The editors at the National Review are largely sympathetic to the president’s proposals, however they are opposed to the three most important items. While they support confirming a permanent head of the ATF, strengthening the background check system, and working to inform mental health professionals about how best to deal with homicidal patients, they are opposed to closing the gun show loophole, limiting magazine capacity, or reinstating the assault weapons ban. Here’s their argument on the last two points:
President Obama also called for restoring the assault-weapons ban and capping magazine size at ten rounds. As we have explained previously, these measures are not useful if the goal is to reduce crime: President Obama can call assault rifles “weapons designed for the theater of war” all he wants, but in fact they are semiautomatic guns, functionally indistinguishable from hunting rifles. High-capacity magazines, meanwhile, are of dubious benefit to someone intent on harming innocents: They require less frequent reloading, but are more likely to jam, and at any rate changing magazines is not difficult even for the untrained.
People are using semiautomatic rifles to hunt these days. I really don’t understand why people are doing it, but it has become normal. The expired Assault Weapons ban attempted to distinguish between semiautomatic weapons designed for hunting and those only suitable for killing people, but the distinctions were somewhat arbitrary. And, in any case, a semiautomatic hunting rifle or pistol can do just as much damage, just as quickly, as a semiautomatic Uzi, AK-47, AR-15 or other military knock-off. So, on this point, I understand what the Review editors are saying. I don’t agree that we can’t arrive at some reasonable distinctions, but you can use a rifle designed to bring down a deer to bring down a person, and as long as semiautomatic guns are legal in any form, banning just some of them will be of limited value. Still, if a semiautomatic gun isn’t suitable for hunting, I see no reason not to limit its use to the shooting range. Licensed range operators could allow people to get their jollies but not to leave the premises with an assault weapon.
The bigger problem is with high-capacity clips. The editors downplay this, but when someone has to reload, they can be stopped (as happened in Tucson) and people have the opportunity to escape. I already mentioned that I don’t understand why people hunt with semiautomatic weapons, so maybe I am just dumb. But what kind of animal would you want to fire more than ten bullets into? Where is the utility of these clips for the hunter? It seems to me that they are a convenience for the shooting range. Other than that, they just allow people to fantasize about having a shootout with the ATF or FBI. Unless someone can make a better argument than I’ve yet seen, I don’t see how there would be any real problem with limiting magazine size. The lives saved might ultimately be small, but well worth quite a bit of inconvenience.
The editors’ argument on the gun show loophole is interesting:
In addition, the president backed mandatory background checks on gun sales between private individuals; under current law, checks are required only for sales conducted through licensed dealers. In theory, a comprehensive background-check system could be helpful — but in practice, any attempt to implement such a system would probably be cumbersome and unworkable, and the president did not offer specifics. It would be wrong to make gun sales difficult and expensive, or to spend massive amounts of money on a project with dubious benefits.
Having a massive background check system that can be easily and legally circumvented is exactly what we have now. I would call that cumbersome and unworkable and of dubious benefit. So, either we give up entirely on background checks, or we make them a real requirement. How the Review editors can support Obama’s efforts to improve and expand the background check system, yet still oppose extending it to all gun purchases escapes me. It would seem to violate every principle of conservatism to take such a view, except the principle that a conservative should never disagree with the National Rifle Association.
But, seriously, why do people hunt with semiautomatic weapons? Maybe if you’re hunting bear or something. Otherwise, don’t fill your meal with lead and save your ammunition. Jesus.
But, seriously, why do people hunt with semiautomatic weapons?
Because people are stupid and couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn otherwise.
Here’s a thread that discusses their use. Best argument is for eradicating prairie dogs and coyotes, whatever you think of that. Some just use it as they would a regular rifle and don’t want to lose that option.
In other words, they don’t need it, but they want it.
