A Ruger Ranch Rifle wouldn’t have made him any less dead.
Might have. He’d have gotten off far fewer shots, at least, which could have made the difference.
The Ruger Mini 30 ranch rifle fires the exact same round and has 30 round magazines.
You left out one data point: how do the rates of fire compare?
So the guy fires a spray of automatic gunfire through a door because he heard a knock, he’d been robbed before and was afraid of being robbed again.
It was Halloween night. The porch light was on.
Uh, do robbers usually…knock?
Screw it. It’s senseless.
they are identical. unless this was a fully automatic AK, which seems unlikely since it doesn’t say it was. the rate of fire is however fast you can pull the trigger.
He didn’t fire full-auto, TV. That’s a common misconception about the AK-47; the semi-auto only variant that 99.9% of people who won “AKs” have has the exact same nomenclature as the full-auto military version.
Senseless? Yep.
Which is why I hope Mr. Quentin Patrick gets sentenced to life in a Pound-Me-In-The-Ass-With-A-Horse-Cock-Ten-Times-A-Day-Penitentiary.
Well, I meant “to blame” in the sense of “having violated the law or failed to properly enforce the law”.
If this guy was in fact not legally entitled to own a gun, then the local law enforcement and/or the retailer who sold him the gun would be to blame for allowing him to acquire one.
Yes, I agree that permissive laws can contribute to undesirable outcomes, but I think that’s different from being actually blameable.
Just for the record, I’m not opposed to private gun ownership by law-abiding responsible citizens in general, but I am opposed to the Second Amendment, and think it should be repealed. I think there’s a rational case to be made for allowing (and regulating) private ownership of guns, as of other dangerous objects, and for accepting an increased risk of negative consequences like this incident as a reasonable price to pay. (I might argue with some gun owners about what levels of regulation count as reasonable and what levels of risk count as acceptable, but that’s negotiating about details.) But I think enshrining the ownership of a particular type of dangerous object in the Constitution as a fundamental right is horseshit, and encourages irresponsible attitudes and behavior with regard to guns.
The woman’s name is “Pee”?
C’mon - really?
Ah, my mistake. Thanks for the catch, ExTank.
I love America.
Got nothing, do you? A 12 yr old is dead after trick-or-treating at the house of someone that thought they’d be safer with a fucking AK-47 lying around. The perfect gun to fanatzaise about while you jerk off. This wasn’t some accident that happened while hunting or target competition, no it was just some useless piece of humanity who made himself feel less inadequate because he owned the same gun that has been used to kill thousands of people around the world. And for some reason people feel that our fucking Constitution should guarantee halfwits like him to have almost unfettered access to guns. Probabaly easier for him to buy the gun than get a driver’s license. At least he’d have to pass a test showing he knows how to drive to get that.
Personally, I find I get much better wood when I fantasize about the FN FAL. YMMV.
How the Holy Hell does a 22-year ex-con have an AK-47? It’s only been illegal to import the bloody things his whole life!
(Checks Wikipedia) Oh, not a spray & pray, but a semi-auto version. Still a damn fool weapon to use for home security inside town.
I’m smelling troll. What are you pitting? Gun rights? Assholes? It’s not clear.
Do you know anything about guns? Do you think less people would have been hit with a 45 ACP? When you say shotgun do you mean 870 or 1100?
I have avoided the recent gun threads because, frankly, they have been fraught with tragedy, and it is difficult, if not impossible, to defend such actions.
I simply have this to say, and you can take it or leave it:
In the years that I have owned weapons, specifically handguns (I have four), I have never drawn them in anger, and I have never used them outside of a range. I sincerely believe that weapons are useful for defending myself and my loved ones.
However, the fact that guns are used to maim and murder people weighs heavily on my conscience. Nevertheless, in a country where weapons are Constitutionally protected, I find myself in a complicated position. I believe that guns are not the problem. I really do. They are nothing more than inanimate objects subject to the whims of their owners. Yet their owners are responsible for killing several thousand people every year.
So, what’s the balance here? Is there any solution? I don’t think that there is. It’s a tragic thing indeed that anybody should die at the hands of firearms. But what can we do about it? I ask that in all sincerity, so please don’t bring up things like the Assault Weapons Ban of 1994 (and perhaps 2009, hooray :rolleyes:), a singularly useless piece of legislation. If you’re going to criticize gun ownership and have some pan for controlling guns, please submit some workable proposal. Otherwise, these threads are pointless and achieve nothing, acting only to express an anger that we all feel.
