But there’s still no “gun show loophole” - even before the laws designed to close this non-existant loophole, nothing was different at a gunshow that didn’t apply at anywhere else besides a gun show. Because of laws aimed at closing this nonexistant loopholes, sales at gun shows are actually more restricted at gun shows than not at gun shows in many states.
The idea of a “gun show loophole” is complete fiction. Otherwise just tell me - what’s legal at a gun show that wouldn’t be legal outside of a gun show?
From your link:
“The remaining 33 states do not restrict private, intrastate sales of firearms at gun shows in any manner”
This may be true, but it’s using disingenuous language to imply that there’s something there. It’s meant to read “these sales are unrestricted at gun shows!” as if gun shows were a special venue that got a pass from thet law. But in those cases, private sales are not restricted in that way even outside of gunshows. You could change the quote to remove “at gun shows” and it would remain as correct and be more honest.
The difference is that you have in one area at one time an opportunity to buy many weapons.
There’s no legal difference. There’s no loophole to close. A loophole would mean that something legally works differently there due to the nature or wording of a law.
If you want to ban private sales, then be honest about it and advocate the banning of private sales. Don’t dress it up as a non-existant gunshow loophole. The reason almost never heard of talking about banning private sales but I constantly hear about the “gun show loophole” perplexes me a bit. I can only assume that for whatever reason, the gun control lobby wants to eliminate gun shows, but aren’t actually interested in the negative implications of private sales. Again, gun control is not about results.
So you want to broaden restrictions further to regulate all private sales. Thanks, we need all the support we can use.
Tell that to the military:
Here.
I wonder how many timws I can say disengenuous in this thread.
In any case, you’re not even remotely near making a point. I did not say I advocated that or that it would be effective at accomplishing anything, or anything good about it. I merely said that if that was your concern, attacking private sales would be the logical way to go about it, not lying to create a fictional “gun show loophole”.
Really? Do you even think for a moment before you post?
“In United States military parlance assault weapon is often found as part of a system name of weapons designed for and used in assault operations. Current examples include the SMAW and SRAW used to breach obstacles or destroy structures. Historical examples include the Bangalore torpedo, the APOBS, and even the flame thrower.”
Do a google image search for SMAW, SRAW, bangalore torpedo, APOBS, and flamethrower and tell me if you think any of those had anything to do with the federal assault weapons ban of 1994.
You are doing the exact sort of bullshit that makes compromise with the gun cotnrol lobby so unappealing. It doesn’t matter that you’re wrong, you can lie and say “yeah well technicall the army sometimes calls flamethrowers assault weapons, therefore assault weapon is a real term, therefore the AWB (which had nothing to do with anyhting I’m talking about right now) was a good law!”… yeah.
You have to know that the fact that the US military in some weird context apparently infrequently uses the term “assault weapon” (as reported by wikipedia!) has nothing to do with the discussion about assault weapons as referred to in assault weapon bans. And yet you say this anyway in some sort of wrong, illogical attempt at playing “gotcha!”. Pathetic.
Missed this part did you: “Assault rifles and shotguns capable of fully automatic fire, such as the Heckler & Koch CAWS, the XM8, and the Russian 7.62mm/40mm Assault Weapon System are also classified as assault weapon systems”? Then you ignored the fact that the term was also used by Gun Digest in 1986. So your contention that is is “a bullshit phrase invented to scare people” is just fucking wrong unless you think the US Military and Gun Digest are trying to scare people.
I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen such a bunch of spoiled cry babies. Wah, wah, they won’t let me own a handful of weapons out of the thousands of types that are available. Well there are also a bunch of foreign cars that can’t be imported, and certain foods from other countries, and lead glazed ceramics, and cribs with slats too far apart, and children’s pajamas that aren’t fire resistant, and venation blinds without breakaway cords, and fireworks.
Is there something about your particular hobby that makes it sacrosanct?
So what? How does this prove your point any more than flamethrowers and shoulder-launched rockets? None of those things had anything to do with the term “assault weapons” as it is used by politicians and the gun control lobby. By the definition of the Assault Weapons Ban of 1994, actual assault rifles, which are capable of firing more than one bullet per trigger pull, are unaffected.
