How many people can a you kill with a single Big Mac?
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People do worry about soda and Big Macs, though, and the heart attacks that a steady diet of both might bring. Also car accidents, and strokes, and drowning, and death by shark and snake, and all sorts of things. Is there some kind of precedence that we’re all meant to follow?
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Agreed that mass shootings are not the low hanging fruit. Shootings of people who shouldn’t be shot are the problem to solve. Gun control is not only about keeping guns out of people who are bad with guns, but also about making people who are bad with guns know that others know they are bad with guns. Tracking who owns which guns and especially who owns which ammunition could help that tremendously.
A good start is simply keeping good track of how many guns are sold. Flagging guns as guns in credit card reporting is a no brainer.
Then compiling comprehensive statistics on gun deaths and injuries. Again tracking these in medical and insurance databases flagged as gun issues is a no brainer.
The post I was replying to was telling us that we shouldn’t worry about sales of assault rifles because handguns kill so many more. Set your precedence as you will.
“You say you’re building a l33t haxx0r PC, but we’re sending a squad over just in case”
You could probably grow enough botulism on there to kill everyone on Earth; there’s probably enough mass there to kill dozens of people, if you injected chunks of it into their veins.
How many people can be killed with a single handgun? With a nine or ten bullet clip, that’s an upper bound, but one that most people couldn’t reach; one school shooting with a Ruger MK III killed three, wounded three. That’s easily on the order of how many people you could run over with a car. If that’s really your measure, I’d go for a crowbar; doesn’t need reloading, and won’t break like a car.
In reality, the questions are a lot more complex. Guns get more concern than cars because they’re weapons, they have the practical use only of intimidating and killing humans and killing animals, and they’re used more frequently in intentional deaths (but far less frequently are a cause of unintentional deaths.) The very question of guns is singling out one (moderately infrequent) cause of death, gun-related deaths, because guns aren’t generally useful tools, and murder is considered a worse death than most others, or at least one more in the purview of government to deal with more than the diet-caused heart attacks. Accepting that, I see value in first focusing on weapons used in mass-shooting, since they have less practical value than other guns and school shootings and the like tend to cause more culture shock.
One if you shove it real good into their wind pipe.
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So you’re saying something like “ban 9mm”. Right? Mexico actually doesn’t allow any ammo the military uses. So instead of 9mm they have .38 Super. Only the Narcos have no problem finding 9mm, .223/5.56mm, and the guns to shoot them.
There are a lot of other less common but similar in function calibers. In the rifle market the ammo and gun makers are always looking for the next wildcatter round that can fill a niche. The new hotness is long distance shooting - bullets with high ballistic coefficientcy and high velocity to reduce bullet drop over long ranges.
But the point is: you ban 9mm/.223 will do little to nothing to combat crime. I suppose criminals will just use up their current supply (or more likely not use it unless they need it for, you know, crime) and then either steal or barrow a new gun that shoots what ever is left that is legal. The smart ones can order a new barrel and possibly a magazine and convert them to the new caliber. Actual enthusiasts will reload what they can, and then probably convert some to the new caliber. They may leave others alone for collectability. There is a whole niche market where people collect guns that shoot weird ass ammo that isn’t made any more. You have to take shells from other rounds and convert them by reshaping and trimming the brass.
These sort of laws aren’t looking at like a practical problem. Who is getting 500 rnds of 9mm for Christmas? People like me. Criminals aren’t buying hundreds of rounds of 9mm a year. They are buying a box a year - if that. Even those who go to the range one a month might do a box a month. These laws just fuck over the common, average owner with out curbing crime.
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I don’t understand why you think that rifles don’t have practical value. The things that I would consider to be socially-acceptable uses for guns are hunting and target shooting. The things that I would consider to be non-socially acceptable uses for guns would be killing other people.
Rifles, including assault rifles, are useful for hunting and target shooting. They are fairly impractical for killing people. It’s really had to conceal carry a rifle. It’s really hard to move around indoors with a rifle held at the ready. That’s probably why they are used for about 3-5% of the murders in the USA. They are impractical for shooting yourself with, too - the barrel puts the trigger more than an arm’s length away from your head.
