6000 rounds of ammunition does not mean 6000 gunshot victims, or even 100; I don’t know why this is always touted as so sinister. Most firearms enthusiasts will tell you that buying 3000 rounds of ammo simply means that someone stocked up on a year’s worth of target practice ammo at a bulk discount rate. And the fact is that drum magazines, however impressive they might look, aren’t as practical as simply having 20 or 30 round removable magazines that can be quickly changed; most militaries haven’t used drum magazines since WW2. And in fact Holmes’s drum magazine jammed, leaving him to finish shooting with an ordinary shotgun and pistol.
It’s closer to a fusion of Hinduism and Judaism. For example, Sikhism rejects self-denial and evangelism, among other things common in Christian tradition.
Actually, according to that list, we’re not even in the top 40 and their are a number of countries, such as France, Belgium, and the Scandanavian countries have far tighter gun control laws.
This is just silliness, from someone who has never bought a gun or ammo. Online sales are typically for large quantities because shipping ends up eating up any savings unless you get a case-lot discount. The need to buy large amounts at once is more of a bug than a feature of buying ammo on-line: You have to come up with a large chunk of change. Bulk-pack shotgun shells are cheaper to buy at Walmart when shipping is considered.
Many of the places I have bought on-line require a fax or scan of my driver’s license, in addition to a valid credit card. The brick and mortar places used to just look at it, but mostly don’t even bother now that I have some grey in my beard. I can even pay cash and leave no paper trail if I wanted to carry cash.
Please provide a cite showing any evidence that Holmes was “spooked”. I myself have not joined a shooting range because the orientation meetings were infrequent, and inconvenient for me to make. It is just a briefing on range safety rules, not a high-stakes interview. Intimidation has nothing to do with it. There is no way to use the range without showing up in person anyway. Practicing sustained rapid fire is going to attract a lot more adverse attention than being a little nervous at a safety briefing. He supplied his name, phone number, and likely his address on that application. The background check forms he filled out to buy his guns got all his info and required a government ID, and got phoned in to the FBI. ..but the prospect of having to attend a a range safety briefing “spooked” him? Defies all reason, that does.
“Thousands of rounds of ammo” sounds scary to some, but is a non-issue. Perfectly reasonable, sane, responsible people can go through thousands of rounds of ammo per year, and often want to go shooting on Sunday, when the sporting-goods store is closed, or head out early before it opens. The spree shooters typically shoot a few tens of rounds. About what, or even less than is needed to sight in a new gun and find out what ammo it shoots most accurately and reliably. WAY less than is needed to become proficient in using a handgun, and just what you’d need for a quick trip to the range to maintain proficiency. Walmart sells .22 ammo in 500 rd. single boxes, and shotgun shells in 100rd. boxes. Ammo is heavy and bulky. It is such a problem that post-WWII armies have moved to mostly lower powered weapons to reduce the weight and bulk of the ammo their soldiers have to carry. No matter how many rounds are in his closet or attic, no spree shooter is going to have more than a couple hundred rounds available at his crime site, and that could be obtained with a few trips to different stores even under the most ludicrous ammo sales restrictions I have heard proposed.
As has been mentioned, very high capacity magazines are range toys. Police and Military don’t use them because they reduce reliability. If a spree shooter uses one, the odds are as good as not that it will jam and reduce the carnage. Even when the work, they encourage non-aimed rapid fire which likely reduces the body count. Spraying lead into a dense crowd is going to wound a lot of people, but carefully putting center-of-mass shots into one victim at a time is going to kill many more in the same amount of time. Rapid fire is used by the military to deny the enemy the opportunity to shoot back…it isn’t the best way to make dead bad guys. There have been some notorious incidents where police officers emptied their guns (in one case, even reloading) and hit their target with fewer than 5% of the shots. “Firepower” might as well be called “noise power” for all the good it does toward putting lead into the target.
Maybe not:
It’s hard to know why he did not follow up on his initial email to the owner of the gun club, but that is one possible reason. After he sent the email, he was told he’d have to attend a mandatory orientation. The gun club owner left several messages and Holmes never followed up. It seems sensible to me that he didn’t want to have to deal with another person who might have been put off by his bizarre behavior (after hearing Holmes’ answering machine message, the gun club owner told his staff to inform him if Holmes ever showed up in person).
Just sent to my U.S. senators and Congresswoman:
I urge you to back stronger Federal restrictions on firearms.
Hardly a week goes by that there isn’t a gun massacre somewhere in our country. Recent mass shootings at a movie theater in Colorado and a Sikh temple in Wisconsin have again underlined the need for a more sensible gun policy. There is no reason why anyone needs, for instance, to be able to fire thirty bullets in a matter of seconds, as happened in the shooting which killed six and wounded thirteen others, including Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, in Arizona last year. The shooter was only stopped because he paused to reload.