This is a stupid and pedantic argument. We’re saying that “assault weapon” is a scare term that encompasses whatever weaponry the user of the word wants to include with it, and not a specific class of weapons. And in response, to try to demonstrate this is not the case, you supply a link that demonstrates that everything from flamethrowers, shoulder-launched missiles, bolt action rifles, revolvers, automatic shotguns, assault rifles with underslung grenade launchers have been called assault weapons. You prove the term is too widespread and arbitrary to have any meaning as describing a specific class of weapons. The ultimate irony is that none of these types of weapons, as wide as the definition is here, describes weapons that were banned under the 1994 assault weapons ban. So even with this huge net, you miss the target.
Wah, wah, they won’t let you speak out against the government when there are thousands of other things that you could speak freely about!
The things you list - there’s either a practical reason for their banning, whether it be through trade agreements or some practical reason like safety. They are intended to give results - ie putting requirements on the spacing of slats on cribs is intended to make for safer cribs. The assault weapons ban did not have such a purpose - it did not target weapons that are used in crime to any significant degree, it did not attack the functional aspects of these weapons that would actually change how they function, but just how they appear. It is not a ban that can be justified with logic or reason or practicality or results. You are defending an illogical law. So even besides the issue of how far the right of gun ownership extends, this law doesn’t even pass the cursory “is this law useful and logical?” test.
So the comparison is not a ban on cribs with the slats too far apart, it’s a ban on cribs that are red or cribs between 3 feet and 3 feet 2 inches high or any other arbitrary criteria. And not only that, but for the analogy to be apt, we’d have to have some sort of well funded, politically active anti-crib lobby whose admitted purpose is to pass any anti-crib law they can in the hopes that they can gradually ban crib ownership.
I’m not so concerned about the hobby, but as the basic human right, and I will defend it as ardently as any other basic human right. If there were a big anti-free speech lobby out there making progress towards getting laws passed, I’d be arguing against them just as hard.
Great wiki link. What’s your point? Mine is that Federal and State laws do not cease to apply once someone enters a “gun show.” Therefore, making the claim that a loop hole exists, and somehow exempts people from following said laws is the indication of diminished mental capability.
A proper cite to refute my claim would show me a city, county, or state that exempts patrons of gun shows from all Fed and Local statutes regarding the sales of firearms. That would show that a loop hole exists. You’ll forgive me if I don’t hold my breath…
You made the claim that “assault weapon” was invented to scare people. It was not, it was in use before the AWB by people that were not anti-gun. Be a man and admit that you are wrong.
As for the “basic human right” of owning any sort of weapon you want, that pretty much sums up the irrationality of the extreme gun-nuts. If there were any merit at all to this idea, it would be that one has a right to defend oneself - not that one has the basic human right to use a particular kind of gun to do it.
What’s your point? I wasn’t saying that NRA members support the Patriot Act. I was citing it as an example of misleadingly titled legislation.
No, I’m not wrong. You are ridiculous. The term “assault weapon” as it pertains to the type of weapons banned by the assault weapons ban is arbitrary and was effectively created because they wanted something that sounded like “assault rifles” but since the weapons they were banning weren’t actually assault rifles they had to create something similarly sounding to an ignorant public.
Just because you can find a previous use of those words put together to describe ENTIRELY DIFFERENT CLASSES OF WEAPONS in a different context does not mean that the term wasn’t effectively created for their purposes by the anti-gun lobby. Even giving you a wide variety of sources and definitions, none of what you claimed about the history of the word “assault weapon” actually applies to these weapons at all. Their use of the word “assault weapon” is entirely different from all previous uses, and hence, they effectively invented the term.
Imagine if they came up with a new ban - something arbitrary, like… all handguns made with polymer grips are now going to be “assault guns”. And I said that “assault gun” is just some arbitrary term they made up to make those guns sound scary. Would you say “nuh uh! The military has been using the term assault gun for a while, therefore you’re wrong!”?
