Sniper Problem - Why aren't we using this...

Great Debates
41

Again the less significant points first.

More to training to be a police officer than how to use the weapon. And sometimes they abuse the power.

As to semi-automatic use-

from PEDIATRICS Vol. 105 No. 4 April 2000, pp. 888-895. As noted before. I guess you can call my journals my ass.

Thanks for the lesson in gun control laws. Sure seems like a hodgepodge of different state laws and a smattering of federal ones. State laws are going to only be as good as the weakest link. I’m specifically interested in how continued ownership is monitored and the penalties for the illegal sale of a handgun. Who is supposed to enforce these regs.

How to decrease the number of handguns in the hands of the punks?

Well a few possibilities.

Sure, a complete ban would work over time. None to steal, none to illegally deal, sooner or later the ones on the street get confiscated. Law abiding citizens could have their current weapons grandfathered in or would comply because they are law abiding. I do not advocate such an approach. I think that it disrespects the many responsible gun owners out there and is a disproportionate response. But the best way to take the wind out of the sails of those who do advocate such an approach is to come up with some other effective plan. Not to just accept the current homicide rate as what it is going to be or to try to convince us that more guns would decrease it.

I’d like to see an emphasis on control of resale with teeth. A federal law, consistent across the country. If you resell a handgun illegally and it is used in a crime then you are partially culpable for that crime with mandatory jail time. Federal law with monies dedicated to enforcement of it.

I’d like to see that individuals can only purchase a handgun after thay have taken and passed classes which include instruction on responsible storage; instruction not only aimed at safety in the house but at preventing theft of the weapon. That such storage practice is law, even if enforcement of that law can only occur if the police are in a domicile for some other reason.

These laws would decrease the illegal access to handguns by the punks. Without stopping you from enjoying your gun heritage and hobby.

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A legally privately held class 3 weapon (at least, machine guns) have never been used to commit a crime. In 68 years of regulation, no private citizen has ever used a legally owned machine gun to commit a crime.

Do you realize the significance? Hundreds of thousands of owners, and tens of thousands of weapons - and not one was used in a crime. Yes, class 3 weaponry is a menace to society.

One would be a start.

As for a 20 round magazine with a barrel with less than 6 inches - I’m not sure what you’re referring to. There are specialty magazine manufacturers that make large capacity magazines for almost every common pistol design out there - but they’re rare and novelty items, really. Are you trying to say that every common pistol type made in, say, the last 100 years, is an assault weapon?

43

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What is your issue with ‘assault weapons’, out of curiosity? I’m assuming you know absolutely nothing about them, but the term itself sounds scary, so we must end their menace!!! That’s exactly what HCI and friends wanted as a reaction when they popularized the term “assault weapon”.

You don’t even know what one is, or how often they’re used in crime, yet you want them tightly regulated.

IIRC, long arms only account for a percent or less of gun crime nationally. “Assault weapons” are a mere fraction of that, less than ten percent of one percent, if I recall. If you doubt me, or would like more precise figures, I can find them for you.

Long arms aren’t suited for crime, and there’s nothing about “assault weapons” that makes them any more suited than any other type of long arm (and for that matter, shotguns are MUCH more useful for most crime). You never asked, and don’t know this - and yet you’re willing to advocate heavy regulation strictly based on a name.

44

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Sorry - what are you implying here? That semiautomatic handguns are somehow inherently dangerous? Semiautomatic handguns have been about 80% hand gun designs in the last 100 years… basically, any non-revolver handgun is a semiautomatic. I’m not sure if you’re mistaking semiautomatic to mean they’re submachine guns, or something - but semiautomatic pistols are basically the ‘default’ type of pistols out there, and there’s nothing scary about them.

If you were referring to something else, please clarify.

45

Senor,

Read the posts in the thread before commenting. I did indeed ask,

And received my education from John. Since then I’ve tried to be more precise and have referred to automatic and semiautomatic weapons. The numbers for those I have provided.