Yes. I live in Ky where deer season is considered a paid holiday. Most of these people can’t hit anything without several shots, even if the deer is just standing there. Marksmanship has gone down the tubes since the lifting of the ban. All you hear the week before season opening is Ack Ack Ack Ack Ack echoing off the hills.
A story from the old days – 30 years ago – a friend of ours ran the local gas station at the interstate exit. Hunters from Ohio used to come down for the season, and hang around drinking coffee after coming out of the woods for the day. Our friend eavesdropped on some of their conversations. One bunch talked about taking “brush shots”. He asked them what they meant and they said they shot into any bushes/thicket where they heard/saw brush rustling, just in case it was a deer! I shudder to think of assault rifles in their hands. A 30-06 was bad enough.
Some people don’t want the meat, they just want to kill something. BTW large caliber big bore rifles and even large caliber handguns (should one find oneself in close quarter that would make a rifle difficult to use) are recommended for hunting bears. I would question the sanity of anyone taking their AK-47 clone rifle bear hunting.
Probably the best bear rifle: Auto-loading Browning BAR
http://www.browning.com/products/catalog/family.asp?webflag_=002B
I was just trying to imagine why you would want to have an AR to hunt. If the game can fight back, that would be one reason. Other than that, I guess it’s cheaper to own just one gun, and if you can use the AR you have for the zombie apocalypse to hunt deer, then why not?
But, you don’t need the automatic feature.
From what I know, hunting wild boar is often done with semiauto, and (probably illegally) full-auto.
At least that is what it sounds like, from a few hundred yards away.
And I don’t blame them one tiny bit. Those boar are sneaky, fast, nasty and dangerous and often hunted at night. And are delicious, BTW.
But that’s in Socialist Europe, not North America.
Here, it would have to be someone hunting WOLVERINES that need such firepower; in fact, you should probably be using claymores and vulcans, just to be safe. Besides, they ain’t good eatin’.
yes, we have wild pigs [i.e. escapes] but not actual wild boar which something else again [in both sense of the phrase]
My favorite comment to make to the lazy type hunters is that ‘last year we had two hunters get mad cow disease from the deer they shot and ate’. You should see their faces! Of course it’s only semi true, 2 hunters 100 miles away did end up contracting the human version after consuming venison but it’s a stretch at best.
If you can’t bring it down with one shot … don’t fire.
My father taught me this when I was a kid, still holds true today.
My grandfather’s version: If you can’t bring it down with one shot, stay the f out of the effin woods.
I also fail to see how hunting game with machine guns can be construed as a test of skill, or a sport. How about the following approach:
machine guns are generally belt fed and require more than one person to operate. We are talking about semiautomatic weapons that have one round in the chamber but that automatically reload after each shot. You pull the trigger for each shot.
As for your suggestions, I have already suggested the liability insurance part of it. The problem here, obviously, is with the power of the gun lobby and with courts’ interpretation of the Second Amendment. Both factors severely limit what can be done.
Also, gun rights supporters are at least as passionate as anti-choice activists, making them stronger than their actual numbers would imply.
However, gun advocates fall on the hard side of the “life” side of things. There are honestly people who believe abortion is murder — I think they’re completely wrong — but if you hold that belief, you would regard such a practice as abhorrent. No one can credibly argue that gun regulations are murder.
God knows we’d hate to make any kind of sale cumbersome.
Seriously, do these people want an application to have a signature form that allows for just an X on the signature line to make it easier for people who can’t read?
I live in an area that is coveted by hunters; therefore, in the hunting seasons I am often surrounded by lime gree and orange vested heavily armed people. There is a strange black and white element in that the good guys are really good. They train physically before the seasons, they often carry bows, they are aware of all the property lines and access, they may not all be sharpshooter quality but they pride themseles in taking a buck down in 1 or 2 shots. They often walk up to my house andintroduce themselves and tell me where they’ll be. There is a pride in their prowess and it is impressive.
