Licencing is a Trojan horse. If you want to stop mass shootings you need to remove guns. Completely. Allowing people to have them with a licence doesn’t actually do anything. Do you think that the Las Vegas shooter couldn’t have gotten any licence you could reasonably propose? He was rich, and gave every indication of being an entirely normal person right up to the point when he wasn’t.
The only thing licencing does, really, is make it hard-to-impossible for the poor or under-privileged to have guns.
I don’t like that one bit. Too much of a GOPy solution.
To control guns for the purposes of stopping mass shootings you need to ban them. Entirely. Or ban any effective firearms or firearms that can be converted into effective firearms. So anything past a single-shot or maybe a double rifle. And even a double-barreled shotgun can be fired distressingly fast if you take the time to learn.
First, America isn’t Australia. Australia wasn’t drowning in blood before it instituted the ban. In fact, it could institute the ban so painlessly because it didn’t need them as badly.
Second, Australia’s legislation is a ban on all effective firearms anyway. It’s not ‘licensing.’ It’s “you can own single-shot rifles and some handguns and that only if you clear many hurdles.”
Third, they still have problems. A massacre in 2002 and a hostage situation that, but for luck, would have been a massacre in 2014. And that is in a country which really likes its gun control. Huge support across the board. Massive compliance.
(side note: AU had 700 firearms deaths in 1987, when their popn was 16.25M. Scaled to a popn of 325.7M that would equate to 14,000 firearms deaths, or a bit less than half the US total today. So “better”, but very far from “great”. Is 14k deaths ‘swimming in blood’? That’s up to you to decide.)
Second, Australia’s legislation is a ban on all effective firearms anyway. It’s not ‘licensing.’ It’s “you can own single-shot rifles and some handguns and that only if you clear many hurdles.”
No, it isn’t. You can own a machine gun in Australia, if that is what your heart desires.
Third, they still have problems. A massacre in 2002 and a hostage situation that, but for luck, would have been a massacre in 2014.
The two examples you give are not representative examples of a wider problem, they are the complete problem space. You’ve listed every example of multiple firearms deaths in Australia since 1996^, and neither of them cross the threshold for many definitions of ‘mass shooting’.
Calling the outcome of the Sydney Siege “luck” is … contestable.
^ edit: wait, you missed the Hunt family massacre, the Hectorville siege, and Wright St. But none of those fit the definition of mass shooting either. Yet even if you do classify all five incidents as ‘mass shootings’, that still does not making licencing ineffective - that you would do so is pretty much a textbook example of the perfect solution fallacy.
No, no, no, you misunderstand me. I’m saying it worked in Australia and even in Australia to which it is well-suited, it’s imperfect. It’s not the quest for a ‘perfect’ solution. Just one that’ll actually do some good. And in America, that’s a lot more than merely licencing. It’s a near-complete ban of effective firearms.
And as for ‘machine gun,’ I’m not an Australian lawyer but everywhere I look it says that they banned automatic and semiautomatic rifles. That’s what people cite when endorsing the Australian position.
Something, incidentally, that apparently the Australian ambassador to the US would rather people wouldn’t do. Man might be a fruitcake, though. I was just looking for any way you could own a machine gun in Australia and that came up.
Having cast bullets for percussion cap black powder and reloaded cartridges for carbines, I can tell you that it is not easier to make your own ammo. Now if you have a supply of brass, powder and primers then it’s super easy and a lot of gun clubs do this to keep costs down and reuse spent brass.
Swiss regulation is partially done through regulation of ammunition. This is necessary as guns are quite common through militia membership there.
Citing examples of where regulation is successful is irrelevant unless you can cite specific instances of it stopping 3D printing and DIY (like our 80% lower loophole).
Regulate brass, power or primers then you more than than just a “cute” solution.
This whole concept is utterly idiotic.