I have no problem 'fessing up to my ignorance and learning from those who are willing to teach. How about you?

46

You define assault weapons as anything “semiautomatic”, and so it appears you haven’t learned your lesson.

Or do you believe that most handgun designs of the last 100 years have been ‘assault weapons’?

And indeed, I have no problem admitting ignorance and learning - that’s what I’m here for - but by your tone, you suggest I’m unwilling to learn. Is there something I said that gave you that impression?

47

Oh, and I did read the entire thread. John said:

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In return, you quoted figures on semiautomatic HANDGUNS used in crime. Clearly not what he meant by ‘military pattern semiautomatic rifles’. Again, are you proposing that almost every major gun design in the last 100 years, and probably the majority of handguns in this country, are ‘assault weapons’?

If not, then it appears that I am not the one with the failure read this thread.

48

Sorry if that came off as a bit harsh sounding. You implied that I didn’t read the thread, and just spouted what I said out of ignorance - I didn’t like the tone. But I also shouldn’t have responded harshly, as we probably just had a miscommunication. Anyway, if that’s the case, my above posts should clarify.

49

Okay we can both stand down. :slight_smile:

Really, since John clarification for me as to what is meant by “asault rifle” as used by gun hobbiests and what is meant by “assault weapon” as used by federal regulators, I have tried to specify that I am discussing automatic and semi-automatic weapons and usually handguns. If I’ve slipped up and said “assault weapons” after that, then I apologize. You are right in saying that I don’t know guns. Never even handled one.

Whether they are standard issue handguns or not matters not to me. What matters to me is that they are the guns particularly favored by young punks in commission of crimes, that they seem to be particularly well suited for such a purpose, and that they are obtained by criminals by illegal purchase and by theft.

My focus from there is how to reduce the opportunities for illegal purchase and theft of these guns in ways that are not onerous heavy regulation. I could even imagine that having one set of federal gudelines that trumps the rats nest of conflicting state regs may actually be less of an imposition on gun hobbiests than what you have now. That is if gun rights advocates led the way in helping design them with an appreciation of what the mainstream really wants out of “gun control”, not taking away their guns, but decreasing the ability of the punks to get their hands on them. (And sure I’d love to see more vigorous enforcement of the laws we already got too)

50

So you seem to be saying the semiautomatic handguns are inherently more suited for crime than revolvers. Can you tell us why that is the case?

And even according to your own numbers, that doesn’t really make any sense. All handguns are basically revolvers or semiautomatics - there are some single shot speciality target pistols and such, but we can safely exclude them for the sake of discussion. Based on your own numbers, if 61% of handguns used to be kids are semiautomatics, and 47% used by adults are semiautomatics, then that means kids are using 39% revolvers, and adults are using 53% revolvers. As revolvers also ‘assault weapons’? Their prevalence in crime seems to be roughly the same.

51

In case you’re unfamiliar with the term, semiautomatic is used to detonate a self-loading arm which will fire one round with each trigger pull. Revovlers don’t fall under this category, even though they also fire one round per trigger pull, because they feature a rotating chamber design. A new round is loaded into a semiautomatic chamber after every shot, whereas a revolver switches chambers every shot. Both are essentially functionally the same - one trigger pull per shot fired - but the internal mechanics are different, hence the classification.

That applies to any arm - semiautomatic shotguns and rifles also fire one round per trigger pull.

52

Er… “is used to denote”… woops.

Guns would be pretty dangerous things if they detonated to the term ‘semiautomatic’.

53

yes, I’m sure such weapons have been illegal - but isn’t it a bit hypocritical to argue that guns should not be outlawed, then point to the laws outlawing guns to justify said argument? That’s worse than the tobacco companies bitching about warning labels, then trying to avoid liability by say “but we put labels on them!”

Stocton, 101 California Street (AK-47, don’t remember, respectively)

where to start…

how many of the “common pistol types” have 20+ rd mags?

how many current production models feature 20+ rds, and barrels < 6"?

