such unreasonable inability to compromise for the purpose of saving lives, then it starts making less sense to compromise yourself, and instead just be stubborn, and say, “No, no, you have demonstrated that you cannot play with your toys safely, we will have to take them away from you now.”
It may not aggrevate or frighten some people, but there will also be people who will react to it anywhere you go, and especially people who have been victimized or affected by firearm-related violence. As a responsible gun owner, it is your duty to be considerate to others and not go out of your way to insist upon ostentatious and gratuitous public displays of weaponry simply for the purpose of showing off or discomfiting others. As a gun owner and former instructor myself I find such displays and justifications for thr offensive and reckless because they just serve to convince people who already do not like guns that gun owners are irresponsible jerks.
Uniformed police openly display weapons because being armed is a part of their job and it would be impractical to conceal a duty pistol and other duty gear. Plainclothes and off-duty officers do not generally openly display weapons and many departments actually have requirements for concealed carry (e.g. must not show in standing or kneeling position). But that is neither here nor there; we are speaking of private citizens displaying weapons in a public context where no display or use is called for. The difference between ‘carrying’ and ‘brandishing’ is largely subjective, and most people cannot tell whether someone carrying a rifle around Walmart is preparing to go on his own discount shooting spree or is just a general kind of asshole who doesn’t understand basic principles of social conduct.
Stranger
Are they or are they not all threats to public safety? Why do you think they all carry, unless it’s fear of each other?
No, the word is, as you know, an invention of the gun lobby, although hoplophilia obviously is real. What *is *also real is fear of getting killed. That, as you may or may not know, is normal.
OK so I guess now we’re back to the same debate that has been re-hashed a million times - the whole “nobody needs these” debate. Nobody’s mind is ever going to be changed on that, and there’s less political capital for banning “assault”-type weapons than there has ever been. The genie is out of the bottle with AR-15s. I think it’s pointless to try to ban them. And if it did somehow happen, these spree shooters would just use shotguns loaded with buckshot; shooting into a dense crowd of people, the result would be just as grisly as it would with bullets.
But, for my own part, anyway, I think it’s fucked up when people openly carry long guns and I think it should not be allowed. Disallowing it it also probably achievable politically, unlike banning them entirely.
Cite? I’m a LEO in Wisconsin (since 1982!:eek: ) So long that I retired fully, with pension, from one agency and started a second career with another agency where I’ll be eligible for another pension in 2022.
In other words, I know WTH I’m talking about. Anywhere it is legal to openly carry a handgun in Wisconsin it is also legal to openly carry a long gun, including so called “assault weap:rolleyes:ns”.
In fact, agencies have modules during required inservice training to make sure officers are aware of this. There were law suits over it in the past, suits that every agency lost.
Simply openly carrying an AR-15 in public, with no other factors present, is NOT a justifiable reason to detain someone in this state.
And yes, some open carriers are doing it to get a rise out of people, others are not. Neither is RS or PC for a stop.
Yes, but we’re not talking handguns.
*The Lee bolt-action and 10-round magazine capacity enabled a well-trained rifleman to perform the “mad minute” firing 20 to 30 aimed rounds in 60 seconds, making the Lee–Enfield the fastest military bolt-action rifle of the day. *
A trained marksman can fire as many aimed rounds with a bolt as with a semi-auto.
A .223 is .22 caliber. It is more or less the same bullet diameter as the .22 hornet, the .222 remington, and yes, the .22 rimfire. There are many .22 rounds, of which the most common are the .223 and the .22 rimfire.
No, a deer rifle can use a .223 or .222. Semi-auto deer rifles are common, however, yes bolt is more common. Still, you can’t differ a “assault weapon” from a deer rifle by caliber or action type. The second most common assault weapon is .30 caliber. And there are some in .45.
Yep, - they don’t carry 'assault weapons" - they mostly use *fully automatic weapons . Not available to the public. * However, the remington 700 is a bolt-action centerfire rifle, used by snipers and is more or less, a standard deer rifle variant.
When?- well the Federal Assault Weapons Ban - Wikipedia
Efforts to create restrictions on assault weapons at the federal government level intensified in 1989 after 34 children and a teacher were shot and five children killed in Stockton, Calif. with a semi-automatic Kalashnikov pattern rifle.[1][2][3] The Luby’s shooting in October 1991, which left 23 people dead and 27 wounded, was another factor.[4] The July 1993 101 California Street shooting also contributed to passage of the ban. The shooter killed eight people and wounded six. Two of the three firearms he used were TEC-9 semi-automatic handguns with Hell-Fire triggers.[5] The ban tried to address public concerns about mass shootings by restricting firearms that met the criteria for what it defined as a “semiautomatic assault weapon”, as well as magazines that met the criteria for what it defined as a “large capacity ammunition feeding device”.[6]:1–2
Well, the questions you asked were indeed- "ignorant’. The questions show that you dont know much about guns. Unless you were on purpose asking ignorant questions?
