Senate Gun Control

ah yes, the jokester. hero of damaged, emotionally-stunted nolanboys the world 'round.

 

For several years, I've joked with some friends that we ought to put together full SG1 costumes and then attend one (or both) of the local Renaissance festivals.

You're going to laugh at me, but I actually have a similar pair of gloves. They aren't military. They're for motorcycle riders, and the kevlar over the knuckles is meant to protect them if you go into a slide.

They were given to me with my bike (which, 4 years later, I still haven't finished getting it running - the carburetor has been sitting on my projects table for over a year). I really need to finish it when I get the chance.

 

If you think about all the mass murders that have taken place the last few years, you have to remember that all those weapons were purchased legally. If it passes, we are all in trouble. Now, I can understand banning automatic weapons because of how dangerous they can be, but trying to get rid of mags with a capacity of more than ten rounds is ridiculous. Its not the guns that are causing corruption, its the fact that idiots want their five minutes of fame, are crazy, or are having issues of their own. Banning Anything related to guns is not gonna do anything. The people run the US, and when stuff like this happens, panic occurs and we get into more trouble. Law doesn't prevent anything. It just upgrades it. There are always loop holes, and people will find those loop holes. Especially in this case.

 

Yeah, I'm not sure why anything is illegal, frankly.

 

Automatic weapons have been restricted through mandatory registration since 1934. In 1986, the registry was closed to new registrations. What that means is that any guns that were not registered prior to May 19, 1986 (including those manufactured after that date) are illegal for civilians to own. They are restricted to only military and law enforcement. (Guns used by movie studios are designed to be unable to fire anything except blanks, and so they are exempt.)

Since the National Firearms Act of 1934, only one crime has been committed with a legally-registered NFA machine gun, and that was committed by a police officer killing an informant.

Personally, I'm laughing at the people paying obscene prices for AR-15s right now. Guns that a few weeks ago were selling for around $800 are now going for $2000 or more. I was looking at buying a stripped lower receiver to build an AR after the new year (they usually run about $60-100), and some are selling for as much as $600!

I don't care what posturing politicians are doing right now. Diane Feinstein can propose a ban all she wants, but no ban that outlaws (or heavily restricts) the most popular sporting rifle in the nation (the AR-15) is going to pass. There simply aren't the votes for it, and there aren't going to be.

That means that in 3-6 months, when it becomes clear that a ban isn't happening and the current production backlogs are clearing out, I'll probably be able to buy that stripped lower receiver at fire sale prices. I can live with that.

 

Hooray you can buy a pointless part for a killing machine in a couple of months for less than you can now.

Gotta love how when kids are killed prices go up. Supply and demand ans all that.


Go free market yay!!!

 

Legally speaking, the lower receiver is the gun. It's the part that has the serial number and has to go through a FFL.

And the AR-15 is not a "killing machine". It is the most popular target rifle in the world (which is the key reason I want to build one). The vast majority of them in civilian hands (as it's also heavily used by both military and law enforcement) are never used to do anything more than shoot holes in paper (or the occasional melon). For example, according to the FBI's statistics, of the 13636 homicides (of all types) in the US in 2009, only 348 were committed with a rifle of any type (including hunting rifles). That's only 2.55% of all homicides in the US. For comparison, bare hands and feet were used in 801 homicides, and blunt objects in 611. A murder is more than 5 times more likely to be committed with a knife (1825 homicides) than a rifle.

 

Like that guy in Thibodaux last year who hacked his son to death and left the head out on the streetcorner for his wife to see.
http://www.cnn.com/2011/CRIME/08/15/louisiana.child.killing/index.html

And the guy who hacked his pregnant wife to cut out and kill their baby.
http://www.wwltv.com/news/northshor...woman-stabbed-has-baby-cut-out-175467651.html
He lived around the corner from my sister...and he's also the reason my brother-in-law bought her a Springfield XD40 subcompact and shooting lessons.


EDIT. LOL..."lessons". My sister is one of the best marksmen around.

 

Shouldn't that be markswomen?

 

Nope. Marksmen.

Adding extra syllables to a word for the sake of political correctness is just plain silly.

 

This thread reeks of redneck.

 

Why...was he going to go crazy and stab her? They were family-related incidents after all. Guess she better start carrying that gun around the house.

 

My sister does pitbull rehab. While illegal, dogfighters still have a nasty reputation about breaking in to steal animals.

 

So that guy that killed his wife is not the reason.

 

Just for a point of contrast, there was string of elementary school attacks in China in April of 2010, too. They were similarly committed by mentally imbalanced people determined to others. Except no one died. Because there's not really any private gun ownership in China, so contra all the "determined killers will find a way" pro-gun people, they actually didn't find a way at all, and the damage they were able to do was severely restricted by merit of the fact that they were using hammers and kitchen knives.

