Gun control anyone (again)

[LorenS]

Re: Gun control anyone (again)

I still don't understand why an average citizen may need an assault rifle? a handgun - yes, but a high capacity automatic rifle???

You do realize the capacity of most semi auto/ full auto guns is not fixed? Built in magazines have been abandoned, therefore the capacity of the gun is arbitrary. The weapon and the magazine capacity are therefore separate discussions.

Do you understand that automatic rifles require a $200 tax stamp, the signature of you local police chief a background check and costs start around $15,000?

Do you understand that most handguns are "high capacity" by the same mechanism as a rifle?

Do you understand that due to much superior ergonomics and basic physics you are likely to successfully end a threat much faster and with less risk of injuring other people with a rifle?

Aside from portability there is absolutely no advantage to a handgun. The great grandaddy of the "assault rifle" was the M-1 Carbine. It was developed because the .45 1911 handgun was so difficult for troops to use.

Basically, it boils down to this: When you NEED a gun, you really need the absolute best, and that is a rifle. You can't miss fast enough to win and a rifle ups your hit ratio dramatically. Most people don't like leaving loaded guns around the house, hence the desire to load a magazine and keep it available for rapid deployment into a rifle.

The 10 round vs xx round debate is stupid. Even our cops like to have a few bullets left over. It's stupid to plan on running out.

[lektrode]

Re: Gun control anyone (again)

I wonder if anyone not drunk on Democrat Kool-Aid considered Obama a scholar even before he became president. I most certainly did not think him a very intelligent person although I did believe (and still believe) he was a better candidate than McCain. As for agreeing to enforce the laws of the land and so on, it was 100% clear in the early part of his first term that he was going to renege on *all* of his meaningful, publicly-made promises to the general populace to keep his meaningful, privately-made promises to the rich and connected.

I have a difficult time deciding who is worse: George W. Bush or the current turkey-in-chief.

In light of what has happened in the U.S. during Obama's terms of office, though, I don't think he's going to get his stupid gun control laws through anything other than executive order.

+100
and that he was only marginally 'better' than the other 2 is beside the point

but methinks thats just what his/their grand scheme is:
wait til the final days/weeks of his reign of terror/corruption and THEN ram thru all sorts of stuff that he - like.. even when they had FULL VETO-PROOF MARGINS OF CONTROL in 09-10 - wernt able to jam thru (like his first run at gun control)

methinks the plan is to take away the guns before they move to ban cash...

[vt]

Re: Gun control anyone (again)

Recent Supreme Court non review of lower court decision has important implications:

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/...intact-n475421

[shiny!]

Re: Gun control anyone (again)

I still don't understand why an average citizen may need an assault rifle? a handgun - yes, but a high capacity automatic rifle???

Automatic rifles aka machine guns have been illegal for civilians to own since the 1930's. The only time you see them are in the movies because Hollywood studios have permits for them. So people see full auto machine guns spraying bullets in the movies and think, "there oughta be a law!"

Semi-automatic weapons fire one round per trigger pull, just like many hunting rifles. "Assault rifle" is a political term, literally coined by politicians, to describe "scary-looking" semi-automatics with a plastic stock.

[vt]

Re: Gun control anyone (again)

How does a man who entered the White House vowing to restore science to its proper place tell us that gun control is the answer to terrorism?

After all, California already has strict gun control, as does France, which just had its second terrorist massacre this year. Not to mention that the one time when terrorists with assault rifles and body armor were foiled, it was because an off-duty traffic cop in Garland, Texas, was carrying a gun—and used it to shoot the two heavily armed Islamists before they could kill anyone.
Or that “common sense gun control” would have done nothing to stop Richard Reid (the unsuccessful shoe-bomber); the Tsarnaev brothers in Boston (pressure cookers) or the 9/11 hijackers (box-cutters). Maybe the president should be demanding common sense pressure-cooker control.

Yet while the critiques of the president’s antigun pitch are correct, they are also beside the point. Because liberal calls for gun control aren’t about keeping guns from bad guys. It’s what you talk about so you don’t have to talk about the reality of Islamist terror. And focusing on the weaponry is part of a liberal argument that dates to the Cold War, when calls for arms control were likewise used to avoid addressing the ugly reality of communism.

Understand this, and you understand why Senate Democrats reacted to San Bernardino by putting forth antigun legislation. Why the New York Times ran a gun control editorial on its front page, and the Daily News used its own cover to feature the National Rifle Association’s Wayne LaPierre underneath San Bernardino killer Syed Farook—labeling them both terrorists. And why President Obama used Sunday night’s address to whine about those resisting his call for gun measures that would not have stopped any of the shooters.

