What's the threshold for a firearm to be too dangerous?

I’m talking about armor piercing as in light armored vehicles, not body armor which, as you note, can be pierced (if we are talking about without the ceramic plates) by rifle caliber ammo.

If you want to make the argument that multi-shot firearms of any type are too dangerous, I’m not going to stop you.

My threshold is semi-auto. Bolt action, lever action and revolvers are a significant enough step down in firepower from semi-auto to lead me to believe they are viable options in society. I’d still like handguns to be tightly controlled, as they are highly portable weapons, but I can put a revolver in a separate class than semi autos.

Actually I’m pretty much in agreement with HurricaneDitka and XT: I lean way towards the libertarian end of gun ownership. Perhaps I should have posted this in IMHO rather than GD, but I’m interested simply to hear Dopers’ views on this. I liked iiandyiiii’s response.

I don’t think you can prevent the bad guys from having guns, so I want one, too. I’ll keep it under the bed, not carry it outside of my house.

Why do you want to outlaw my 20 gauge semi-auto shotgun? It’s got a 3 round magazine and unlike magazine fed semi autos it doesn’t have a fast way to reload.

I had a buddy in college who went out into the woods one summer and built and cabin and then blew it up with a grenade launcher. It this was in the youtube age he would have been famous and he had a lot of fun doing it. I don’t see any reason to outlaw his fun. He was properly licensed to own the M203 and did so in a way that didn’t hurt anyone or anything. I have been lucky enough to fire an Uzi and a Tommy gun and they were both a blast. I can understand why we don’t want everyone to own those things but I don’t see any reason to extend the types of guns that are on that registry.

I don’t know. The Virginia tech shooting was done with a 22 and 9mm pistol. He killed almost as many people as the new Zealand shooter did with a semi auto rifle and semi auto shotgun.

Neither one killed as many people as a terrorist did with a cargo truck in France.

Basically, I don’t know.

I’m sure you realize this already but the .22 and the 9mm are (both) semi automatic .

Right?

I’m on the less is more side. Less restriction to the law abiding folks that is.

Doesn’t a bigger magazine mean you can carry more ammo?

If your ammo belt or whatever you use to hold your magazines has slots for (say) five magazines it seems to me the longer magazines that hold 20 bullets doubles your ammo capacity from magazines that hold 10 bullets.

I think the people’s right to keep and bear arms can be satisfactorily ensured with bolt-action rifles, pump-action shotguns, and single-action revolvers.

I know hunters and shooting enthusiasts will say “what about…” but the OP asked for a dividing line, and that’s about as clear a line as I can define.

I understand guns. But a 22 pistol doesn’t have the same capacity for tissue damage as a 223 rifle (or whatever the NZ shooter was using).

Also the virginia tech shooter had 10 and 15 round magazines. I think the NZ shooter had 50+ round magazines. But the Virginia Tech shooter still killed 33 people. So all this talk of banning semi auto rifles and large capacity magazines wouldn’t have stopped the Virginia tech killer.

Neither one was as dangerous as a cargo truck.

My point with the shotgun is that he got off about 9-10 shots rapidly with a shotgun. Maybe with a pump shotgun he would’ve gotten much less off, with a single shot shotgun it would’ve been near useless for a massacre.

So to reiterate, I don’t know where the line is, or if we can just draw a line and say ‘these weapons are too dangerous, but these are ok’. Even the 1934 firearms act seems kind of arbitrary. Silencers, short barrel rifles and short barrel shotguns are not the problem. And fully automatic weapons probably aren’t much more lethal than semi auto rifles. If anything, a fully auto rifle probably depletes its ammo faster and requires more reloading, which makes the shooter more vulnerable.

I ‘guess’ if you wanted to stop massacres, the only guns people could own would be single shot shotguns, bolt action rifles and revolvers that hold 6 bullets or less. But even then, I’m sure you could kill a few dozen people if you wanted. A bolt action rifle could kill a lot from a high position.

What sort of incidents would you be hoping to prevent by allowing all weapons except the ones that can pierce armored cars?

As to the first question, no…of course not. If I have (3) 10 shot magazines that’s the same as (1) 30 shot magazine. Weight wise the weight of the bullets is a lot more than the weight of the magazines. That’s going to be the real limiting factor…having more magazines might be a bit more bulky, but it’s not all THAT much more bulky. It’s one of the primary flaws in the gun control argument wrt magazine size. That and the fact that, frankly, any idiot could just jury rig a large magazine with 10 minutes of work and some duct tape and a big spring. They are planning a mass shooting, so I doubt they are going to be all concerned with violating some magazine size statute after all.

As to the second part, well, again, this isn’t exactly an insurmountable issue. If your belt or whatever only holds 5 magazines, well…get a bigger belt. Or use a man purse. Or myriad other things (duct tape them to your shirt or staple them to your forehead). The limiting factor is the weight of the bullets, and in most cases (all really) the shooter doesn’t ever fire all the bullets and is sitting there with an empty gun and nothing to do in any case. Mostly they are caught or commit suicide with plenty of ammo left, even that idiot in Las Vegas who spent hours seemingly lugging boxes of ammo up to his room.

