Is the gun semi automatic or not?
So you flaunt your willingness to break the law while contemplating new laws on otherwise law abiding folks. A very classy move I must say.
By your statement, I am guessing that you do have a beef with it actually. If you want to open a thread questioning hunters and what they do, feel free. I can assure you however that I do not like to see anything that I hunt suffer needlessly.
Exactly. I can guarantee that I could get off a second shot just as quick with my Fox Sterlingworth as I could with a semiauto Benelli.
The speed in which a followup shot is available is determined by the action.
The number of bullets one can fire in a given amount of time is determined by how many will fit in the magazine.
To which are you complaining about? Or is it both? Or guns in general?
No reply to me, Burton?
Well, to start with, revolver action is impractical in a rifle. The higher pressure makes the poorer seal an issue.
Secondly, the need not to reload means that you will not have to move when shooting. Thus, you can shoot five or six things without having to shift your aim. Reloading generally requires movement, which disrupts a sight picture.
Thirdly, what delay between shots would you find appropriate? Ten seconds? A minute? How would you enforce this in a reliable manner?
Semi-automatic weapons operate by making one bullet reload the next. They fire as fast as they do because it is simplest and easiest to do so.
Do you actually know anything about guns?
Both Annie-Xmas and Diogenes have alluded to it, but I don’t think anyone’s taken explicit account of population differences in this thread.
For example, Canada has about 30 million people, and the US about 300 million.
Now, just off the top of my head, I can think of three “mass shootings” in Canada in about the last 15 or so years (Ecole Polytechnique, Concordia, and, most recently, Dawson College).
So, three “mass shootings” for Canada. Everything else being equal, that, in some sense, should translate into 30 “mass shootings” in the US over the same period.
Have there been 30 incidents like this in the US since 1990? My WAG is that is a fair approximation to reality.
The point of all this, of course, is that the US isn’t too special in this regard.
Yeah but I do not think you’d get a third shot off as fast.
This sounds more a case of civil war or at least living in an area with some kind of “war” whatever you want to call it. Sounds like something that happened in Rwanda although admittedly tribal tensions exist many places and such atrocities are too common.
Presumably the attackers you described saw the family as an “enemy” and while horrific it is not in the same vein as this thread where some dude just snapped for some reason and took out 30 strangers.
Maybe we should ban cars then. You (and everyone else in this thread) are many times more likely to be killed in one or by one than you are by some maniac with a gun. And you are more likely to be killed by someone who ‘rarely adhere to’ the speed limit, or drives while intoxicated, or is talking on a cell phone, or otherwise distracted in some way or other…
People are really REALLY bad at risk assessment. Were I to guess, more people die of falling off ladders in the US than are killed by maniacs with guns a la the mass shooting cited by the OP. And a hell of a lot more people are killed simply driving their cars about than are murdered by guns in the US on a yearly basis
As to WHY these things ‘only’ happen in the US, as others have said, they don’t…they just happen more frequently here than elsewhere. Why? Well, again, as others have said, we have larger populations and we have greater access to guns…so of course, by simple probability, we are going to have more deaths by shootings, and more mass shootings. I’m guessing (just a guess mind you), that we ALSO have more deaths by car accidents than most other countries…for pretty much the same reason (i.e. we have larger populations and more cars).
Why this kind of thing always sets off to gun control crowd is a mystery to me (ok, its really not 
)…its like folks who freak out whenever there is a plane crash.
-XT
Do know much about guns? No. I’ve fired a few here and there even did well in marksmanship in scouts many years ago with a bolt action .22.
In other words its about killing more efficiently.
I don’t have any ethical issues with hunting. However I find killing personally repugnant so I’ve never had an interest in it. I have no desire to discuss it as a seprate issue. It only comes up as part of our obession with guns and violence. Which is why I believe these kind of killings things are becoming commonplace.
Just because my getting killed in a car accident is more likely does not mean I want to add needlessly to my risk by having some psycho decide to vent his frsutration on me with a gun.
