As to the original question of the OP, I agree that this is a bill about cosmetics.
I would go a bit beyond that to say it’s also about psychology. It’s meant to provide some comfort to members of the general public who want to see fewer scary looking guns around.
I think it’s greatest value would be for a small of people with some kind of mental problems, who want to buy scary looking guns, just for that reason, to scare people or for some kind of thrill/shock value. No idea how many of these kind of people there are, but if they don’t buy a gun because they can’t get hold of a gun that fulfills their best gun fantasies, all the better.
I personally would be delighted if they could pass a bill that only restricts the capacity of magazines, which IMO is the only thing that might make a difference.
BFD! You’re arguing that a gallon of shit in 9 gallons of clean water doesn’t make 10 gallons of shit water.
You are wrong.
He has also voted for several severely anti-gun owner bills, including the last assault weapons ban. He also voted in 2004 to extend that ban!
He is no friend to lawful gun owners and can not be trusted to defend our Constitutional rights.
Probably not. The Va Tech shooter, who was as crazy as they get and evidently didn’t, uh, “plan” very far ahead, brought two pistols (which definitely did not have “high capacity magazines”). Swapping clips is easy and fast enough. Even speedloading revolvers takes seconds.
Actually, per the old AWB and the newly introduced one, he did. His Glock had a 15 round mag which was 50% more than the harmless:rolleyes: (per the antis) 10 round mag. But you are right about how easy it is to swap out a mag. Less than 3 seconds. The capacity is irrelevant to how much damage a truly motivated psycho can cause. The antis are either hiding this fact or, as I suspect, are completely ignorant of it!
Adam Lanza, although he had 30-bullet magazines, kept reloading when they were half-way empty, apparently because of the habit he developed playing video games where reloading often is the right tactic.
So - how exactly would reducing the number of bullets per magazine have helped?
It wouldn’t. The entire magazine cap thing is either borne of lies, ignorance, or both.
Whether he intended it to be or not, in law enforcement training what Lanza was doing is called a "tactical reload’, reloading even though your mag is not spent.
The NYS cap of 7 rounds is the amount the Colt .45 1911 (the sidearm of the U.S. Military for almost 75 years) mag takes. Any idea how much damage one can do with the old war horse? The antis are clueless!!!
Anyone who supports an assault weapon ban is a bad person. They are either an idiot who does not recognise that an assault weapon is functionally equivalent to a less scary looking weapon, or they are a corrupt asshole trying to take advantage of the former to advance another agenda.
I have no idea what you’re trying to say. You and others were scoffing at the idea that a limit on the capacity of magazines might make mass shootings less deadly. I have provided three examples when unarmed bystanders were able to stop shooters when they had to stop shooting to reload. There’s no way to be certain, but there’s certainly a good chance that if they had to stop shooting more often to reload that they might have been stopped sooner and killed fewer people. As it was, they were stopped before they were able to kill everyone they wanted to. Certainly they intended to kill more than the did – that’s the reason they were reloading in the first place.
So please stop insisting that magazine capacity is irrelevant. It clearly is not, because shooters have been stopped from continuing their sprees while changing magazines. I will grant that the odds are low that it will make a difference in any particular situation, but it clearly has in the past, and it might again in the future.
I’m a gun owner. I own a pump shotgun that’s my primary home defense weapon (nothing and I mean nothing will scare an intruder more than the soundsound of a shotgun being racked) and it comes in handy for the occasional rattlesnake that comes onto our property. My wife owns a automatic .22 pistol that she uses to target shoot and I own a .22 semi automatic that the proposed bill would be classified as an assault weapon. This rifle is used for target shooting and eliminating hordes of Taliban soda cans that occasionally invade or target range.
The problem I have with this ban is that it does absolutely zero to address the problems we are facing. It seems to me that a weapon is put on the list because it is scary looking, while others that have the same exact functionality are still legal. A great example is the .22 rifle I own. It is a Mossberg 715T. Semi automatic and available with 25 round magazine. It has a pistol grip, folding stock and barrel guard. In short everything that qualifies it to be banned. It looks like a M16, so even that makes it a “dangerous” weapon.
Here’s where this bill makes absolutely no sense. The 715T that I own and described above is nothing more than the Mossberg Plinkster rifle, a traditional target shooting rifle, with a plastic housing on it to make it look like an M16. When I say nothing more, it is the exact same rifle. The 715T would be banned, yet the Plinkster (with the optional ten round magazine) would not be. Keep in mind that you can at this time purchase a 25 round magazine for the Plinkster, but does that really matter? I can change a magazine and be ready to fire again in a few seconds. So, can someone explain to me how any of us would be safer if this bill passes and my 715T is banned? Anyone determined to cause a massacre can do exactly the same thing with the Plinkster, but they just won’t look as cool doing it. Did the politicians who authored this bill even put some thought into it? I swear that they don’t care a wit about doing something meaningful, but rather the goal is to look like they’re doing something meaningful.
