Is gun storage a service universally offered by firing ranges?
From my sample size of zero firing ranges personally visited, I couldnāt begin to guessā¦
Weāve got two Supreme Court cases ā and a bunch of lower court cases ā that say otherwise. Hard to read Heller and McDonald and not see that the 2d Amendment covers the possession of ammunition. The scope of lots of other constitutional rights have been expanded (or, more properly, recognized to be broader) by the Courts. If the Constitution protects the right to contraception (and it does) within the far more amorphous (but real) right to privacy, it certainly protects the right to own ammunition.
3D printing.
What about it?
I said that people could focus upon criminalizing the manufacture of guns, rather than most efforts which assume that millions of firearms are still made every year - but that access should be controlled. Criminalizing manufacture is not meant to imply that illegal manufacture wouldnāt still be possible. By this logic people could decide that speeding limits are pointless, since there is ultimately no way to prevent people from speeding.
also @OtherMichael
There are far too many guns in circulation and they donāt exactly go bad over short periods of time. If we stopped making new guns today there are millions out there already.
Phasing out ownership with death is likely the best way to go an interesting option to me. Open Carry and Concealed Carry laws should be made to force 100% liability on the carrier and if anyone is injured they should be financially, as well as morally, liable. Make it so expensive and painful to hide from the truth about gun ownership that even the folks who believe the lies will be forced to stop and think.
Not to mention that numbers can be twisted many, many ways. From TFA:
Extrapolating Kleck-Gertz survey results to the Phoenix area would predict 98 defensive killings or injuries and 236 defensive firings during the study period. Instead, the study found a total of 3 defensive gun uses where the gun was fired,
There are many, many instances where simply showing that you are armed is enough to send a bad guy fleeing. A friend of mine from my high school days has, in fact, brandished his weapon three times in order to prevent him becoming the victim of a crime. Now, if you show your gun and scare a potential bad guy off, and yet you do not call the police, there is no record of this.
Estimates over the number of defensive gun uses vary, depending on the studyās population, criteria, time-period studied, and other factors. Higher end estimates by Kleck and Gertz show between 1 to 2.5 million DGUs in the United States each year.[1]:64ā65[2][3] Low end estimates cited by Hemenway show approximately 55,000-80,000 such uses each year.[4][5] Middle estimates have estimated approximately 1 million DGU incidents in the United States.
True - so why are millions more being made every year? Who is driving this demand? Iāll give you a hint, itās not sports shooters or gang bangers. If it was a toxic pollutant, I am skeptical that people would dismiss this by saying not to bother eliminating it simply because thereās already too much.
I donāt use firearms, but what about people such as myself, who do not exist as financial entities?
Most people with guns do not āownā them, rather, they are issued them. So these consequences would not apply to most people who carry and use them - who are the police and military. Who are also the ones vigorously driving the manufacture of firearms.
Itās like that famous brand of potato chip - Betcha canāt stop at just one!
Most gun owners donāt have just āaā gun - they usually have several. And many have more than a few. One guy I work with has dozens if not hundreds.
I do not think that is correct, but I am glad to be shown wrong. I will quickly google as I think the number of guns in the hands of police and the US military might not dwarf the number of privately owned guns.
From: http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/united-states
The defence forces of the United States are reported to have 2,700,000
Police in the United States are reported to have 1,150,000 firearms The estimated total number of guns (both licit and illicit) held by civilians in the United States is 270,000,000 to 310,000,000
The reason our cops are armed is because our populace is so heavily armed.
well, I say let there be a right to bear arms.
Oh you want AMMUNITION? HAHAHAHAH, good luck with that.
Ammo expires and becomes somewhat dodgy to use after a while. And itās not easy to make.
Nerve gas is awesome chemistry and using it is a blast (when done in a controlled environment with proper safety precautions)! What do you mean thatās not a good enough argument for being able to own large quantities of nerve gas?
Yeah, itās true - even as the number of guns owned in the US increases, the number of gun owners decreases. Itās a smaller and smaller number of people owning more and more guns.
Thatās an intriguing usage of āmiddleā, given the extremely broad range of the āhighā estimates.
Because ranges, as they currently exist, donāt really provide storage facilities. Instead, I donāt keep ammo on hand (since ranges usually require you to buy their ammo anyway).
Let me reply to you with my previous statement:
Personally, I advocate for community ownership of firearms.
I donāt believe that private firearms ownership is a worthwhile thing. I instead advocate community (not state!) ownership.
Not so much if well-stored. Some WW2-era ammo is still good as new. (And if you need high reliability, and still worry about the ammo, use a revolver. I had a few rounds of brand-new range-supplied ammo misfiring or case seizing at ejection, so I saw how a semi-auto can fail you in a critical moment. The added bulk of the cylinder is the cost of not having to rely on the ejection mechanism.)
Making ammo is not so easy, thatās true. However, there are ways. Again, the proliferation of home-scale machining tools will be an interesting game-changer here. For the propellants, there is the potential of having microreactors. I am harboring a speculative thought or two along those lines, using air and water and something organic (e.g. cotton) as feedstockā¦
Not entirely there yet. A combination of 3D printing for some parts and CNC milling for the rest, already here today as affordable off-the-shelf. Laser-melting, or a combo of metal deposition and CNC milling (you can do the deposition with a modded MIG welder as one of the toolheads), hopefully near future of garage shops everywhere.
People build pipe bombs neverthless. But they arenāt so desirable objects and are single-use only and their potential for both fun and defense is rather low.
Wannabe gun owners arenāt all machinists, and vice versa. But if you create the market, e.g. by not acting on the demand but pinching off the easier, mass-produced supply, and have money as a go-between, you will get machinists willing to provide whatever the purchaser asks for. From el-cheapo zip guns to higher-end pieces. There is a whole web of interrelations that determine this outcome.
If stored properly it can last for many years. Modern powders are stable for at least 50 years. I know people who have shot vintage stuff 100 years old and it worked fine. As long as it doesnāt get wet it should be fine. There might be some consistency issues with burn rate that makes the velocity inconsistent, but it will still go bang.
These numbers are drastically different from what I would expect! Unfortunately, I have no easy way to follow up on how they arrived at these numbers. The stats were compiled by one Aaron Karp. Thereās no specification here of what is meant by āsmall armsā, and I donāt have access to āThe Military Balanceā that he cites. I suspect that the US military chronically underestimates itās weaponry in hopes of obtaining ever more funding and hardware - not that I have any evidence of this. Also I need to wonder how this factors arms which are considered current and ready for use, versus older stuff which is stored away.
The ratios probably change significantly when larger weapons, artillery, and grenades are included.
Going by personal experience of my own eyes, I have seen far, far more carrying, intimidation with, and use of firearms by police and military in the US than by the civilian population. So even if the stats you found are accurate, and there are somehow hundreds of millions of privately held guns squirrelled away somewhere, I still consider defense of myself and my family based upon my own observations.
If they are public servants, then cops have no business arming themselves against the populace. And especially against unarmed people, which they routinely do.
This is the same military that keeps telling Congress āno, seriously, we donāt want that d**n tankā?
