FYI - Non-sporting arms, like AR-15s, can’t be imported.
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Family? Don’t you mean gun collection?
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And why would you when you can get a good american lower for around $50 and put the whole rifle together for under $400?
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I haven’t been around hunting or target practice culture in a while, so my joke may have been a misfire based on an outdated premise.
I was riffing on the popularity and abundance of the SKS, which in circles of folks I knew, was basically what you bought when you wanted an AR-15 but didn’t have the money to get one or the time to build one from parts.
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The overall murder rate is about half of what it was in the 80s and early 90s and is currently at or near historic lows. There are many theories for why this is, including increased gun ownership and right to carry laws. The Freakonomics theory was that legalized abortion was the biggest contributor in that it eliminated would-be criminals (they proposed that was about 50% of the decline and better policing, higher incarceration, and the decline of cocaine added up to the other 50%).
Almost every single factor that has been hypothesized is highly political and will be argued forever. There are surely hundreds of contributing factors in both directions and the true answer is a complex combination. It makes it easy to poke holes in any one theory as not being fully explanatory. Controlling the variables in a study is very difficult and susceptible to error since there are so many of them.
But as a whole, we seem to have forgotten how dangerous the US was in the 70s through 90s.
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Australia has had something like 3 mass shootings in over a decade since banning the general availability of firearms. The US has a mass shooting once a week. Even scaling for population the difference isn’t proportionate
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I know the number of firearms have gone up dramatically, but percentage of households or people owning guns has dropped since the 70s.
https://www.norc.org/PDFs/GSS%20Reports/GSS_Trends%20in%20Gun%20Ownership_US_1972-2014.pdf
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Nobody’s going to grab guns. It will never happen. The key is to enforce gun existing laws with severe penalties. Selling arms without a dealer license (eg, out of a car trunk at a gun show) should be a prison sentence. Selling guns without doing a background check should require a shop to surrender its license. Failure to register a gun that you own should result in prison. Let’s get the small-time weed offenders out of prison and fill those jail cells with people who actually pose a threat to people’s safety.
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One gun enthusiast I knew referred to number of murdered people in Las Vegas shooting as “score”.
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Missing from this article:
Nobody cares about Sony selling laptops.
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So freaking what? Many sports, even at Olympic level, are just calmed-down versions of activities that were once vital combat skills. Throwing the javelin and the discus, the biathalon, the pentathalon…you have no point there.
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That’s it! I’m just going to install a lava moat. I know it’s a lot of energy usage but it was that or mining bitcoin.
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Laser tag is simulated combat. So are chess and checkers.
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Ah ok. I think surplus Mosins and SKSs are still a thing, but they aren’t nearly as cheap as they were. Evidently they didn’t get included in the ban.
I was just making sure no one thought they were importing ARs from China. There is a 1989 law, or executive order by Bush that banned the import of 'non sporting rifles". So AKs, FALs, SA80s, and ARs (though I don’t think anyone was knocking them off back then.) or M-14 clones.
Now we need to know which causes greater energy usage, putting in a lava moat or mining bitcoin!
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With a shotgun. The very best home defense weapon is a short-barreled pump-action 12 guage shotgun loaded with buckshot. The spread gives you better chance of hitting with less need for careful aiming. At the ranges inside a normal house room, buckshot will do everything you need. A shotgun pellet that misses has a MUCH lower chance of blowing through a wall and killing a neighbor. And that sound of working the action on a pump gun is so iconic - sometimes just hearing that will convince people to give up and get out.
Yes, I know your question was in jest, but there are too many @#%!@s who actually believe that !@# that a weapon designed to be a high-speed bullet hose is actually what they want for defense.
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Yeah I seem to recall neither that nor the Clinton era bans affected them. I admit that joke was a deep cut both on the gun and computer side.
Free shrugs.
As a gun owner, sport shooter, and supporter of the 2nd Amendment, I say this about Colt’s decision: GOOD.
I don’t own an AR15 and never have and have never understood the desire to own one. It’s a freaking murdertoy, not a rifle. I’ll take my old surplus M14 any day.
99.9% of the people who own AR15s are head cases who play Ricky Ranger games in the hollow space they call a “mind” and they need therapy a hell of a lot more than they need a firearm.
If you think you “need” an AR15 for ANY reason, seek professional help. You need it.
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Aside from the standard magazine being 20 rounds instead of 30, how is an M14 any less dangerous than an AR-15? Or did you mean an M1 Garand?
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