Then there’s the cheaters. They are #1 lazy. They are out of shape, they refuse to use the access trails and instead drive their pickups through the chained gates, steal any signs, shoot on the road out of the window of their pickups completely ignorning that their bullits are actually shattering windows, tearing up the yards where neighbors’ kids are playing on their jungle jim. They will unload a clip on a sage brush or a rattler, they leave candy wrappers and cigarette butts.
But my point is that it seems to be black and white. The guys who take great pride in the work it takes to hunt right and the guys who are just plain lazy bad as**es. The real hunters seem uninterested in playing war with a rattler or even a bear or coyote. Why the National Review types can’t recognize the good guys and must default to the lazy faux hunters is a part of the problem.
You use a semi-automatic to kill things. Its not hunting, it’s killing.
And if you want to get rid of prarie dogs (not a really good idea, BTW) you use rodent poison.
Another really bad idea is to try to clear kill coyotes. In addition to being practically impossible, the amount of rodentia eaten by those suckers would overwhelm the ecosystem in a about a year. This says nothing about the snakes they eat. Don’t want them eating your chickens? Get your lazyass butt out there and build a decent chicken coop.
Bear hunting? 50 calibre sniper rifle … from 3000 yards out. Safety first.
Boar Hunting? Use a spear or be a wuss.
Calydonian boar hunt !!!!
http://employees.oneonta.edu/farberas/arth/Images/ARTH209images/Vases/archaic/Francois_vase_1.jpg
This is probably obvious, but when 3000 people were killed at the Twin Towers, “everything” changed we’re told. We instituted a security system filled with inconveniences and huge cost. The shoe bomber: the same. We took away lots of liberties, like the freedom to travel or to privacy or being searched, for the privilege of travel. Here on the little island where I am, when we leave by ferry we have to show identification to board and our license plate is recorded. We have to have a homeland security person look into our car.
Now, thousands of people are killed every day by guns, even by “the good guys” who make mistakes while cleaning a gun, or leaving it accessible to children or other adults who might pick it up. Did the fellow in Newtown break into his mother’s gun safe? Did he have a key? Were the guns secure? Why don’t we see this epidemic of gun violence, symbolized by the massacre at Sandy Hook, as an event that “changed everything” and therefore worthy of the kind of compromises of our “rights” as we saw after 9/11 and, sadly, continue to see (into the far distant future)?
Are these same folks who don’t want restrictions on their guns screaming about warrantless wiretapping and all the other potential infringements on rights that 9/11 brought about? I don’t think so.
When President Obama shared the “900 people killed by gun violence since Sandy Hook” statistic at his press conference yesterday, I too found myself thinking of the twin towers.
I kept hoping he would say: that’s about 1/3 of the people who were killed on september 11.
I think keeping large magazine rifles at gun ranges is a good compromise. I’m not totally opposed to large magazine rifles. I could see compromise. I just think the lethality of the weapon should be proportional to how difficult, time consuming, and expensive it is to get one. So if Daddy has to have his AR-15, he can pay for insurance, licensing, classes, extensive profiling, yearly check-ins, etc.
What’s clear is that our gun policy should not be driven by a microscopic group of people who claim to have some recreational need for killing machines. There are plenty of excellent video games where every type of gun can be enjoyed in well designed fantasy environments. This is part of what is crazy about the NRA going after video games: video games are a competitor to the gun industry. And video games are vastly safer.If people get their thrills from the Xbox, why should they bother with the real thing?
For hunting…
What sort of gun you need depends entirely on what you are shooting at. If you are going for varmints/cyotoes and other smaller animals you will want a smaller caliber rifle that has a decent magazine capacity. In contrast if you are going for bear or deer you will want a much high caliber rifle but magazine capacity isn’t something you’re going to care that much about.
The same logic applies to hand guns as well. Carrying a side arm while hunting is a very good idea because of bear, camping as well! But you’ll need it to be a very high caliber, which is of course going to mean it doesn’t have as many shots.