The fact that (illegal in California) after-market high-capacity mags are mfg’d does not give cover to your argument that a weapon designed with such features should be legal.

again - justify a mac-10, a “street-sweeper” (12 ga short-barreled shotgun with rotary magazine).

or even a fire-suppressor - why would a legal shooter want to conceal his location?

I take it you won’t try to argue that these are “sporting” weapons, which leaves you exactly where?

Given the demonstrated risk of crazies getting these devices, maybe they should not be in circulation, um?

And how are the gun shows in Texas doing? (OK, so I bait…)

p.s. - I have owned both a revolver and a semi-auto pistol. I do know the difference.

p.p.s. - your position would be stronger had I not seen a public, online auction for 7.62 armour-piercing ammo - apparently, some stuff is slipping through the cracks.

54

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Er, no. I didn’t say they were illegal. They weren’t, and aren’t (at least, not grandfathered ones). There have been tens of thousands owned by hundreds of thousands of owners, and none has been used in a crime. That was my point - not that they were illegal in the first place. If you were operating from the presumption that they were illegal in the first place, what was talking about banning class 3 weapons above?

Perhaps I’ve misunderstood you.

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That wasn’t a class 3 weapon.

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Dozens - and the most common. 1911s, browning high powers, most types of glocks, some sigs - should I go on?

Guns with external magazines don’t have a limitation on magazine size - if you can make a 10 round mag, you can make a 50,000 round magazine, it doesn’t matter. So long as the ‘interface’ where the magazine interacts with the frame and action are correct, the physical size and capacity of the magazine is as large as you want it.

As such, certain specialty manufacturers make all sizes of magazines for whatever reason. If you want to ban every type of handgun that has such a magazine made for it, you’re going to have to ban almost all of the most common types of handguns.

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“20+” rounds isn’t a gun specification, it’s a magazine specification. So long as a gun can accept detachable magazines, it can accept detachable magazines of practically unlimited size. “Standard capacity” is determined generally by the size of the frame, so that the magazine can fit in the frame in it’s entirety, but that’s not a mechanically limiting factor. You can have a magazine sticking 5 feet out the bottom if you’d like.

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What “features” are you talking about? The feature to accept a detachable magazine? Well, there you’ve gone and banned every semiautomatic pistol ever made. Magazine capacity is NOT limited by gun design, but by magazine design. Any gun capable of accepting a detachable magazine “doesn’t care” whether it’s 5 rounds or 50.

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Again? You never asked me to justify it in the first place. And you might want to explain exactly what you mean by justify.

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A flash suppressor? It’s commonly misperceived that these are used to conceal flash from the target - that’s physically impossible. What they do is help keep from blinding the shooter from the muzzle flash.

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Who cares if they’re sporting? If you assume the only thing I have against gun control is that it interferes with sport, then you’re having the wrong argument.

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Well, you’ve convinced me. I’m firmly in the gun control camp now.

You’re right, because of the risk that a few crazies may end up killing me with a legally owned gun instead of a bomb or a knife or illegal gun, I want to become disarmed and meek and unable to defend myself. After all, if I’m unable to defend myself, then other people will be unable to hurt me… yeah. Sorry guys, I’m not a gun nut anymore.

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I have no idea what you’re getting at.

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That note wasn’t really directed at you.

What are you talking about? You’re not even making sense. Why would my “position” be stronger if you hadn’t seen armor piercing ammunition? What position did I take?

And, 2 things: A) It’s legal to sell preban steel core ammunition, and B) you had the idea that it was illegal and it was “slipping through the cracks” anyway. You saw a law against it, and saw, in your mind, that law being circumvented. Apparently, this is supposed to mean we need another law?

Could you please start directing your comments at things I’ve said and positions I’ve taken? You seem to be rambling on about things that I haven’t even touched on, and I’m not sure what you’re trying to say.

55

The Luger, designed in 1908, was immediately fitted with a thirty-two-round drum that could be installed in place of the pistol’s 7-round stock mag.