Exactly the same gun, but one looks more dangerous than the other. But the"safer"looking one can do everything the other can. So by banning the assault version, what has been accomplished?
You might be asking, why I choose to purchase the 715 model instead of the Plinkster if they’re the same gun. The answer is simply style, I like the way it looks compared to the other. No different than buying the sport model of a car because it’s the one with the nice rims and spoiler.
On a personal note, I’m a member of the NRA, I’ve owned some sort of firearm all my life, getting my first shotgun for Christmas when I was 14. I don’t consider myself a gun nut and I certainly don’t dream of the day I’ll be able to use one of my firearms to defend myself. I certainly would if I need to, but I truly hope that day never comes. My family and I (along with most of our friends and neighbors) enjoy target shooting. We are just as sadden by the terrible violent events as the most rabid anti-gun person. However, making firearms unavailable to people like myself because a mentally unstable person does the unthinkable doesn’t seem like the answer. Somehow the answer lies in identifying and getting help for those among us that are mentally unstable. I truly believe that firearms made their acts easier, but I also think that if someone like this school shooter couldn’t have gotten a hold of a gun, he would have found a way to inflict damage. It might have been an explosive, it might have been gasoline and a match, but it would have been something. The real problem is the lack of intervention and we have got to find some way to address that.
I personally don’t think the “assault weapons” ban will pass, or that it would be extremely effective if it did - I think universal background checks and better mental healthcare, etc… are far more important in decreasing most gun violence. I also think that limiting high capacity magazines could have an effect.
I understand how banning guns based on cosmetics alone might seem like it won’t have a huge effect, but I don’t see how pro-gun people can say it won’t have any effect on gun violence and death. If I had to make an argument for the AWB, it would be the following:
I think that there are a lot of people who use style to choose what type of gun to buy, or even whether they buy a gun at all. Even if you only consider Law Abiding Gun Owners[sup]TM[/sup] and not criminals directly, I think the AWB could possibly have some effect because law-abiding people who are attracted to assault-type weapons might be buying more guns, or possibly even buying a gun in the first place, purely for style reasons. So then someone who wouldn’t otherwise get a gun, or who would otherwise have less guns, is putting more guns out there in their houses, cars, etc…
This contributes to the availability of guns in general and thus increases the likelihood they will be used for violence or death, even by law-abiding gun owners. This could be when they’re used unnecessarily (e.g. you shoot a potential threat who, if you didn’t have a gun, wouldn’t have been a threat anyways, or you shoot your teeneage son at 3am when you think it’s a burglar) or accidentally (e.g. shoot someone while cleaning your gun, or when you think it’s unloaded). It also makes it more likely that someone in your house will commit suicide by gun (which is more lethal than other methods). It also increases the availability of guns to be stolen by criminals when they break into your house or your car. So even though all of these things can still be done with guns that aren’t affected by the AWB, if the AWB decreases the number of gun purchases in total, then it will also decrease the number of these events.
The AWB could also decrease the number of guns in the hands of criminals or potential criminals. Even with universal background checks, I’ve heard (correct me if I’m wrong), that background checks only prevent purchases by felons (e.g. criminals with long misdemeanor histories can still buy guns), and the mentally ill who’ve been institutionalized (e.g. you could be really crazy, and even under medical treatment, but as long as you’ve never been locked up you can still get a gun). I think it’s very likely that criminals, or potential future criminals inclined to violence, are also attracted to guns on a basis of style. They want to look like the badasses in movies. Sure, even with the AWB your hard-core criminal can hurt people with a non-banned semi-auto or with a non-auto gun. But with the AWB there’d be less semi-auto’s floating around for your less-than-completely-hard-core criminals to have lying around all the time.
So if wannabe asshole Johnny can’t get a Really-Cool-Looking semi-auto gun, then they might not bother to buy a gun or have as many guns. Lots of potential future criminals would still get non-AW guns, but I think a reasonable argument can be made that less of them would. Then when Johnny graduates from shoplifting to mugging or break and enter, he would be less likely to have a gun with him. Or if he gets in an argument with someone else, he’d be less likely to have a gun on hand and escalate the argument into a gunfight.
I think that anyone determined to cause a massacre will do it anyways. But I think the greatest effect of the AWB would be more at decreasing the number of gun purchases in total due to people not buying (as many) guns just because they look cool. So the potential decrease in gun violence from the AWB wouldn’t be so much with rare unhinged spree killers - it would be from less unnessary or accidental deaths, suicides, thefts of guns by criminals, and making it less likely that potential garden-variety criminals would have less guns laying around.
Now, I’m not saying that the AWB with mostly “cosmetic” criteria would be the solution to gun violence, but I think it’s incorrect to say it would be completely useless. Personally, this Canadian thinks that potentially reducing the number of unnessarily and accidental gun deaths, gun suicides, gun thefts, and availability to criminals is a decent trade-off for not being able to buy a really cool looking gun. And if a law-abiding gun owner is only interested in target shooting or hunting, they still have access to guns that are useful for those purposes.