Sure, let’s reduce all violence, not just “gun violence”. More police , better trained. More programs to get minorities out of the slums that breed criminals. Programs that reduce recidivism. Get rid of the war on drugs, and commute sentences for non-violent drug offenders. Increase sentences of violent crimes.
And bans on assault weapons can’t significantly reduce violent crime. Even if every assault weapon in the USA was magically waved away, it might reduce violent crime by less than 3%. Rifles just are not used by criminals.
*But here’s the thing: When it comes to shootings in America, the use of an assault rifle is actually rare. Shootings with rifles, including assault rifles, make up less than 3 percent of gun homicides in the US. And according to federal data, handguns have over the past couple decades made up the great majority — more than 70 percent — of firearms used in homicides.
The data, along with the tragedy in Annapolis, shows the limitations of an assault weapons ban, which has become one of the top policy proposals from March for Our Lives and other gun control advocates — despite also being one of the gun control measures with the least supportive evidence behind it.
The typical argument for the ban: Weapons of war have no place in American communities. These high-velocity, high-capacity weapons are particularly deadly, even more so than other semiautomatic firearms such as handguns. They have also been used disproportionately in mass shootings. And they aren’t needed for hunting or self-defense. So they should be banned altogether.
All these claims have a certain intuitive sense behind them. What they don’t have, however, is a whole lot of empirical evidence, based on my discussions with gun policy experts and researchers. Studies on assault weapons bans have generally ranged from inconclusive to unfavorable toward a ban. And even if the bans were effective at constricting access to assault weapons, they’d likely have only a small effect on gun violence overall, especially if shooters resort to other types of firearms.
*
Now sure, in a few cases, the body count from a mass shooting would be less. But you asked how to reduce “gun violence”- and it is NOT by banning “assault weapons” since they are not used much in crime.
There are 30 million of them in the USA. If we did ban them, it would cost us about $15 Billion dollars. Some jerks wouldnt turn them in, we’d have quite a few “ruby ridge” type incidents. Men who were guilty of no other crime would be killed or imprisoned, putting a huge burden on our courts and prisons. A good number of police and federal agents- some of whom are my friends- would be killed. All to reduce the very rare mass shooting deaths by maybe a third. Violent crime would go up for a bit, but not down at all. Not worth it.
So, if you don’t want to ban them, what are your suggestions?
I agree, openly carrying a AR 15 is being a jerk, just like openly driving a gas guzzler 800 hp car.
But it’s not illegal, nor is it cause to call 911.
Yes, and why don’t those scare people? Because they are used to it. In England, most police dont carry guns, and gun carrying police do make people somewhat nervous.
They are not. Every tenth person openly carrying is not a threat.
It is, but it is real. People do have a unnatural fear of guns, even toy guns sometimes.
Sure, but they why aren’t you afraid of cars or smokers, since they are many times more deadly than guns?
Yeah, some people get literally scared to death by them, like those eleven folks at that synagogue yesterday morning. Totally irrational of them!
Even cops get scared of toy guns. Enough so to scare a kid to death with a real gun.
I’m not afraid of smokers, because I can get the hell away from them.
I’m aware every day that cars are lethal machines. But we’ve constructed a society where most of us can’t go to our jobs or to the grocery or over to a friend’s house without getting in a car. Unlike guns, we just plain can’t do without them. We do what we can to reduce automobile-related hazards. You seem to think that the fact that we haven’t reduced those risks to zero is an argument why we shouldn’t reduce gun-related risks.
no need for ferraris. crazy people can run over pedestrians in a badly tuned Yugo or use a truck filled with bricks through a school building.
Society in the US has changed considerably from when I was a child in the 60’s. I carried a knife in grade school and made a 12" long knife in shop class in high school. I can still remember a grade school teacher asking to borrow my boy scout knife so she could cut open a box. Nobody got stabbed. rural schools had gun clubs. I learned to shoot after hours AT SCHOOL. I didn’t finish the course but I learned how to properly handle a gun.
Something has changed and it’s not access to guns. It’s a breakdown of society.
In the end, when the only things left are a handful of people, a humongous pile of guns and a marshmallow, the marshmallow will get the blame.
Yes.
It’s not really a presumption. He said:
From “or similar weapon” (and similar phrasing he used in other posts) I think it’s pretty clear that he wants to ban all the scary guns, but I doubt he’s knowledgeable enough to delineate which ones those are.
I end up spending most of my time and energy beating back stupid ideas. If liberals would stop proposing those, perhaps we could get somewhere productive.
You are imagining things that I have not said. I didn’t mention crying or tears at all.
I think you’re wrong. Gun sales spike when it looks like there’s a chance they may be banned. I don’t think they’re buying them “to upset liberals”, I think they’re doing it to get them before liberals ban their purchase.