What’s getting lost in our gun “debate” is why some weapons are used in crimes. Most gun crime is done with hand guns, and of those most of it is done with .22lr. What’s interesting is that .22lr isn’t even very good at killing people, it’s a round that isn’t all that effective on anything larger than a house cat. But it’s used in so many crimes because it’s insanely cheap ammo that’s readily availible, and because the pistols that fire it are stupidly easy to use they are all over the place as well. So naturally this is what people use. This is despite the fact that if you really wanted to kill someone with a handgun a revolver with .44 is much better at killing things and vastly more reliable. But since they aren’t all over the place we don’t see them widely used in crimes.
One of the typical gun nut snarks is if you limit the amount of ammo in a magazine we will just move to MUCH higher caliber weapons. So instead of riddling people with low caliber bullets people would just be blowing off their entire head with one shot. This is worth thinking about because it’s not that far off the mark.
Is it not possible to regulate on the basis of total energy released = caliber x max terminal velocity x number of rounds per clip? – As this is a measure of the destructive potential of a weapon without reloading?
That doesn’t really solve anything.
Most of the guns used in shootings, including the ar-15, aren’t really the most destructive in their class. The reason they are used is because there are tons of them out there, the reason there are tons of them is that they are cheap and the ammo is cheap and they are massive profit drivers for the companies making them.
The reality is that all the extra stuff you can put on ar-15 that makes it look really scary to people unfamiliar with guns don’t make it any more lethal. But they do drive up the cost (you can spend more on mods than on the actual gun) and make it more fun to tinker around with.
Reloading is also a red herring. I was in the military and I’d never use an extended magazine because they cause all sorts of jams and weapon malfuctions… which is why the cops and the military don’t use them. We also don’t use automatic fire because it makes the gun less lethal, your shots go all over the place.
Several shootings recently only ended because the shooter was stupid enough to use an extended magazine and his weapon jammed.
Police response time is really the key here. If I wanted to shoot up a school sandyhook style reloading isn’t going to make one difference, maybe adding 30 seconds for multiple reloads in a shooting that the killer had 20 mins. I’d use a lower capacity mag and take my time to get the maximum body count, it wouldn’t end till the cops get there.
What we always look at regulating is the stupid stuff. Scary looking guns large mags whatever.
To solve the problem gun control isn’t the answer. It’s a socio economic issue. Better healthcare, better jobs, guaranteed income, better education, and trying to shift to a less violent society over all. Unless that’s done the rest is all pissing in the wind and claiming it’s raining.
Booman Tribune ~ Comments ~ The National Review and Guns
All these things could help, over a long period of time, but they are too general to tackle the specific issues leading to gun violence:
etc.
The most convincing argument I’ve seen against magazine limits is basically that they’re too cheap, too plentiful and too easy to manufacture for a ban on larger magazines to be enforceable. So while very few people have a particularly compelling need for them, good luck doing anything about keeping people from getting them.
You know, that’s basically the same argument for pot legalization.
But pot doesn’t kill nearly as many people.
Take the resources devoted to enforcing one and switch to the other. Really. If having a large magazine in your truck meant a 6 month stay in jail after a traffic stop, they’d get locked up or tossed.
It’s not the magazines that are locked up securely are as large a concern.
“I already mentioned that I don’t understand why people hunt with semiautomatic weapons, so maybe I am just dumb”
I am not a gun guy, but I think even I can answer your question. It requires a lot less skill and reduces the level of sportsmanship. What’s not to like?
are you snarkichild in disguise? 🙂
The National Review seems to be arguing that one part of the solution is to only sell defective magazines. Works for me.