The US Army in 1941, issued to some tank crews, rediculously long 27-round stick magazines for their Colt .45 sidearms. The magazines were over two feet long.

The Thompson, as any good gangster-movie viewer knows, can accept a 100-round drum. That same weapon is what Hanks’ character carried in Saving Private Ryan, fitted with a 32-round stick magazine.

Competition shooters that use Colt-pattern AR rifles have specialized single shot magazines- they literally only hold one round. Those same rifles will interchangeably accept any military-surplus 30-round mag.

Magazine size, shape and length is irrelevant to a firearm’s legality or illegality.

Also, Happy, a “fire suppressor” is that red thing on the wall in the kitchen. A “flash suppressor” is merely a sheetmetal cone over the muzzle that hides the flash of the burning powder at the muzzle, from impeding the shooter’s vision in low-light conditions. It does nothing at all to hide the flash from anywhere but directly behind the arm. In any case, modern powders create very little flash- energy used to make the bright burst is energy not used to drive the projectile. Just as cars have gotten more mileage out of a volume of fuel, powders have been improved to provide more power internally, and less wasted as flash.

Movies, in case you didn’t know, enhance the flash with special blanks- I have yet to see a gun in real life produce that sort of cinematic fireball.

Many of the things you see attached to the muzzles of evil black guns are properly known as “muzzle brakes”. They redirect hot gasses, typically upward, in an effort to counteract recoil jump to a limited extent. Extremely high power arms redirect some gas backward in an effort to reduce felt recoil, or “kick”, but at the expense of greatly increased noise directed towards the shooter himself.

A “sound” suppressor, also inaccurately labelled a “silencer”, is a Title III item, and subject to the same restrictions as a “machine gun”.

As for the supposed “armor piercing” ammo, importation of Chinese-made steel-core ammunition was banned by Executive Order in 1994 or '95, as I recall. However, there were literally tons already here in the States, the owners of which realized a huge windfall when the EO caused the price to triple literally overnight.

And since people were buying it almost entirely because it was terribly cheap ammo (barely half the cost of even generic American ammo) for plinking and recreational shooting (all states ban the use of nonexpanding projectiles for hunting) the huge jump in cost meant people stopped buying it to plink with.

Which eventually caused the prices to crash, and meant that the importers wound up with still-significant piles that only slowly trickle into the market.

But ooooh, it’s armor piercing, so it MUST be eeeeevil stuff, purchased only for nefarious purposes. :smiley:

56

b]Senor**,

Actually, I do not mean to be saying that. I mean to be saying that handguns, especially semiautomatics, are empiricaly the weapon of choice for crime, especially crime by youth. My (once again, only semi-informed in this regard) view is that semi-automatics allow faster fire than non automatics and would thus be best suited for criminal intent. Am I incorrect in this belief? Handguns of course are better suited for criminal intent than rifles are. And some handguns seem as if they were spefically designed for such a purpose.

So that’s what happens to bad kids! They’re turned into handguns! :wink:

57

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Handguns in general are predominant in firearm crime, yes, but even by your own figures, with youth they have a small majority and with adults they have a minority - hardly evidence of anything substantial.

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Yes, they both fire as fast as you can pull the trigger.

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Former is generally true, the latter is arguable.

:stuck_out_tongue: I meant “used by”.

In any case, I think you got mixed up somewhere with the term ‘semiautomatic’. John was referring to semiautomatic military pattern rifles, saying they were exceedingly rarely used in crime - which is true - and you countered with a cite that counted the number of semiautomatic handguns, something entirely different. I tried to clear that up.

Did you still want to advocate the notion that military pattern semiautomatic rifles (I hate the term ‘assault weapon’, it’s arbitrary, meaningless, and is desgined to stir up a lot of irrational fear towards them - as you’ve displayed) are commonly used in crime and, therefore, need to be more tightly regulated?

58

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by DSeid *

Ahh yes, of course. Any failures of gun control laws must OF COURSE be due to those terrible states which don’t have them, and not any problem with the laws themselves. And, although OF COURSE this is common sense, you wouldn’t happen to have any sort of evidence to back it up, would you?