The National Institutes of Health have designated firearms injuries and deaths a major public health crisis. We have far more shootings per capita than any other western industrialized nation. This is unworthy of a great republic; it cannot be what the Framers had in mind when they wrote in the Second Amendment of a “well regulated militia.” We are awash in guns, but can still take some smart, common-sense steps towards reducing gun crime. Now is the time. Assault weapons and large ammunition magazines must be banned; the mentally ill, criminals and terrorism suspects must not be able to buy guns and ammunition; the gun show background-check loophole must, at long last, be closed.
I hope you’ll lead the way in seeing that firearms violence is greatly reduced, if not eradicated, in the United States. We must do all we can to stop this senseless carnage.
Thank you for your consideration. I look forward to your reply.
Very truly yours,
Hopefully they will file that in the circular file folder…
(‘Hardly a week goes by that there isn’t a gun massacre somewhere in our country.’?? 
What a load of horseshit)
I don’t intent to pick on Kevbo, who may or may not be an NRA member. Nevertheless this response reminds me of the knee-jerk NRA-member reaction.
First, as I stated before, I personally own guns and have used them on a range in the past six months. I also have bought ammo before–admittedly, not via the internet (always in person) and never in the quantities listed; I’d estimate I’ve bought 1000 rounds in the past year, all for a pair of .22’s I own (I do have a .30-06, but haven’t shot it in a while). Why is it that when someone starts discussing limitations on guns and ammo, the pushback never assumes that a sportsman or hunter can feel this way, that the criticism will only come from someone who hates/fears/has never shot guns?
Second, I said that “Regulating large (or not so large) sales of ammunition via the Internet” might have averted this tragedy. I didn’t say “ban”, but again this is the conclusion to which those who have been brainwashed by the NRA immediately jump. It’s the reason the senator from Wisconsin used the NRA dog-whistle “restrict our freedom”, to ensure its membership gave the usual Pavlovian response to any discussion of guns in the wake of yet another gun-related tragedy.
Third, I agree that just because he bought 6000 rounds of ammo doesn’t mean Holmes (or any mass-shooter) could have used it all in his crime. But the fact that he did buy it–along with perhaps other patterns in his behavior, as I simply don’t know that much about the details–is something that might have tipped someone off to check him out (a concern similar to what the gun-range owner might have felt). In fact, anything that made Holmes’ activities more public in the weeks/months prior to the tragedy would have probably been a good thing.
Notice the distinction: I don’t think banning the sale of ammo over the Internet would have necessarily averted the tragedy, and I agree the infringement on personal rights would almost certainly outweigh the potential benefit (though, unlike the NRA, I’m willing to discuss it). But, say, requiring something like an FOID card (I live in Illinois) to purchase ammo over the Internet is probably a restriction/regulation I could get behind.
Finally, I refuse to believe that the price of general gun ownership in the US has to be as high as it is, which is essentially what the NRA is arguing. Their solution–surprise, surprise–is to simply push for more guns, which I believe is a result of their capture by a firearms industry whose primary goal is, y’know, to sell more guns and ammo. Feeding the paranoia of their membership isn’t based in reality, it’s simply to stoke demand for their product.
If you are aware of drive by shootings its not whatsoever horseshit. You’re just an extremist without any concern for the costs of gun overabundance in our society. Not even the majority of the NRA membership agrees with you.
Gun deaths in US are almost tied or this year will exceed automobile accident deaths yet the NRA leadership will not even allow publicly funded studies to find out what measures we could take would reduce gun deaths.
It’s certainly been fantastic for gun sales. No matter how few steps Obama and the Democrats take on gun control (his only significant action to this point has been relaxing the rules on guns in national parks), they’re always able to goose sales by saying the Democrats are on point of coming for everybody’s guns. At this stage they can’t even point to real events and have to make up stories about what’s going to happen if Obama gets re-elected.
[QUOTE=Untoward_Parable]
you are aware of drive by shootings its not whatsoever horseshit. You’re just an extremist without any concern for the costs of gun overabundance in our society. Not even the majority of the NRA membership agrees with you.
[/QUOTE]
Oh good…should be no problem for you to then supply some actual cited data that there have been an increase in the number of ‘gun massacres’ in the US then, right? Feel free. If you can, THEN you can call me ‘an extremist without any concern for the cost of gun overabundance in our society’. Otherwise, it’s a load of horseshit.
Unless you are counting suicides and accidents in the ‘gun massacre’ thingy, your point is bullshit. Or, let’s see a cite, ehe? Also, as I’ve asked repeatedly, show me some fucking data that in a changing regulatory environment such as we’ve had for the last 30 or so years that gun violence has gone up in the US…otherwise, again, claiming we need more regulation is a bullshit point that has no basis in reality.
And, just for the record, I’m not an NRA member, I don’t own a gun, nor am I a gun fanatic. I also am not opposed to regulation or registration of firearms. But these knee jerking reactions and horseshit, over the top hyperbole about ‘a week goes by that there isn’t a gun massacre somewhere in our country’ are just ridiculous. Like the whole ‘automatic pistol’ and ‘assault-style weapons’ bullshit.