Disclaimer: I am gun owner. I shot competitively in high school and college (It is an NCAA sport). I was, while on my college team, competing among the best marksmen in the country (the best of whom was a woman from West Virginia University’s team). I am not a member of the NRA nor would I dream of becoming one at the present time. I don’t shoot so much anymore, and I don’t even keep my firearms anywhere near my house because I have kids, but I do still own an AR-15 rifle as well as semiautomatic handguns. And I can state without a moment’s hesitation that even if required to by law I would never turn in any of the firearms I own, or even register them, and neither would anyone I know, regardless of other political beliefs, progressive or conservative. That’s why I believe that implementation of anything like a ban on “military style” weapons — whatever that is defined to mean — would ultimately be impossible and only symbolic, and possibly even tragic, especially as long as the second amendment remains in the constitution.
I don’t hunt. Never have. Most people who own military style semi-automatics do not use them for hunting even if they do hunt. Some do, but that’s not the motivating reason for owning such a firearm. Most people who own AR-15 rifles use them for shooting things like old refrigerators in isolated or abandoned rural landfills or on private farmland or forest land, and there is no firearm better than an AR-15 rifle for such target shooting activity. The AR-15 is a frighteningly easy to shoot weapon even for beginners, but it is also enjoyably challenging as a precision target weapon. And despite its use in some of the recent massacres, there is simply no evidence that I have seen which shows that any more than a small percentage of the annual gun deaths every year are accounted for by shootings with AR-15s or other, “military-style” firearms. Nor is there any evidence that shooting tragedies with such weapons are on the increase in any way. The opposite, in fact appears to be the case, with the FBI reporting deaths by rifles of all kinds to be 20% lower in 2011 than in 2007 — not more than a few hundred per year — which itself was already much lower than in the peak violence years of the 1980’s.
The problem with gun control is this: Only one policy has been shown to be able to produce the low gun violence results achieved in places like Europe and Japan — banning private gun ownership outright and rounding up guns, by use of police power if necessary. And that’s just not a feasible prospect in the US under any scenario as long as the second amendment remains in the constitution and as long as current owners of AR-15s and similar weapons think as I do — that we’re not going to comply with any law requiring us to turn them in or register them.
So I would rather have focused on the kinds of things which can be shown to have already worked in bringing gun violence rates down so much already than by doing things which are likely to make currently law-abiding gun owners into lawbreakers by criminalizing the activities that the vast majority of us do without any harm to anyone. Although I really don’t see any problem with ideas like a ban on the manufacture and sale of new high capacity magazines, I would sooner see private automobile ownership banned for killing so many people every year than any more playing around with a ban on “assault weapons.”
And your refusal to register your weapon arises from what principle or fear?
Principally for being identified by public authorities, or others, as a gun owner, for whatever possible hassles or penalties that might eventually come from that. I personally don’t like to have to identify myself as a diabetic to drivers’ license authorities either and avoided doing so for years. I think most gun owners, however, cite the recent cases of Canada and Australia where seemingly reasonable legislation to register and locate such firearms for the purpose of better controlling access to them by dangerous people was almost immediately followed up with legislation that allowed police to identify and round up such weapons, first voluntarily and then by force.
I should familiarize myself better with that history in Canada and Australia. I am aware that Australia passed strong restrictions after a mass shooting, but I don’t know much at all about how it was implemented.
Personally, I think it is reasonable to require liability insurance for firearms, which would naturally require registration.
The liability issue could possibly be one of the best ways to deal with handgun violence. If you don’t transfer ownership of you’re gun, you’re liable if it used in a crime. That would massively disincentivize straw purchases and incentivize safeguarding your weapon or reporting it stolen.
And it doesn’t require any strong-arming by the government.
I think it is entirely reasonable to require liability insurance for drivers, and even more so for owners of an AR-15.
I think it may be possible experiment with both insurance as well as some form of outside-of-the-home armory in urban areas without registration, as long as private organizations are those empowered to implement it and with restrictions privacy sharing at least as strong as HIPAA, which protects people who are having affairs from being outed by their doctors, although with the skittishness of many gun owners about any government involvement at all, they still may face the same implementation problems. (And I’m skeptical that the costs of gun ownership actuarially add up to enough to dissuade many people.)