Really? Why don’t you take this plan to the DEA so they can use it to get drugs off the street, they haven’t been successful in the 80 years or so that the war on some drugs has been waged. I’m also interested in how you would prevent people from manufacturing guns, since it can be done pretty easily with a home machining setup (and even more easily with ‘shop’ setups that aren’t exactly rare) - maybe add some cameras for everyone who owns the appropriate tools? Even before you start working on gun-banning, you might want to sell your plan to the INS as well as the DEA, since containers and trucks full of people manage to cross the border despite being illegal - whatever you’re going to do to stop guns from being smuggled in, I’m sure they would appreciate having it now. And, of course, there’s always theft from the factories producing guns for the ‘exempt from ban’ group (which generally includes the military, police, tax collectors, celebrities, politicians, and movie-makers).

The fact that GC types tend to have views like yours on banning firearms or classes of firearms is one of the factors that leads PG types to doubt that you’ve got some actual limit on what controls you support.

Ah yes, any facts on the actual effects of gun control are anathema to you. It seems pretty safe to rephrase the above to ‘We need more restrictions! Don’t try to show me what happens when we pass more gun control laws, just come up with some that work and don’t you dare advocate lossening a single one’.

I’ll ask again, though I already asked it in one of your drive-bys: does your use of the words ‘safe storage’ mean ‘not useable for self-defense’?

Except for those parts of the heritage dealing with defending yourself, of course.

59

This should be fun - which ones are those, exactly? And do bear in mind that 38 states have shall-issue concealed carry laws, so just saying ‘look, it’s so easy to hide’ doesn’t qualify as designed for criminal purposes.

60

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by happyheathen *

Oddly enough, the perpetrator of that particular crime had previous felony convictions and was caught about two years before Stockton with a firearm in his possession. Federal law provides a five-year sentence for being a felon in possession of a firearm, but no one bothered to prosecute him under that law. Had he been in jail, it’s rather unlikely he would have been able to shoot up a schoolyard. Rather tellingly, the Brady Bunch and other GC supporters used Stockton as an argument for banning evil-looking guns, despite the lack of evidence supporting such bans doing any good, and seem rather reluctant to cry out for prosecuting people under existing law, despite the fact that a prosecution pretty clearly would have stopped the incident. I think that says quite a bit about whether the real desire is ‘stopping crime’ or ‘banning guns’.

Any of them that were in production before 1994 or use the same magazine as another gun that was in production before 1994.

Barrels < 6" are pretty damn common, since it’s long even for open carry (the 1911, which the army used for over 70 years, has a less than 6" barrel, as do most guns carried by police).

Also, the ‘20+ rd mags’ comment is interesting - does that mean that you support allowing the federal ban on 11+ rd mags expire in 2004, since it’s more restrictive than you advocate?

BZZT. “High Capacity” magazines that were in California before the ban are still legal.

So, you advocate a ban on virtually all semi-automatic pistols currently in production?

In a free state, laws restricting the people are not passed without a good reason for the law. Thus, the burden of justification is on the person who wishes to pass a law banning something, not on the person who opposes the law.

Flash suppressors don’t do much to conceal someone’s location, they reduce the flash seen by the person firing. I’m sure you’ve heard of activities like hunting and target shooting where someone attempts to aim shots accurately.

I agree, crazies, especially those with previous felony convictions who were caught with a gun, should not be in circulation, it’s too bad the Brady Bunch and other groups of that ilk don’t agree with you. As far as firearms go? Well, if you want to prevent mass slaughter of schoolkids, do something about cars first. Mass ‘carings’ of kids (especially ones riding in schoolbuses) are so common that they don’t even make the national news.

Yeah, heaven forbid that ammunition with scary labels be sold! I mean, cheap surplus steel-core ammo must be cop-killers, even though normal 7.62mm ammo will penetrate any normal body armor without trouble.