Put simply, today’s liberalism cannot deal with the reality of evil. So liberals inveigh against the instruments the evil use rather than the evil that motivates them.
Not that there aren’t measures society can embrace to keep the innocent from being shot and killed. The best example may be New York City from 2002-13, during Ray Kelly’s last stint as police commissioner, when the NYPD was bringing the murder rate to record lows through America’s most effective gun-control program: stop-and-frisk.

This was gun control for bad guys, under the theory that when you take guns away from bad people—or at least make them afraid to carry guns on the street—you reduce shootings. But it was savaged by liberals. Because they don’t want just the bad guys’ guns. They want yours.

So they demonize guns while fighting approaches that try to identify threats, whether from mentally ill individuals such as Adam Lanza, who went on a murderous rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, or terrorists such as Syed Farook and his wife,Tashfeen Malik. Surely the key to distinguishing between the millions of law-abiding Muslims and those who mean us harm is intelligence.

Nevertheless, the urge to blame the weapon has deep liberal roots. It was particularly pronounced in the latter years of the Cold War when Ronald Reagan was president.
Even as Reagan was applying the pressure that would ultimately bring down the Berlin Wall in 1989—from arming the Afghan resistance to supporting Poland’s Solidarity movement to rebuilding America’s defenses—liberals derided him as a warmonger. Two things especially irked them: He’d called the U.S.S.R. the Evil Empire, and he was skeptical about arms control for the sake of arms control.

So when the Gipper walked away from the 1986 Reykjavik summit because Mikhail Gorbachev insisted his price for a nukes deal was the end of missile defense, Reagan was derided as a dunce. But his decision proved one of his finest moments: Scarcely a year later the Soviets caved and Mr. Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.

Bad regimes are like bad guys in this respect. They’ll take a deal they know has no teeth. But they will accept a genuine arms reduction only when the good guys put them in a position where they have little or no choice.

This helps explain why, for example, Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi turned over his entire nuclear program to George W. Bush—and why the Iranians happily agreed to a deal with President Obama that puts them on the path to a bomb.

Meanwhile, we’ve just endured what may be the first successful ISIS-inspired attack on the homeland. And like her former boss, Hillary Clinton is demanding the government “take action now” on guns.

Back and forth it goes. Instead of debating the antiterror policy of the past seven years—the wisdom of ending the National Security Agency’s metadata program, whether ISIS can be knocked out without any ground troops, how the lack of nerve on Syria fed this mess, or whether Islamist terror can be defeated so long as our leaders refuse to call it by its rightful name—we’re all arguing over gun control.

Then again, if you were Mr. Obama or Mrs. Clinton, isn’t this the debate you’d prefer?

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-liberal-theology-of-gun-control-1449533861

[Woodsman]

Re: Gun control anyone (again)

How does a man who entered the White House vowing to restore science to its proper place tell us that gun control is the answer to terrorism?

Because it's all they have. They know it's a loser but the base loves it and it's an easy way to make Republicans look stupid and evil when emotions are raw.

Democrats have no intention of addressing the causes of terrorism or slowing down in the least in reaping those many benefits its effects provide the state, its agents and owners. And neither do Republicans. Or haven't we noticed the remarkable continuity and commitment to "stay the course" between the Bush and Obama administrations' terrorist incubation and chaos manufacturing policies in the Middle East and elsewhere. Do any serious observers expect a meaningful shift in the third Clinton or first Trump administration?

As for gun control, the last decade or so has seen Democrats learning to use the issue sparingly and only in response to mass murders because while the base loves it, the mushy middle only responds positively during periods of heightened emotion. The rest of the time, they either don't think about it at all or think is is a bad thing.

Democrats cynically use gun control to appear like they are "doing something" about a problem that either they don't want to fix or haven't slightest idea how to fix. The Republican trope is a slight variation of the same con. Here the GOP cynically encourages the paranoia of it's base over the "other du jour" always just outside the wire or climbing the fence to do their menace; the response being more - more guns, more cops, more prisons, more surveillance, more criminals, more victims, and ever and always war and more and more war. Meanwhile, both factions studiously avoid doing anything that brings resolution one way or the other because they both find so much value in keeping the controversy going.

The rest of the piece about what liberalism is or isn't or what it can't or can do is pretty much the usual, pointless, stuck in the 20th Century wingnut mindset and that's enough said about it.

[vt]

Re: Gun control anyone (again)

"The rest of the piece about what liberalism is or isn't or what it can't or can do is pretty much the usual, pointless, stuck in the 20th Century wingnut mindset and that's enough said about it."