 

Nice cherry picking your comparison. How about the month before that? In March 2010, a man went on a spree and fatally stabbed 8 children in Nanping. Or how about the month after that, where another man went on a spree and fatally stabbed 7 children and 2 adults (while wounding 11 more people) in Hanzhong?

You can get a list of those and others here. The total on that list is at least 25 dead and 115 injured, which is comparable to the ratio of dead to injured in most mass shootings.

In most mass shootings, you get a lot more wounded than killed. (Think of Aurora, where 12 died but 58 were injured, or Tucson, where 6 died and 13 were injured, or Columbine, where 13 died and 21 were injured.) In that, Sandy Hook is the exception, because there were no people who were only wounded.

But that has nothing to do with the weapon that Lanza used. It had far more to do with the fact that he had victims who were fairly powerless (mostly children) in a confined space while it took the police 20 minutes to arrive.

As to the claim that you can always wrestle a knife away from someone, my only response is to point out (yet again) that life is not like Hollywood. It is very dangerous to grapple with someone who has a knife. Depending on the type of blade (admittedly a box cutter isn't as much of a threat as a larger knife) and the size of the attacker, you will easily find yourself overwhelmed by most attackers unless you have been specifically trained, especially if you are dealing with a one-on-one situation. (In fact, at close range a knife is far more deadly than a gun. A person with a knife can charge you and stab you from a distance of 21 feet before the average person could draw and fire a gun.)

 

Also, as an update to my previous post's data, here are the stats from 2011 (with updated stats for years since 2007):
12664 total homicides
323 with rifles
1694 with knives
496 with blunt objects
728 with hands/feet/etc

Rifles of all types made up 2.55% of all homicides, exactly the same proportion as in 2009. Since 2007, that percentage has varied from 2.55-3.04% of all homicides. For contrast, for the same time period, the percentage of all homicides that involved a knife ranged from 12.18% (in 2007) to 13.38% (in 2011). In other words, while homicides with rifles (including "assault rifles") are decreasing as a proportion of the whole, homicides are increasing as a portion of the whole.

And remember, that includes all types of rifles, not just AR-15s or other scary-looking "assault rifles". When this year's stats are released, the raw number will likely go up by about 10% from the people killed in Aurora and Sandy Hook (although not all of them were killed with a rifle in either case). Depending on the total number of homicides this year, don't expect that percentage to change by more than a small fraction, and probably stay well within the range for the last 5 years.

 

KK makes a good case for banning rifles in the US. At least 300 people can be saved each year.

Now let's look at the 6000 Americans who get killed with pistols every year.

And until guns are mainly used in food preparation, let's not talk about knives.

 

Here's a bit of news for you: guns are used far more for food preparation than for killing people. Last year, in Virginia alone, 231454 deer were killed by hunters (source). Of those, over 200000 were killed with firearms (rifle, shotgun, or pistol - yes, you can hunt with a pistol). The vast majority of those deer were killed for their meat, i.e. as food. I would say that killing the meat is a vital part of preparing it to be eaten.

And that was only for one state.

 

Going back to this comment, you are using some very faulty reasoning here.

First of all, a ban on all rifles is simply not possible. Even something as simple as a registry of them is impractical. Canada tried such a registry, and saw an abysmally low compliance rate, to the point that they are in the process of getting rid of their long gun registry. As Larry Correia points out in an excellent article (it's long, but I highly recommend it):

Even assuming an incredibly high compliance rate of 99%, you would still have more "illegal" gun owners out there than cops, and that's assuming that the cops would all support the ban.

And that's not even starting on the cost of such a ban. Because of the Takings clause, the government cannot simply declare that a legally-owned item is now illegal and can be confiscated. The government would have to compensate the gun owners at the current fair market value for each gun that is taken, as of the time of the taking (i.e. the price just before the ban goes into effect). With over 100 million rifles in the US, each worth on the order of $1000 each, that's hundreds of billions of dollars. (And no, you can't just offer a $100 grocery card for a $1000 rifle like LA does in their annual buyback program. Those programs are voluntary, so they aren't subject to the takings clause.) Good luck trying to appropriate that money in the current fiscal climate.

And all of that isn't even touching on the Second Amendment issues. Under the "militia" interpretation (that so many gun control advocates favor, as laid out in Miller), rifles like the AR-15 are exactly the kind of firearm that should be allowed. They are directly comparable to the rifles and muskets that militia members provided for themselves during the Revolution (as they are the civilian version of the military's current equipment). If you go with a "sporting purpose" test, then the AR-15 is the most popular target rifle (and target shooting is a sport) in the US (and rifles in general are used for sporting purposes like hunting). If you use the "armed revolution" interpretation, again, the AR-15 is the best choice to provide parity with the military's equipment. If you are looking at self defense, then rifles have been proven there as well (in the LA riots they were commonly used by Korean shop owners to protect their stores from looting) and are arguably the best choice for home defense.

