This is the *gate of public outrage!
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Damn right. What we need in the gun control debate is more vague terms so we can line up massive political will behind banning ‘assault weapons’ which turn out to be a loose amalgam of features that make guns scary but not particularly effective, changing nothing.
That’s the way forward! In fact, I propose we ban bad guns. That’ll do it.
Look, people, if you want to ban all guns fine. That’s a position. You needn’t know anything about guns, just ban them all. But if your position is that some guns are to be banned and some aren’t, you have to draw the line somehow, and that requires basic knowledge of how guns work. Otherwise you don’t really have a position and, thus, nothing to talk about, and you end up banning pistol grips instead of, say, anything that takes a STANAG magazine.
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If I could be emperor and just have it my way, I wouldn’t ban firearms.
I’d ban firearms that have detachable magazines, and integral magazines with more than 6 rounds.
Enjoy your hunting rifles, your revolvers, and your home defense shotguns.
Leave weapons of war for the army.
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See, that is an enforceable proposition. Probably. Unfortunately, modding a gun for auto-fire is tricky. Modding a gun to take more bullets is depressingly easy since none of the parts you’d be diddling with take a lot of pressure. A lot depends on how you feed the internal magazine. Rifles with that sort of design tended to use clips which, honestly, don’t slow you down much. You could mandate something like a lever-action which is the devil to load but doesn’t work with modern bullets very well.
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Yeah, there’s complicated extra stuff. Like, I’d outlaw stripper clips, en-block clips and guns must have their stripper clip guides removed to be compliant etc.
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Oh, yeah, a Mannlicher-style clip would just render the exercise pointless. You could probably sweeten the deal by offering to as tit-for-tat to expand the ‘destructive device’ limit to .700 or .950 for all I care. It satisfies the gun collectors who get to play with massive rifles and things, and their utility in shooting many people is effectively nil since the rifle will either break your shoulder or will weigh about a hundred pounds. And, let’s see, make an exception for lever-action tube-magazine rifles and call it something like American Traditional Firearms Act.
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Gee, if only there were some prior art that could be used as a model for legislation that allows ownership of practically any type of firearm - up to and including fully automatic and belt fed - while imposing appropriate responsibilities that results in negligible levels of firearms violence.
Oh well. Such a shame that this is just an insoluble riddle wrapped in an enigma surrounded by a huge body count.
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Okay lets ban guns with a muzzle velocity greater than 500 m/s.
Sure there is prior art. But if you can get the political will to implement regulations as sweeping as, say, the system used in the UK, then the debate is over.
But since you don’t, and the debate is still going on, some level of conversation might be necessary. Hence the need to know what you are talking about.
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Nope. Your semantic dick waving is irrelevant.
The answer already exists, so there’s no need to reinvent that wheel. You just need to stop derailing and get the fuck on with it.
Oooh. That’s interesting. I mean, you’d get one hell of a push-back from hunters since you can’t really reliably hunt large game with that sort of speed, but it’s a pretty reasonable way to talk about it. Basically means you allow pistol cartridges and not rifle ones.
That said, while it would have probably stopped the Las Vegas shooter, I fear it may not be going far enough. Somebody with a brace of pistols loaded in .40S&W, say, could still wander into a crowd and do terrible harm.
I don’t need to do anything. I’m not American. I don’t get a say in their laws. And ‘the answer’ is only the answer if it gets voted in. Which it won’t because there’s no political will to do so and one huge reason there isn’t political will to do so is because of the overweening smugness of the occasional gun-control proponent.
Others are well-meaning, wonderful people, but it takes just one asshat to undo the careful diplomacy and bridge-building of dozens of good folk.
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Is that what you think you’re doing? Ooookay then.
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No, I’m talking on an internet forum about questions of policy, something I’m interested in. I thought that talking was rather the point. Why, what are you doing?
I can’t do careful diplomacy and bridge-building on this subject because I’m not American.
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As usual, see Australia.
Yes, a mechanically-minded Oz farmer could modify his limited-capacity semi-auto hunting rifle into something approaching a military weapon.
But if he were to be caught with it, he’d be facing serious criminal penalties, even if it had never been fired. Our cops take that sort of thing seriously enough that almost nobody bothers to test them.
How we classify guns, quoted from that interview:
the government established different types of firearms for different categories of guns and ruled that each would need different licenses. Here’s roughly how it works:
Category A is .22s, shotguns and air rifles. That’s the easiest license to obtain. No semiautomatics are allowed.
Category B is for center fire rifles. You have to provide a reason for why you need a more powerful gun. I shoot feral pigs and foxes; that’s a valid reason. Again, no semiautomatics.
Category C is available only to farmers; they can own a semiautomatic shotgun or .22 but the cartridges are limited to five shots for the shotgun and 10 shots for the .22.
Category D, for semiautomatic guns and rifles, is only for professional shooters: you have to have a registered business and prove that you are earning an income through shooting.
An H license is for handguns. If you want to buy a pistol in Australia you’ve got to be a member of a target pistol club. You’ve got to do a minimum of eight competition shoots per year to keep your license. If you don’t, you lose it.
Category G is for collectors. For that you’ve got to attend at least one meeting per year.
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Yeah. that’s roughly how some European countries do it. And it would obviously solve the mass shooting issue, at least for those who came by their arms legally.
But do you think it’s possible to push something like that through the necessary legal steps? Because that’s the rub, isn’t it. Not just coming up with a regulatory regime, but one that is fit for purpose (i.e. stops mass shootings insofar as that is possible) and yet is politically possible.
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It’s pretty clear that as long as the NRA exists, effective gun control is not politically possible. It has too much influence on too many politicians contrary to what the human constituency wants.
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Not particularly relevant, from my perspective.
The Trumpists are charging towards war, environmental collapse and unrestrained fascism. I don’t see a realistic chance of a Constitutional solution, so we’re left with two options: they are allowed to continue [1], or they are overthrown via revolution [2].
.
[1] And the entire planet is fucked to a genocidal degree.
[2] And many impossible things become possible.
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Law has not caught up with not just the technological change in firearm development, but also the change in both military doctrine, law enforcement, and the nature of government itself.
Ignoring the fact that firearms in the 18th century were muzzling loading muskets, the concept for national defense was that every citizen was also a part time soldier. The founders distrusted the idea of standing armies and like the idea of a military that was compose of part time militias that could only be called on by the President in the event of a national emergency like an invasion or uprising.
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I feel like most of the modern left’s problems and failures are down to this thing where we turn on anyone who doesn’t agree with us hard enough. The right are mostly fuckers, but they’ve got discipline. They don’t spend half their energy attacking their own allies.
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