The idea would be that someone could face severe penalties if an injury occurred with their firearm and they couldn’t provide insurance information, so no registration would happen until the gun proved a problem, which already results in the police finding out about gun ownership and provenance. Likewise, someone could face penalties if a high-powered rifle in an urban area was found to be unsecured in that person’s home or possession instead of a private armory. (Which would mean it couldn’t be reported on property insurance in case of theft, etc.) In both cases, really only people who want to comply without risk — those least likely to kill anyone in the first place, would be affected, but arguably they could have at least prevented the CT massacre.
I think what would be worst of all is if owning a banned, unregistered gun becomes like a membership in a cool, prohibited secret society of some kind, like being a freemason in 18th century Europe. And that’s what I am sure would happen if anything in the US occurred similar to what has happened in Canada and Australia regarding registration of and outright banning of many kinds of them.
The USA has had no difficulty criminalizing millions of African Americans and Marijuana users because it had the power to do so, and wanted to do so in order to marginalize elements unwanted by the elite.
The real significance of fears about the registration of firearms is that it may signal that gun owners might in future be similarly marginalized once the balance of power has swung sufficiently against them.
I also suspect that white gun owners would be less militant about gun control if the majority of guns were owned by minorities…
I would say that the USA has had a lot of trouble criminalizing marijuana users and drug users of all kinds and classes, just like it had a lot of trouble trying to ban alcohol use. But I agree that the class and power implications of firearms ownership and its legality may have something to do with this as well.
Are automobile owners marginalized because they have to be licensed to drive, and must insure and register their vehicles? Will they be when the balance of power swings against them?
Maybe gun owners should ask why public opinion is against them before jumping to these kinds of hypotheticals.
A “Kool Klub” situation would be a big improvement. If gun owners need to hide their guns from estranged wives and children (who don’t keep secrets well) there will be substantially fewer homicides and accidental shootings. It’ll help less with suicides, but even there some gun suicides are by people who don’t already own a gun and go buy them. Even moderate improvements in gun mortality are well worth pursuing. 10% of homicides and 5% of suicides would save about 2,000 lives/year, mostly of young, healthy people. That’s an admirable public health goal even though gun mortality would still be a leading health issue in America.
Perhaps. But we are already achieving those numbers in crime reductions as it is, with current policy, so it might be more helpful to identify what is actually working and promote those things.
So the principle, for ‘most gun owners,’ is an attempt to circumvent a law that they think might be passed in the future? In other words, it’s because they are considering acting in a criminal fashion if subjected to laws they don’t support?
Basically, yes. And that’s a good reason to not support such laws because it means that implementation of them will be impossible at best, and tragic at worst. Implementation of laws requires at least tacit support from regulated parties or else a huge amount of resources to overcome opposition. That’s why drug sales continue and undocumented immigration continued long after laws prohibiting the practice and establishing penalties were ever acted. People don’t just follow rules, generally, because a law says so. They do it because they want to, or because there is enough credible force to make them do it. That isn’t the case with gun control at the present time.
I took the opposite lesson, there. It sound to me like the gun owners who resist registration intended to break a potential future law are basically setting themselves up as criminals. They’re exactly the people we don’t want to have gun, aren’t they?
Laws aren’t consensual. Implementation of laws don’t require tacit support from regulated parties. They do require a huge amount of resources. That’s why the criminal justice system is so damned big. Because laws virtually always are opposed by those to whom they apply. It’s why they’re laws and not guidelines.
You’re making my point. You’d be making an entire class of otherwise law-abiding people into criminals by outlawing their normally harmless activities. The result is that such a law is unlikely to be able to be implemented, even if passed, and would almost certainly result in worse outcomes if implementation were forced by applying enough resources to doing so.
