I’ve no horse in this race. My country has entirely sensible gun laws.
My sole point is that one huge reason the gun control debate is going nowhere is that people’s positions are fuzzily defined and appear endlessly flexible. If polled, most Americans want gun control and yet it doesn’t seem to materialize. Possibly because advocates of gun control are awfully imprecise about what they want to control and how.
Like the term ‘assault weapon’ which is basically gibberish.
Now you might say that you have better things to do with your time than learn the precise difference between a direct gas impingement and a long-stroke piston and I certainly sympathize with that. But elected officials who are paid to know better have been noted to offer howlers that betray a complete lack of engineering knowledge when it comes to firearms.
Also, lastly, consider that what you want the law to DO does imply the confiscation of nearly all firearms in private hands in the US. Why should you consider this? Because trying to convince your fellow citizens to adopt that law is going to go an awful lot smoother if they don’t suspect you of lying when you say you aren’t after their guns.
If Rube-Goldberg machines of this nature are to be considered than the list of banned firearms must include bolt-action rifles, as well, because those can actually be converted into self-loaders by way of some clever mechanics. The tail end of WWI included a number of such devices including the US’s own Pedersen Device.
Well surely the best way to start the campaign for gun control is to make use of laws already on the books. Have you considered tipping off the ATF? People must fire these things at ranges, as such a modification is useless without practice. I suspect it’d be easy to organize to massively report these sort of thing.
To buy a properly papered fully automatic weapon in the US, you’ll be paying a lot of money. Probably not $10,000+ for something like a mini-uzi, but easily in the tens of thousands of dollars for anything with even minor historical value, at auction.
An NFA papered M60 went for nearly $52k at Rock Island. And that’s a remanufactured weapon. Basically bits and pieces of old M60s put together to make a functional one.
Suffice it to say, to get an NFA registered weapon is going to cost an obscene amount of money and the ownership for these kinds of legal weapons is almost entirely collectors, with a few nutjobs with more money than sense who actually shoot these things at the range.
The banned guns are pretty hard to get ahold of. But, you don’t need something like a banned M60, when an AR-15 that has a C-Mag or Beta-mag can fire a hundred rounds before you need to change magazines.
Is it possible to build an automatic weapon up from parts?
If people with legal weapons use them at the range, bits will wear out now and then. (“This is the axe of my fathers…”) So there must be a market for replacement parts. And it’s not as if it needs to be built up from an existing VIN or tail number.
I can’t say. Maybe the ATF does, but I really don’t know. I’m sure @Mister44 would be the man to ask on that one. I’m guessing that parts likely aren’t tracked if they don’t have a serial on them.
That’s partially true. Partially not. Guns have serial numbers, and modifying them is extremely illegal, and depending on the manufacturer, there might just be a serial on the lower receiver, to having matching serials on every field-strippable part of the weapon.
In anycase building up a restricted firearm from parts is still expensive as all hell, and a much cheaper, simpler, and less legally fraught way to achieve devastating firepower would be to just go to the gun shop and buy 20 ARs, and a lot of ammo and magazines.
Seriously, the AR-15 and the AK-pattern assault rifles, whether automatic, or semi-auto only are exquisitely engineered firearms that are the end product of decades of refinement toward becoming the perfect man-portable standard issue weapons of war. They are very effective weapons. They’re not anything else. They’re good for putting holes in things and that’s about it.
Unless you are using it from a fixed mount for area defence purposes, a fully automatic firearm is almost always less lethal than an equivalent semi-auto. The military stopped issuing full-auto assault rifles for a reason.
The full-auto aspect is not the key issue here. The Pulse nightclub shooter used a semi-auto, and this new bastard probably would have killed even more if he’d had the sense to switch it to semi-auto or burst mode.
He bought most of the guns in the months leading up to the shooting. As premeditated as the shooting was, it wasn’t as if he had the guns forever. Banning guns now will make things safer and safer over a long period of time. Have some hope, my friend.
Meaningful gun control reform in the present political environment is not going to happen. Anything supported by the right on this topic at this time is likely to be a politically biased attempt to disarm their victims.
Remove the fascists, then get to work on gun regulation.
It took decades of bad gun policy to make firearms this ubiquitous, it will probably take decades of good policy before the number in circulation gets back down to some sensible level. But we gotta start sometime.
Bump-firing is impractical and really inaccurate, and wouldn’t work well for something like fighting a war. But spraying down a large area with rapid fire is perfect if you’re a gunman firing into a crowd and you want to injure and kill as many people as possible.
You are underestimating the number of victims here. This attack alone had 500+ more people who will need ongoing medical treatment for gunshot wounds, some of whom likely will be forced into financial distress or medical bankruptcy as a result. There are another 22,000 people who are going to think twice before attending another mass gathering, and the countless people who witnessed the event secondhand who will have similar thoughts about large groups of people.
The trauma of suicide and targeted attacks are contained to the victims and loved ones, whereas the trauma of this attack will continue to resonate in the public psyche. The deaths here are the tragic epicenter of a spreading wave of trauma that will damage countless lives.