This list from the Brady Campaign chronicles shooting incidents in the US since 2005 where 3 or more persons were injured or killed. I haven’t read it completely (it’s 62 pages long, and I for one just get numb and depressed reading one senseless tragedty after another), but they list 24 such incidents in 2012.
So, 3 or more = ‘a gun massacre’…and, looking it over (just skimming it), even using that obviously cherry picked criteria, it’s still not exactly a weekly occurrence. Also, I’m not seeing that the level of violence has increased even since 2005.
Well, since you gave a cite from 2005, a quick Google search shows that it has slowly dropped from over 10,000 murders by gun in the US per year in 2005 to 8,775 in 2010 (far below the number of automobile deaths per year, btw Untoward_Parable, which is over 40,000). Granted, much of the commentary in this article (it’s from the Guardian) is puzzlement, but the stats are there anyway. I love this part:
Even leaving out firearms, you are looking at over 4000 murders with other types of weapons each year in the US.
Divide and conquer has been an acknowledged tactic of groups promoting gun control: Don’t mess with “sportsman’s” guns, just make “reasonable” regulations against items that nobody needs to have. They successfully used it to pass the Assault Weapon Ban. (AWB) Once the evil black rifles were taken care of, they moved to the next “unreasonable” category of guns.
There is in fact no clear line as to what is reasonable, and what is not reasonable. The anti-gun side has repeatedly demonstrated that they consider many weapons unreasonable based on purely cosmetic grounds. Each time they are successful at having one thing declared unreasonable, the goal posts are moved.
The current rhetoric is focused on these criminals having thousands, or in some cases just hundreds of rounds of ammunition. Like The Rainman’s “About a hundred dollars” most non-shooters have no experience upon which to decide if that is a reasonable amount of ammo or not, but it sure sounds like a lot when the bubble headed bleached-blond says it breathlessly on the 5 o’clock news report. To this is added the “he just bought it on the internet” boogie man. The facts are that a few thousand rounds of ammo isn’t really a lot, and buying it over the internet is actually harder than buying it at a bricks and mortar store, at least outside of a handful of states I choose not to have experience with.
People buy over the internet to get slightly better pricing on case lots of common ammo, or oddball calibers. Just try finding 7.65 Argentine Mouser at your local sporting goods store. (that is in fact the last caliber I bought over the internet.) The knee jerk is that “solving” the non-problem of internet ammo sales will certainly make shooting more expensive, and may make certain orphan caliber guns impossible to obtain ammo for…and this would be done in the name of possibly preventing some criminal activity for which there is no real link to the crime in question…all because “Thousands of rounds” sounds like a big number to many people.
Look at the AWB for reference. No significant drop in crime when it went into effect, no big surge when it expired. (despite a huge surge in sales) The murder rate just continued on it’s gradual downward trend. Yet that ban energized the NRA and conservatives. It is no stretch to think that maybe a thousand voters in Florida might have been swayed. Without the AWB, it would have been up to President Al Gore to invade Iraq or not. I really think there is a credible chain of causality that the Assault Weapons Ban cost over 5000 American lives, and 10’s of thousands of Iraqi lives.
Yes I am a gun owner. No I don’t vote for republicans. ever. I don’t want liberals and democrats to take up this election-loser of an issue and give those evil fuckers another shot at screwing up this country even worse than W did.
Can you provide any empirical data that shows that restricting legal access to firearms by law abiding individuals has reduced violent crime in any place in the world?
Or even easier, can you make a real correlation with empirical data that links the number of firearms and the number of violent crimes?
Outlawing recreational drugs and booze seemed “logical” but those attempts were complete failures.
They won’t. It can’t have escaped your notice that Obama has spent three years avoiding the hell out of this issue for just this reason. Maybe he made some generic comment about it after the Aurora shooting, but there’s no way any gun control legislation will get through Congress in 2012, and with Republicans likely to hold the House through 2014, it won’t happen then either. It’s far from my top legislative priority, for that matter. That being said, there’s no reason the discussion has to be dominated by the NRA, whose arguments are “everybody should be able to have as many guns of any type as they want with few or no questions asked” and “don’t bother passing gun control laws since they won’t work.” To that you’re adding “There is in fact no clear line as to what is reasonable.” That doesn’t mean it can’t be defined, of course - just that people would have to come together and create a consensus. There’s no reason that can’t happen. It just doesn’t, largely because Second Amendment literalists are exceptionally good at employing scare tactics and rallying their base.
Well one they weren’t complete failures. Two regulating drugs and alcohol has been pretty effective.
Very few people are advocating for outlawing guns. Most people think we should be regulating them.
I fail to see why we need guns to have less restrictions on their sale then that of alcohol.
we don’t.
Have to be 21 to buy a gun, do you? Are minors not allowed in stores that sell guns?