Unless and until semi-automatics are actually illegal, limiting magazine size will have either zero or a very limited effect while causing actual gun owners a lot of heartburn and, frankly, to think the real goal is a slippery slope ban, since it’s so stupid and obviously useless in preventing mass murders or even the regular type.

Go back and re-read for clarity…I didn’t say allow all weapons except those. Light armor piercing rounds aren’t only for armored cars, you know that means they will go through doors, cars, houses and probably the next door, car and house too…right? Sounds like that would be a threshold we should probably mitigate to me. YMMV of course. Same goes for the other things I wanted to put as a threshold that weren’t about armored cars that you seem to have missed.

Either large magazines actually are useful and serve a function, or they provide no benefit. Which is it? In my experience, a large magazine, and fewer reloads, means more shooting with less pausing.

Really? Either or? :stuck_out_tongue: In your experience? How much actual experience do you have? Because, frankly, if you are claiming that pausing is a major issue then I’m a bit skeptical. Is having 30 round clips convenient and requires less reloads than (3) 10 round clips? Of course. Will having (3) 10 round clips make any real difference in a mass shooting event? Maybe by a few seconds…maybe 10 whole seconds, if the person doing the shooting is particularly incompetent. On the other hand, that 30 round clip actually has a higher chance of jamming, so it’s probably a wash.

Seriously, it’s not an either or. They serve a function, are useful but aren’t really necessary to slaughter a lot of people if that’s what someone really wants to do. Some box cutters and coordination killed thousands after all for 9/11…and a few guys with knives managed to kill 100’s in China in one event. If you really want to kill a bunch of people, limiting the magazine size is going to really have zero effect on someone being able to do that. It’s one of the reasons why gun advocates really distrust the gun control crowd. Either the gun control folks are stupid, they are ignorant or they have some sort of over arching agenda in pushing for this. It has little to no practical effect except to make things harder for gun owners.
Anyway, I don’t want to hijack this into yet another stupid gun control thread where both sides talk past the other. I gave my threshold for a firearm to be too dangerous. Obviously, just being a firearm alone make them very dangerous, but I think adding armor piercing, incendiary and explosive rounds, or explosive firing grenade launchers or missile launchers really takes beyond that threshold, as does allowing really high caliber rounds or crew served weapons.

Yes, you also excluded weapons that require a team of people to move and fire. That matters a lot, I suppose.

What class of attacks to you seek to prevent, and which class of attacks do you seek to mitigate?

I talked about magazine capacity in this post here.

As it relates to this thread, mass shooters or those intent on doing harm have all the time in the world to prepare, to carry additional magazines. So either the law wont stop them, or they will have the ability to carry more in preparation for their wickedness. Contrast that with a person who needs to defend themselves - they are not going to carry a satchel full of magazines. They will have the weapon on them or easily accessible. They may carry a spare magazine. It’s important to have available the means necessary to defend against threats.

Given hit ratios, and the number of hits it typically takes to stop a threat, 10 rounds may not be sufficient.

The other night there was a typical street corner shooting here. Maybe a drug deal gone bad, maybe a holdup. The police counted 80 shell casings. Just stopping that kind of random gun violence would be a big step.

The OP was asking what the dividing line was, not what we could/should/would or whatever do to mitigate attacks. I think (IMHO and all) that the dividing line is the weapons and ammo types I mentioned. Crew served weapons were one of them, but the others were things like grenade launchers, high caliber weapons (.50 caliber sniper rifle in any flavor, or things that fire 20 or 30 millimeter rounds, anything with a high cyclic rate, incendiary rounds, armor piercing rounds, explosive rounds, anything that uses explosive shells such a the already mentioned grenade launcher or missile launcher or even explosive tipped ammo, etc). It’s what the OP is asking, and that’s my answer. I’m trying not to make this about gun control…again. We’ve had plenty of those, and obviously no one has changed their mind or shifted even a little bit in their stance, so there doesn’t seem much point in going over the same ground again. I don’t think that magazine size makes a gun more dangerous…or even ‘too dangerous’. I would concede that the semi-automatic action or any repeating firearm could be a viable answer, depending on the definitions (i.e. ANY gun could be considered ‘too dangerous’).

I was sort of operating on the assumption that the dividing line would be based on some sort of reasoning or another. As noted any gun is “too dangerous” if “too dangerous” means “can kill somebody”. Which means that we’re either saying that any gun is too dangerous, that no gun is too dangerous, or that there’s some circumstance or outcome more nuanced than “can kill somebody” that the line would be based on. One based on damage to property, maybe? Or a cap on maximum allowable awesomeness a single person may wield?