The US miltiary may have described some weapon as “assault weapons” in an unofficial capacity - ie there is no “assault weapon” class of weapons in the same way there’s an “assault rifle” class of weapons - they were referring to stuff like shoulder-launched rockets and flamethrowers anyway. If some random book described revolvers and bolt-action rifles as “assault weapons” then who cares? They’re pretty common words to throw together. I’m sure some book somewhere has strung together terms like “war rifle” or “battle guns” or other simple combinations. It’s entirely clear that the gun control lobby, when creating stuff like AWB '94 had their own new and arbitrary definition, with the words deliberately picked to confuse the public. Even in your best examples, there is no overlap between the supposed previous uses of “assault weapon” and “assault weapon” as it pertains to the gun control debate.
I quite frankly can’t believe you have the gall to tell me to “man up and admit you are wrong” when you are trying to play silly pedantic games when you have to know on some level your arguments are silly.
The ideas are obviously related, since guns are the most practical tools of self defense. There’s also a very strong correlation between individuals and societies that wish to ban private gun ownership and who wish to limit the right of self defense, as well as abdicate that responsibility. They want to pass laws that punish people for defending themselves, and generally are the type of people who expect to rely on the police to protect them if their lives were ever in danger.
You must have missed this bit:
If the gun-control lobby is painting with a broad brush, you have to admit they borrowed it from the Department of Defense.
No, I didn’t. There’s no way that “bolt-action rifles” or “revolvers” would fall under the category of “assault weapons” as defined by the AWB. As for “semi-autos” - the majority of all guns are semi-autos, it’s too generic a term to be meaningful in this context. Between “bolt-action rifles”, “revolvers”, and “semi-autos” I would say you’ve covered about 98%+ of the non-shotgun small arms in civlian ownership. Are they all assault weapons?
And no, they did not borrow anything from the Department of Defense. Just because someone in the army at some point unofficially described shit like flamethrowers as “assault weapons” does not mean they’re somehow responsible for creating the term to refer to weapons that aren’t even employed by the military. I also didn’t say that they were painting with a broad brush - the cosmetic and (barely) functional features defined in the AWB to describe “assault weapons” are specific - I said they were making up terms to confuse and scare the public.
Adding “assault” in front of something makes it sound scary or menacing, and “assault weapon” sounds a lot like “assault rifle” without having pesky requirements like having the thing you’re describing actually be an assault rifle. Assault rifles have a known, established definition and “assault weapon” is anything you want it to be.
I was going to say that “assault weapon” is “weapon designed to be used in [close-quarters] assault”, so you’d see revolvers, carbines, shorter battle rifles, shotguns, flamethrowers, etc. in that category in a typical DoD use of the phrase.
“Assault rifle” is a fairly strictly defined term, and typically means closer to the AWB sense of “assault weapon” in that an assault rifle is a light-to-intermediate caliber select-fire weapon with a detachable magazine and a shoulder stock. The AWB doesn’t really address these weapons at all, inasmuch as legal select-fire weapons are so heavily regulated as it stands that the AWB instituted no additional limits on them.
“Battle rifle” is fairly nebulous, and typically means a full-size detachable-magazine style rifle firing a full-sized rifle cartridge. Anything from a WW2 M1 Garand to a M14 is considered a “battle rifle”. These were the most heavily affected by the AWB, as they are routinely available in semi-automatic configurations with their military features intact. What annoys me personally about the AWB is that these are also the primary types of weapons (that is, basic single-shot infantry rifles) that should be MOST protected by the 2nd amendment due to their ideal nature for semi-trained civilian militia use (assault rifles, and other select-fire/full-automatic weapons, are not ideal for this due to supply line issues–even fully trained regular infantry only have limited use of full-auto weapons in favor of three-round burst rifles to conserve ammo and promote marksmanship).
…I always feel like we need a smiley that posts the little shooting star logo and maybe plays the jingle from the old “The More You Know…” things that used to show up on network TV, especially after I spew a bunch of definitions onto a pit thread.
I’m pretty sure that wikipedia is wrong here.
Virginia (aka God’s Country) was not listed in your list as requiring checks at gun shows. But from our State Police website:
http://www.vsp.state.va.us/Firearms_GunShows.shtm
I admit that doesn’t mean ‘all gun shows’, but I think at the very least wiki is misleading
The Transaction program means:
You obviously haven’t checked out the gun section at a Bass Pro Shop or Cabella’s.
That’s one-stop-shopping.
At a gun show, I’d have to walk table-to-table.