Getting into a car is a risk I assume by my own choice and with good driving and awareness I can have some control over my risks. I have no choice or control over a guy walking into wherever I am and start shooting.
And when you start down the path of saying it is only a relatively few number of people in the greater scheme of things exactly where do you draw the line? 10,000 gun deaths? 100,000? 1,000,000?
Latest from NPR website:
So an argument could be made that he’s lived here long enough to catch the gun cooties. Unless, of course, the information changes again.
Not that I’m making the argument - this is one of those huge, sad issues that I can’t stretch my mind to fit around.
I want a flamethrower to attach to the back of my car for really awesome burnouts.
No, really, it’s a sport, it started by lighting gas fumes out of the exhaust in the 50s… Makes about as much sense as low-riders.
So ultimately, you feel the way you do, because that’s how you feel. No logic or stats or anything really backs up your positions.
Guns = bad
Hunting = bad
Mean looking guns that shoot too fast = bad
Get rid of guns = good
No idea of what you are talking about = doesn’t matter
Does that sum it up?
A gun is a tool for killing things. Yes or no?
So what if it is? Why not make the killing of some things illegal, the killing of other things regulated, the shooting of some inanimate objects illegal, the shooting of some others subject to certain rules, and leave the shooting of other things alone?
Seems sensible to me, so much so that it is hardly debated by most reasonable people in my acquaintance.
Your problem is that you are approaching things from the gun side, which isn’t really warranted. After all, my grandfather at one time would go hunting totally unsupervised with guns not much different than those that cause significant anxiety in some quarters today, and he did it at the age of nine and ten.
Now, times were different then, and my kids will not be doing that. When they shoot at that age, they will be supervised. But the issue isn’t the guns, it is the nefarious purposes some people put them to. My grandfather could be trusted with a gun. There are kids the same age in my neighborhood I wouldn’t trust with a stick.
I said before that trying to use this tragedy to reinforce your political leanings was a mistake. That’s true of both the gun control advocates and the gun rights advocates both. College campuses, after all, aren’t a place you’ll find a lot of CCL holders, even if they could carry on campus.
I think it is a misguided argument on both sides, frankly, and stems from an understandable desire to make sense of something senseless.
There’s something to that I guess. My daughter went to VT and this has upset me more than it would otherwise perhaps.
Well, were I Amish, I’d say you were needlessly getting killed by that car. The point of course being that to YOU perhaps guns are useless or needless objects…however, others would disagree with you.
And of course, the ultimate point is that, though sensational, the odds of anyone being killed in such a mass rampage are vanishingly small. So, people are (once again) getting all worked up about something that is statistically pretty improbable. Worrying about how their teeth look while smoking that 3rd pack a day, so to speak…
:dubious: You have some kind of mystical control over someone who is driving drunk? Or someone who is having a road rage episode? Or bad weather conditions? Really? Thats news to me.
You have the ILLUSION of control only…or to put it another way, if I use proper gun safety procedures, observe range safety, etc, I can reasonably be assured of my own safety around firearms…as long as I don’t factor in someone else fucking things up. Same as with the car.
Let me ask you not for statistics but just off the top of your head…are more people killed yearly in the US through drunk drivers or through firearms?
You don’t…and I don’t. Society weighs the risks for any given action and decides whats acceptable risk. So, for instance, we continue to eat foods saturated in fat (and die at alarming rates due to this) while wringing our hands in threads like this about the (spectacular and tragic) deaths of a few people. IOW we are worried flying (terrorists and accidents and all…oh my!) while driving to work using our cell phone while eating that third egg McMuffin with extra fat…
-XT
“are more people killed yearly in the US through drunk drivers or through firearms?”
Firearms, more than twice as many.
Fair enough…feel free to cite that of course. I assume you will exclude accidental firearms deaths/injuries…or include accidents not related to drinking in your death/injuries statistics due to automobiles. I am interested in seeing the cites as I’ve always heard that deaths/injuries due to accidents involving automobiles are something like an order of magnitude higher than those due to firearms…so I will learn something new today.
-XT