No-one is going to spend several hundred dollars for a 3D printer, plus several hundred more for the computer required to perform the slicing (plus internet fees, etc.) to print a receiver for a gun that will likely only work for a couple shots, when they can spend $49 (even cheaper on sale) at Harbor Freight for a drill press and make one out of scrap aluminum that can withstand thousands of shots. People have been doing this since guns were invented (using much more primitive tools than a drill press). 3D printers do nothing to make it “easier” to make an actually usable gun. I haven’t even mentioned the countless hours it takes to be proficient at using a 3D printer to print accurate objects (it takes months of research if you spend less than a grand on one). CAD, slicers, printer tuning and calibrating, etc. is a lot to take in.
In case you have no idea what I’m talking about, the “receiver” is the one part of a gun that legally makes it a gun (not kidding, the law is stupid). All the rest of the parts can be purchased without a license as they are just parts. The law only regulates the receiver, not the barrel, which is what makes guns accurate.
The market for drugs is quite different.
A) Drugs are insanely lucrative when compared to the risk, whereas gun manufacturing is more risk than profit. An AR-15 is about 8 pounds and can legally be purchased in the States for around $800. There was an article on BoingBoing just now about a dude smuggling 9 pounds of cocaine worth 120K. Even doubling the price of an illegal AR-15 gets you nowhere near the street value of drugs.
B) Drugs have repeat customers. Repeat customers for a gun smuggler just makes them a bigger target. Which means that gun smugglers have a larger customer acquisition cost.
C) The RCMP list 3 sources of illegal guns: smuggling, theft and manufacturing. There are no known domestic manufacturers.
All told drugs are not a good analogy for the illegal gun trade. The biggest boon for the illegal gun trade in Canada are the United States’ lax gun laws. I’m pretty sure it’s the same internally.
The ammunition is the gun, in the same way that printer cartridges are the printer. Anything can be a gun. A car fuse holder will fire a .22 cartridge just fine.
George Cayley was an early aircraft inventor, who probably would have had the first powered flight if not for the fact that the internal combustion gasoline engine had not yet been invented.
So he experimented with gunpowder-fuelled engines…
Looking at that list, provided it is reliable, I stand by my impression from earlier, @JonS . Effective weapons are effectively banned. Though you might be able to do a fair bit of mischief with a .22LR semiautomatic, but you’d have to be a farmer for that. And I’m not sure what sort of handguns are allowed. I mean, you put a shoulder-stock on something as ancient as a Mauser C96 and it’s all of a sudden a handy-dandy pistol-caliber carbine which you need to ban, too.
Also, I don’t know what the stance on lever-action rifles is. Technically not semiauto but a minimum of training permits quite sprightly rates of fire. And straight-pull bolt action rifles can be cobbled into semiautos with a bag of mechanical odds and ends and a free afternoon, so that’s a risk. And, naturally, bolt-action rifles that aren’t straight-pull can technically be converted to fire as self-loaders but all the attempts to do so during WWI were… imperfect to the best of my recollection.
Probably not actually. The reason potatoes are so good is because they are dense but not hard, so it doesn’t damage the walls of the pipe on the way out (or in). You frequently shear off the edges of the potato going in which forms a perfect seal.
Can you find me numbers on the number of licenses that been given for category D? I tried and failed, but maybe being in Australia your search engines are better focused. Because the restrictions appear to be so tight, that it is unattainable for most people.
TECHNICALLY you can get a conceal carry permit in NYC. But unless you are highly connected, you won’t get one.
It is disingenuous to say “see, it is legal” when it is unattainable for all but a few elites.
If you are in the US, a ‘sort of’ flamethrower is ~$30-40 from harbor freight, and is generally used for weed control. (and that’s the fancy one with the built in igniter.) You’ll need to rig up a backpack or carrier for the 20lb propane tank it feeds from, but I leave that as an exercise for the reader.
No idea of numbers, but AFAIAA it works exactly as advertised.
If you make a living as a professional shooter (e.g. feral animal extermination, kangaroo hunting, etc.), then you can get a Category D licence. If you’re just pretending to have a shooting business as a pretext for getting a bigger gun, then no.