There is no interpretation of the Second Amendment (except a tortured "militia" interpretation calling for the government to own and control all militia arms, and that is completely unsupported in history as the militia traditionally provided their own arms) that supports an outright ban on all rifles, or even on "assault rifles". And that's not even considering the precedents in Heller and McDonald.

Finally, your comment assumes that if rifles were not available for the 323 homicides in 2011, then another weapon would not have been used. That is completely unsupportable.

 

You talk about unsupportabe arguments and faulty reasoning...
and you say guns can't be confiscated because there are too many.

 

No, I didn't say that they can't be confiscated because there are too many. I said that there are so many that it would be too expensive to do in the foreseeable future, that it would require massive changes to the fundamental laws of the United States, and that it's not feasible to enforce.

There are around 300 million guns in the US. If the government has to pay for all of them (required by the Takings clause) in order to confiscate them, you are talking about around a third of a billion dollars (not counting administrative and enforcement costs - just the actual value of the guns themselves). Where's that money going to come from?

You might disagree with the rulings, but Heller and McDonald are still the binding precedent. You can't outright ban guns without addressing them, and any case to do that will take several years to reach the Supreme Court (at the earliest), and even that assumes that at least one of the conservative Justices gets replaced before the case reaches the Court. Alternately, it would require a constitutional amendment to repeal the Second Amendment. The upcoming Congress's makeup isn't going to get anywhere near the 2/3 majority in each house needed to pass that, let alone the ratification of 3/4 of the states. That means that you are talking about at least another 2 years (until you can get another new Congress). It's simply not realistic.

No one is going to try to make members of around half of the households in the US automatic felons. Our justice and prison systems simply cannot handle that sort of workload, not to mention the economic damage it would cause to the country to remove that many people from the workforce.

If you are going to claim that my reasoning is faulty, then where are the flaws? I pointed out several in yours. You pointed out nothing. Care to give it a try? I have the data, history, logic, and reason on my side, so I have nothing to fear.

 

So let me understand this. A season long string of mass killings failed to total more than any one of several of our single incidents, and this somehow reassures you? Because the "ratio" of injured to killed was similar? What sort of specious logic is that? How do you overlook the much more obvious indicator of lethality, actual mortality resulting from the attack? The "ratio" of injured to kill mostly just reflects the difficulty of killing people, and by this logic a pretty wide array of weaponry should be allowed. Even nuclear weaponry can get 2-3x the killed:injured ratio. Maybe they should be legal too! Totally safe.

 

Nice try, but no cigar.

Your example was specifically cherry picked to suggest that people are more likely to survive knife attacks. When I called you on your selection (by pointing out that you cherry picked the month to look at), you are now trying to change the focus to something else.

The fact is that knives are not less lethal than guns, especially at close range, which is what you were trying to claim by pointing to April 2010's knife attack.

Also, your claim that "A season long string of mass killings failed to total more than any one of several of our single incidents" is outright false. While Sandy Hook had 27 dead (which is more that the "season long string of mass killings"), none of the other recent attacks had a comparable body count. In Aurora, only 12 people were killed. In Tucson, there were only 6 killed (less than either the Nanping or Hanzhong attacks by themselves, with 8 and 9 fatalities respectively). Sandy Hook is not the baseline for comparison, it is by far the extreme. And yet, you keep trying to use it as though it is the normal case. (On this list going back to Columbine, there are only 8 out of the 31 incidents where more than 10 people were killed. Of the 31 incidents on that list, only Virginia Tech and Sandy Hook fit the description you gave.)

EDIT: And none of that changes the clear statistics that I gave earlier. You are at least 5 times more likely to be killed with a knife than an "assault rifle" in the US. Seeing as no ban on handguns or guns in general is even being discussed, not to mention would be directly prohibited by the rulings in Heller and McDonald, what do you propose that would actually be workable? An "assault weapons" ban will either be a joke (see the 1994 ban for an example), or would never pass constitutional muster with the current court. An amendment to allow such a ban contrary to current precedent isn't going to pass Congress, let alone get ratified.

So why don't you try proposing something that might actually work, rather than continue your disingenuous complaining when I point out the flaws in your statistics.

 

I think the main thing about guns to knives isn't that you can wrestle a knife away from someone. It's that you can frigging flee without getting shot down.

I see; guns actually exist because people want more of a thrill than a regular holepunch device gives them. No one has ever intended that guns be used an any offensive or defensive fashion at all! Someone who uses a gun to kill or wound someone is in fact perverting a totally innocent device that was originally intended only to punch holes in paper and ventilate watermelons. Of course. It all makes sense now.