Peejay wrote:
Yes I meant semi-automatic weapons of course.
http://smartgunlaws.org/assault-weapons-policy-summary/
Assault weapons are a class of semi-automatic firearms that are designed to kill humans quickly and efficiently. the military features that clearly distinguish assault weapons from standard sporting firearms enable shooters to spray large amounts of ammunition quickly while retaining control of the weapons.
"Assault weapon" is a made up term of the gun control lobby, meant to exploit the confusion of the public concerning firearms, but don't take my word for it, Josh Sugarmann, executive director and founder of the Violence Policy Center directly admitted it: "Assault weapons' menacing looks, coupled with the public's confusion over fully-automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons --anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun-- can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons". "Assault Rifle" is actually a technical term referring to a select fire rifle chambered in an intermediate caliber and capable of accepting a detachable box magazine, but "assault weapons" are classified purely on cosmetics, not on any actual functionality.
Peejay wrote:
Assault weapons have been used in many high-profile shooting incidents, including the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, the 2012 Aurora, Colorado movie theater shooting and the 1999 Columbine High School massacre in that state, as well as the 1993 office shooting at the 101 California Street building in San Francisco.2 In fact, a review of 62 mass shootings between 1982 and 2012 by Mother Jones found that assault weapons were recovered in almost a quarter of them.3 A review of mass shootings between January 2009 and January 2013 by Mayors Against Illegal Guns found that incidents where assault weapons or large capacity ammunition magazines were used resulted in 135% more people shot and 57% more killed, compared to other mass shootings
One, you're using a bunch of
highly biased sources, but regardless, more people are killed in the US every year with blunt instruments than are killed with long guns of any type, of which "assault weapons" are but a tiny fraction. The main reason is practicality, as anything other than a handgun is difficult to conceal and inconvenient to keep handy, while murder is often an impulsive crime committed with whatever is at hand. Again, think about it for a moment; why would ordinary criminals use an impractical and expensive weapon when cheaper alternatives are available and more convenient? Yes, the occasional spree killer uses one, but those events are a drop in the bucket of our day to day crime, and even then it doesn't always work out, as James Holmes jammed his AR15 almost immediately during the Aurora shooting and had to transition to another weapon.
Peejay wrote:
1. Close loopholes in background checks for gun sales
Most criminals don't obtain there weapons from dealers.
Peejay wrote:
2.End the ban on federal funding for research into gun violence
https://reason.com/archives/1997/04/01/ ... -pot-shotsPeejay wrote:
3. Make gun trafficking a federal crime
I believe it alreay is, it's just not often enforced, and isn't really that much of an issue
Peejay wrote:
4. Expand the ban on sales to domestic violence offenders
Why? It's already a borderline unconstitutional retroactive law of questionable utility.
Peejay wrote:
5. Public places, campuses and corporations
Because no one ever gets shot in a "gun free zone"?
Peejay wrote:
6. Restore the ban on assault weapons
Again, why? It had no measurable impact on crime, and those guns are seldom used in crime.
Peejay wrote:
7. Regulate ammunition and magazines
Why and how? I own equipment to manufacture ammunition, as do millions of Americans, and magazines are simple sheet metal constructions, not to mention there are literally billions of them out there.
Peejay wrote:
8. Waiting periods, training and registration
Yet again, why? I've never seen anything correlating the first two with any reduction in crime or accidents, and the last is only good for confiscation, as every country that has ever adopted it can attest to. Even Canada had to scrap its long gun registry in the face of it being an expensive fiasco that didn't solve crime.
Peejay wrote:
I know that some of you know the ins and outs of these potential changes better than I do, but some of them seem eminently realistic and practical.
I am learning a lot here.
However I am also becoming more confident in my feelings that there really is a problem and that there is something curious and confusing about the lack of will to change the status quo.