Gun owners are not unreasonable. We simply have no faith in those that claim to support “reasonable” gun control, because it rarely turns out to be so. So make your pitch. Convince us.
Incidentally, the weapon used was not an AK-47, but that’s mere trivia. That people think it is is an example of why gun owners distrust gun-control advocates.
I’m pitting the American gun culture you moron. The culture in which people think it’s manly to own replicas of guns used by the military to make their meager, trailer-dwelling lives less pathetic. The culture in which people think it’s fun to post to message boards about what sort of gun is best to own in the 1 in 100,000 chance that an armed intruder bursts into their house.
Less than one?
And how would that make any difference to this pit thread.
Thanks for your honest and thought provoking post. I’m not sure what the answer is either. I remember growing up with pictures of rifles in the back of Boys Life magazine and shooting at Boy Scout camp. That was a really different time. Guns were for hunting and target shooting. I just don’t remember the survivalist mentality of needing guns to protect us against the govt. or people (other than the occasional store owner walking to the bank) seeing the need to carry a handgun for protection.
It sickens me to see all the replica military rifles being sold, because they are fashioned after weapns designed to kill people rather for hunting or target practice. I think this coarsens our society and devalues life.
I understand that things like the assault weapon ban are pointless and I wish that responsible gun owners such as yourself could sit down and help design laws that are workable and make sense. I’m not sure that we really need to have widespread availability of guns with large magazines, or the ability for someone to buy thousasnds of rounds of ammunition at once, but these are just thoughts off the top of my head. At the very least I’d like to see guns regulated to the same degree that cars and driving are.
But probably more important, we need to address the culture. What message was the father of the kid killed with the Uzi sending? What is it that makes people think that they need to have guns for safety? Or, if crime really is so rampant, let’s address that. I’d like to see anyone who robs using a gun to be locked up forever. You threaten to kill me for money? Sorry, you lose big time.
Actually, three people were injured in this shooting incident, although only one was killed.
That’s why I support the repeal of the Second Amendment, rather than a ban on gun ownership. I think that the toxic aspects of American gun culture derive more from the glamor attached to gun ownership as some kind of divinely-granted fundamental liberty than from fetishism about guns themselves.
Private gun ownership is a practical and personal matter, and pretending that it’s somehow vital to our precious national freedom blah blah blah does nothing except attract the crazies. Own a gun if you want one, and if you’re competent and responsible, but don’t flatter yourself that it automatically makes you an embattled patriot and defender of liberty.
Airman, I respect your evidently thoughtful and sincere post, and I would not support any legislation prohibiting your ownership of guns. I have to ask, though: if you have never used firearms for defending yourself in the years that you’ve owned them, why are you convinced that they’re useful for that purpose? Yes, I can see how they could be potentially useful for that purpose, but it seems pretty peripheral to what you actually use them for (and long may it remain so, natch).
The linked news article called it an AK-47, and AFAICT, that information came from the local police chief. I’m not sure where you are getting your information to the contrary, nor why you think that if there is an error about this, it somehow reflects badly on gun-control advocates.
An AK-47 is a select-fire weapon. What that means is that via a selector switch on the side of the weapon there is the option to fire the weapon in a full-automatic mode. Now, you may think that this is a semantic distinction, but these types of weapons are controlled by the National Firearms Act of 1934. They are also exceedingly rare and expensive as import of AK-47s has been forbidden since 1968.
What is in question here is a lookalike variant of an AK-47, capable of firing in semi-automatic mode only.
The reason why this is important is encapsulated in an infamous quote by Josh Sugarmann, head of the Violence Policy Center:
In addition, an AK-47 lookalike fires 7.62x39 ammunition, which is a very common caliber and is not at all limited to so-called “assault weapons”.
And therein lies the problem. Banning a weapon for its military-type appearance is silly on its face because there are countless others that use the same ammunition and perform exactly the same but do not share the menacing appearance of the AK-47.
The well is poisoned from the get-go because of people like Josh Sugarmann, Sarah Brady and Wayne LaPierre. The rhetoric has so polarized the two sides of the issue that there can scarcely be a reconciliation between the two.