Your view of implementation of laws is somewhat outdated. In fact, scholars have long shown that laws which work are almost always consensual, and laws that fail are not. (Most laws, incidentally, DO fail to either be implemented or to achieve the outcomes expected when designed.) For example, even though individual drivers might not like being arrested when caught drunk, there is overwhelming support among drivers for such laws. This is not the case with gun restrictions among gun owners, however.
If passing a law regarding guns, if you don’t have consent from most gun owners, the law will almost certainly fail unless a prohibitively large amount of resources were to be applied to overcome opposition. Given that the legal system is already so large, I don’t think adding even more prisons, cops, judges, attorneys, coroners, etc. to that system to deal with the millions of newly classified criminals who own semiautomatic firearms is remotely feasible at a national level. And once you include the capabilities of those new criminals to organize politically, it should become clear how absurd it is to hope for anything but symbolic political benefits for proposing something like that.
Then target shooters can bear the cost of maintaining well regulated ranges where anyone can use the rifles under at least nominal supervision. Because if target shooting is the constituency, we can satisfy that need without allowing millions of such rifles float around as consumer swag or misguided “defense” investment.
I find your paraphrase of statistics about mass killings by such weapons dishonest. How did 2012 compare to 2011 huh?
You may not be in the NRA, but that’s pure NRA spin. There are reasonable compromises that fall very far short of confiscation. But the mere fact you own and have owned a proven killing machine without causing any trouble is no grounds for claiming that the community can never decide that having such things in private hands everywhere is a bad idea. And legal regimes that would allow productive regulation of such things without subverting the second amendment have been credibly described (and enacted, at a state level). And I see you’ve failed to articulate exactly what value your commitment to illegal possession of said dangerous weapons is achieving, either for yourself or the community. You shoot a couple times a month or something? At a range? So what’s so hard about keeping your guns safe at the range, the only place you could plausibly use it? Oh, and we can say that should you join a government affiliated militia or national guard force, you could use your rifle on duty. Seems perfectly constitutional, and I’m sure the community will appreciate your service.
The 2012 statistics aren’t out yet, but the FBI collects and reports the data, and except for a few places such as Chicago, preliminary reports that I have seen on the news indicate that cities had been reporting all time lows, ever, in homicides and violent crime. Violence peaked in the US in 1988 and has been trending downward ever since. If the NRA has been reporting these facts (I haven’t actually seen that they are because it contradicts their message that we all need to be armed to protect ourselves), at least they’re doing one thing honest.
Don’t make the same mistake the NRO makes.
A semi-automatic gun is one that allows you to fire successive rounds without working the bolt manually to put a round into the firing chamber; but each round is fired by its own single pull of the trigger.
A fully automatic firearm allows you to fire many rounds in quick succession on a single trigger pull.
Not every semi-automatic gun is designed or suitable for combat, and many have small-capacity magazines.
The common conservative refusal to distinguish is just stone-walling.
Oh, and I agree that what’s actually needed, in the end, is disarmament.
Hence I favor repeal of the 2nd Amendment.
But I suppose its evisceration by dishonest liberal interpretation would do as well and might be easier to obtain, politically.
It’s not dishonest. The Founding Fathers put “well-regulated” in for a reason.
I do think the 2nd amendment has to be repealed, not because it forbids reasonable and sane gun regulation, but because the gun nuts wave it around like some sort of sacred talisman and have managed to get a lot of people to buy into that. Repeal it, and then we can have sensible discussions on what’s the proper tradeoff between dead children and having fun varmint-shootin’.
Canada has a register-and-regulate approach similar to what’s under discussion, and that has successfully reduced gun injuries and death, albeit by less than the strict regulations of Europe. Gun injuries and death occur mostly as a result of unpredictable impulse issues, and reducing their casual availability, by any amount, will save lives.
I will point out that the English approach, which is basically that guns must be stored in armories, still allows extensive hunting and target shooting. You go to the armory, check out your gun, use it for your fun, then return it afterwards. The guns aren’t in the house when the suicidal/homicidal impulses occur, so deaths are minimized. You can’t wave around that particular phallic symbol in front of house guests, but otherwise, it doesn’t much restrict legitimate gun use.