Handguns are impractical for hunting; as they don’t have enough accurate range to be useful. The main use of them for target practice is preparing to kill other humans, although you could argue that pistol marksmanship is an interesting hobby because of how inaccurate they are. They are easy to conceal. They are cheaper than rifles. They are used for over 90% of murders in the United States. They seem to be the weapon of choice for gun-based suicide.
Even if you are talking about school shootings and mass shootings- the majority of the murders choose to use hand guns. The news pushes the stories with assault rifle murders and not the stories with pistol murders; which is why you can only remember four or five events from last year.
But as you said earlier, too many people want handguns “for protection” (ie., to kill other people with) and you want a gun ban, so banning the guns that you don’t like and they don’t like is easy, because the costs are all on other people. So if you can’t do the right thing and ban the guns that actually cause the problems, look busy and try to do something, right?
They are useful and used for finishing off wounded animals; no one wants to give a final shot in the head at zero range with a .30-06.
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Assault rifles and their semi-automatic cousins are one of the most efficient tools available if your goal is to slaughter a bunch of people in a short amount of time. The AR-15 is a civilian version of the US Military’s M16 rifle. It was designed for the purpose of killing a bunch of people from the very beginning. If you need a weapon like that to take down a deer you’re a shitty hunter.
Everything you say about the dangers of handguns is true, but we don’t have to choose between regulating handguns and regulating rifles.
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How many proposals have you heard to ban handguns? How many people in this thread want to ban handguns, as opposed to rifles, or all guns? If you advocate for banning rifles - first or only - then you are choosing between regulating handguns and regulating rifles.
Let’s find out!
- I support additional regulations for handgun ownership, but not for rifle/assault weapon ownership
- I support additional regulations for rifle/assault weapon ownership, but not for handgun ownership
- I support additional regulations for both handgun and rifle/assault weapon ownership
- I do not support additional regulations for owning either class of firearms
0
voters
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The perfect is the enemy of the good. If all I can do is reduce deaths due to people with semi-automatic weapons, that aren’t useful for hunting, then why shouldn’t I do that?
You want to ban handguns; fine. You can’t in the US. Even ignoring the Second Amendment and the current court-supported interpretations thereof, you simply don’t have the votes; less than 30% of Americans support a handgun ban. So basically all you’re doing is looking busy and acting like you’re going to do the impossible.
That’s like saying anyone who uses a Corvette to drive to work is a shitty driver.
ARs and the like used for deer hunting are used in the same manner with one or two rounds per deer. Typically. Most hunting regs also limit the amount of ammo in the gun, i.e. 5 rounds which is typical of most bolt actions.
Again capability doesn’t mean that is how it i used. A lever action .357 mag can hold 11 rounds and yet people don’t hunt dear with them like Chuck Conners in the opening of The Rifleman.
For anyone who doesn’t get that reference:
Since we’re talking about military hardware adapted for civilian use I’d say a better analogy would be someone claiming they needed an armored humvee or MRAP to drive to work. Except that even humvees and MRAPS weren’t actually designed to kill people.
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Everything you said about handguns is true for assault rifles too, so I agree: it’s useless, and we might as well give up.
I suppose that is a better analogy. But if one manages to find a street legal MRAP, there isn’t any harm in driving it to work.
My continued issue is the constant dismissal of the actual “legitimate” uses people use them for every day - insisting some how their original intended “purpose” is their only possible use. It ignores actual reality vs the reality that I suppose “could be”. In this specific example. the comment suggests the obviously conclusion is anyone using one of these MUST be a shitty hunter, which ignores the most likely hundreds of thousands of people who used one to hunt, but in the same manner as any other rifle.
This is where the analogy breaks down, because if psychos were using civilian-issue MRAPs to kill dozens of people at a time on a regular basis then few if any people would be fighting to keep MRAPs legal just because some people liked to use them for driving to work.
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