True, they stick in "left wing, liberal, right wing, conservative" to appeal to their base.

Meanwhile nothing gets solved, no compromise.

People are scared by crime, race relations, terrorism, and don't trust anyone in government. No solutions can occur in such an environment with the current parties in power.

[Woodsman]

Re: Gun control anyone (again)

Meanwhile nothing gets solved, no compromise. People are scared by crime, race relations, terrorism, and don't trust anyone in government. No solutions can occur in such an environment with the current parties in power.

It's easier to manipulate people when they are in a heightened emotional state, atomized and suspicious of each other's motives. Nothing gets solved because it's not a problem to correct but rather an opportunity to be exploited. No compromise occurs because the factions agree on the value of intractable controversies.

Violent crime is down and gun ownership is skyrocketing. The GOP wants you to think violent crime is getting worse (or terrorism, whatever works) and the Democrats don't want to talk about how popular guns are with Americans. They'd rather not talk about it at all and when they do talk about it they wind up making gun ownership even more popular.

The Supreme Court is one vote away from confirming the Second Amendment as applying to individuals, decisively and once and for all (as far as these things go in jurisprudence, because lawyers). The pro-gun faction wants you to think that doesn't matter because Obama is coming fer yer shootin' irons. The anti-gun faction wants to pretend that banning magazines and grips will be an impediment to someone intent on doing murder.

But either way, please do send us another love offering so we can keep up the good fight for you folks back home. After all, we've got to protect our phoney baloney jobs. Harumph!

[vt]

Re: Gun control anyone (again)

Fully agree. Discord feeds the factions' support.

[santafe2]

Re: Gun control anyone (again)

Violent crime is down and gun ownership is skyrocketing. The GOP wants you to think violent crime is getting worse (or terrorism, whatever works) and the Democrats don't want to talk about how popular guns are with Americans.

Seems to me the GOP wants to scare voters about 'the other' and Dems want to scare voters about guns. So we have 'the other' causes violence and guns cause violence. It's an obvious false dichotomy. But on the bright side, we don't have to face our real problems.

[Prazak]

Re: Gun control anyone (again)

Semi-automatic weapons fire one round per trigger pull, just like many hunting rifles. "Assault rifle" is a political term, literally coined by politicians, to describe "scary-looking" semi-automatics with a plastic stock.

I've read the AR-15 is capable with the requisite magazine of shooting up to 100 rounds per minute. One round per trigger pull or not, that takes the rifle's capacity well beyond hunting. Why is it political to refer to such a weapon as an assault weapon, since that would seem to be what its capacity extends to?

[LorenS]

Re: Gun control anyone (again)

I've read the AR-15 is capable with the requisite magazine of shooting up to 100 rounds per minute. One round per trigger pull or not, that takes the rifle's capacity well beyond hunting. Why is it political to refer to such a weapon as an assault weapon, since that would seem to be what its capacity extends to?

I know for a fact that you can buy a 5-round magazine for an AR-15 and use it for hunting. That makes it a legal sporting arm. Note that in many states AR-15 rifles are banned from big game hunting, not because of their "power" but rather their lack of it.

You are confusing rate-of-fire and magazine capacity. Could you clarify your question? Do you oppose 100 round magazines or pulling a trigger fast?

What you don't get about "assault weapon" is that it's an Alice in Wonderland term. It has been applied to AR style rifles, pump shotguns, handguns at various times by various people. That makes it political.

AR style rifles are really not "weapons of war". They are primarily used for peace-keeping, convoy-defense, guard-duty, perimeter defense and the like. Active combat operations are not waged primarily with rifles anymore and have not been since the 1800's. It's the clean up and subsequent peace keeping where these rifles dominate. These rifles are small, lightweight and easy to use. They are excellent tools for self defense. Unfortunately these same attributes also attract criminal misuse.


Catch-and-release justice?:
http://www.9news.com/story/news/crim...icer/77120848/

This guy would be bad news even without a gun. Do you really want him with a hatchet, knife or even a car in your neighborhood? Then why let him out?

[lakedaemonian]

Re: Gun control anyone (again)

I've read the AR-15 is capable with the requisite magazine of shooting up to 100 rounds per minute. One round per trigger pull or not, that takes the rifle's capacity well beyond hunting. Why is it political to refer to such a weapon as an assault weapon, since that would seem to be what its capacity extends to?

It's irrelevant with any/every semi-automatic rifle or pistol that utilises magazines for loading rounds.

The reason why is that with most pistol and rifle designs any reasonably healthy and fit shooter can be taught by a capable instructor to conduct a magazine change in as little as 2-3 seconds after a few hours of practice.