It would seem to me that hunting stops being a sport when skill and endurance is no longer acquired. Unskilled, impatient hunters need assault weapons.
It stops being a ‘sport’ when the killing is one-sided.
Which is why I fully support the right to arm bears.
They require less frequent reloading, but are more likely to jam…
Adam Lanza’s clip didn’t jam, you ghouls.
NR is doing PR for the totally useless part and opposing the only parts that will make a difference. How Boo thinks that makes them “largely sympathetic” is way beyond my comprehension.
I prefer repeal of the 2nd and outright disarmament to harassing gun owners with unfair liabilities.
Too much like Republican legislation harassing women seeking abortions or those who provide them.
Just nasty.
I’m a gun owner, although I don’t own an AR (or any other semi-auto rifle) at this point. I think nearly all of the President’s proposals are sensible and will probably be helpful, other than the “assault weapon” ban and the magazine size restriction. The universal background check is the most important of the measures; even the manager at the range in South Philly where we shot Wednesday night had no problem with it, or any other of the proposals.
I don’t exactly oppose the “assault weapon” ban and the magazine size restriction; I just doubt they will do any good. First, “assault weapon” is a marketing term the gun industry came up with to sell guns to people on the basis of them looking mean and cool. The features that makes something an “assault weapon” (as opposed to simply a rifle or pistol) are things like a flash hider, a pistol grip, an adjustable stock or a bayonet lug. These things make the gun look like a military rifle (and thus more deadly), but do not affect the function. This is why it is correct to describe them as “military style” guns – the issue is merely one of appearance. So, as many people have pointed out, even if you were to confiscate every “assault weapon” from civilian ownership, you’d be leaving untold millions of weapons out there which were equally lethal.
But we’re not even talking about that, just banning the sale of new “assault weapons.” So there will still be untold millions of the old guns that will remain in civilian hands and freely transferable.
But it gets worse: The ban only applies to the sale of new rifles with the proscribed features. It is totally legal for a civilian to buy a compliant rifle and then add the banned features. (In fact, part of the popularity of ARs is that they are modular, so new parts are really easy to add.) So, for all these reasons, banning “assault weapons” is pointless security theater.
The magazine size ban would be ineffective for some of the same reasons. The ban only applies to the sale of new large magazines. There are untold tens of millions of them already in circulation, and they will remain freely transferable among private owners after the ban goes into place. (I’m also extremely skeptical that, even if you could confiscate all existing large magazines, that it would materially affect the number of gun deaths, since it really would only even come into play in these mass shootings, which are a tiny fraction of gun deaths. Pistols with standard magazines remain the most deadly weapons out there. Anyway, again, no one is talking about confiscation.)
If you think we can get to a place politically where confiscation is a possibility, go for it. Because there is no database of existing guns and magazines, I would expect that there would be massive non-compliance with a law requiring guns to be turned in.
If you’re thinking, “Okay, we might not be able to confiscate assault weapons/large magazines, but we can ban them from being re-sold”, there is a problem with that. First, again I think there will be massive non-compliance. But just as important, banning the sale of existing guns and magazines is clearly a regulatory Taking under the Fifth Amendment of the constitution. Banning the sale of something means you’ve destroyed its economic value to the owner, so the federal government would have to pay the market value of each gun and magazine to every owner. There are 300 million guns out there – how big of an undertaking do you think it would be? (New York cleverly got around this issue with its magazine ban by requiring existing owners to sell theirs out of state by a certain deadline – obviously, you couldn’t do that with a nationwide ban.)
Again, I think the background check thing will be the most life-saving measure of the proposals that involve direct regulation – the proposals to allow doctors to ask about guns in the home and to free up money for gun violence research and for states and municipalities to spend on school security will also help. But I think you shouldn’t get too upset if the “assault weapons” and large magazine bans don’t go through.