As you can see from my response, there's a lot you don't know, and that colors the suggestions you're making. It's a source of endless frustration for me, people read a few articles and watch some movies and think they know everything about guns, when they're really a much more complicated subject, and those of us who do actually know what we're talking about are dismissed as "gun nuts" by the ignorant, emotional masses. I think Eugene Volokh had the best take on it, which I'm going to quote in full here because it's behind a paywall:
Quote:
After various highly publicized shootings, those of us who are skeptical about gun controls are often asked: So what are we suggesting should be done about the shootings? If we’re not suggesting gun controls (as opposed to proposals such as letting teachers or professors be armed, increasing concealed carry rights outside schools, providing school guards or trying to figure out, maintain and extend the remarkable fall in violent crime since the early 1990s) — the argument goes, we’re not taking gun tragedies seriously.
Now I generally don’t support the “don’t just stand there, do something” school of criminal law. When all the proposals seem likely not to work, or do more harm than good, implementing one of them for the sake of “doing something” strikes me as a mistake.
But let me offer a concrete analogy (recognizing that, as with all analogies, it’s analogous and not identical).
Every day, about 30 people are killed in the U.S. in gun homicides or gun accidents (not counting gun suicides or self-inflicted accidental shootings). And every day, likely about 30 people are killed in homicides where the killer was under the influence of alcohol, plus alcohol-related drunk driving accidents and alcohol-related accidents where the driver wasn’t drunk but the alcohol was likely a factor (again not including those who died in accidents caused by their own alcohol consumption). If you added in gun suicides on one side and those people whose alcohol consumption killed themselves on the other, the deaths would tilt much more on the side of alcohol use, but I generally like to segregate deaths of the user from deaths of others.
So what are we going to do about it? When are we going to ban alcohol? When are we going to institute more common-sense alcohol-control measures?
Well, we tried, and the conventional wisdom is that the cure was worse than the disease — which is why we went back to a system where alcohol is pretty freely available, despite the harm it causes (of which the deaths are only part). We now prohibit various kinds of reckless behavior while using alcohol. But we try to minimize the burden on responsible alcohol users by generally allowing alcohol purchase and possession, subject to fairly light regulations.
Some of the regulations, such as bans on sales to minors, are quite likely wise (at least as applied to minors; I express no opinion on bans on sales to 18- to 21-year-olds), though imperfect. Others, such as bans on Sunday alcohol sales, are pretty clearly unwise. Others are closer calls. Others that one might imagine — e.g., a requirement that adults living with children lock up their alcohol so the children can’t get to it — are, to my knowledge, never or almost never implemented, because they would unduly burden responsible adult drinkers.
But on balance the answer to “what are we going to do about alcohol-related deaths?” is “not much, other than trying to catch and punish alcohol abuse.” And if someone says, “you’re obviously not serious about preventing drunk driving and alcohol-related homicide, because you’re not proposing any new alcohol bans or alcohol sales restrictions,” our answer is generally (1) “just because there’s a problem out there doesn’t mean that we should impose new regulations that are likely ineffective and possibly counterproductive” and (2) “punish misuse of alcohol, rather than burdening law-abiding users.”
Now the likely pathologies of gun prohibition — or even of many regulations that fall short of prohibition — would probably differ in some ways from the likely pathologies of alcohol prohibition. I’ve talked of some of those likely pathologies elsewhere, but this post is not about that. Likewise, the social benefits of responsible gun use are different from the social benefits of responsible alcohol use, and the fraction of drinkers who abuse alcohol is likely higher than the fraction of gun owners who abuse guns.
But those are questions for another post. My point here is simply that the right answer to “so what are we going to do about it?,” even when the “it” is horrible, is sometimes “not that much,” at least beyond forbidding intentional or reckless misbehavior.
We should certainly consider proposals that aim to ameliorate the problem, and weigh their costs and benefits. But we should not presume that there’s somehow a moral imperative to Do Something. In fact, there’s a moral imperative not to do something that’s likely to make matters worse.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/vol ... d-alcohol/Professor Volokh also had this rather choice analysis:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/vol ... -gun-laws/
_________________
Your boos mean nothing, I've seen what makes you cheer.
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04 Oct 2015, 2:05 pm
