Every one needs to stop thinking about this in terms of stopping crime. If the measure of a criminal law was whether it can prevent all instances of the act it criminalizes, or preclude the violation of the law itself. We’d have legalized murder by now.
More over most of the things we regulate in the ways that people are suggesting we regulate guns aren’t regulated with that in mind at all, or as the major driver. We don’t regulate cars and driving due to their potential use in crime. We do so primarily for public safety, and a host of other factors like environmental impact. Even things like explosives and dangerous chemicals are not primarily regulated on grounds of crime, even as that’s a consideration in precisely how we regulate particular explosive and chemicals.
The tendency to boils this all down to crime and whether it can prevent it in general, as opposed to mitigating its impacts and format. Is a canard. A canard that does two things. It re-frames the conversation down to one of those very specific things, that becomes practically impossible to effect. Because substantially laws do not prevent crimes. They can disincentive particular actions by making them criminal, and offer legal redress when they happen anyway.
And of course it shoves the determination back down into the personal protection mentality. Where crime is everywhere, everyone is always at risk from unpreventable violent crime. And guns are the solution. Basically its a approach to looking at the issue that ensures only one side of it gets heard.
Meanwhile the crime rate is the lowest its every been, and we are well aware that such things track more with social and economic issues and are more impacted by policing methods and policy level stuff like regulatory frame works than they are by putative criminal justice and whether every house is armed to the teeth. A disproportionate amount of fire arms deaths in this country are the result of suicides and accidents. Which are for the most part non-criminal. Those criminal shootings we have happen disproportionately within households or close associates. And in particular with in romantic relationships with a history of domestic violence.
While mass and spree killings are still comparatively rare in terms of individual risk, a disproportionate amount of them in the US (as compared to other nations) involve not just guns, but very particular guns. And that is both in terms of classic, often personally motivated, spree killings (where blunt object, fire, and knives are often most common) and in the terror attacks (where vehicles, bombs, and sabotagey things like fire and derailings are more frequent outside the US, even in places with access to guns).
So “crime” of the type we’re supposed to focus on in this, is very much not the issue. As random street crime and even organized crime aren’t a particularly big driver of the safety issues here, and frankly aren’t all that much of a presence for most individuals. Or even the population in total. But sticking to those shootings for a moment. At this point we’re used to hearing that these people would have passed a background check, or been able to get a permit, and required their gun (technically) legally. Though there have been exceptions. But a good portion of these shooters did not pass a background check, and did not have a permit. They did not even undergo one, and a permit was not required for one reason or another. And this is a little more pertinent to the background checks. But even though most of these guys could have easily acquired a gun through the background check system, they did not. They still sought out a background check-less purchase, whether private or gun show to acquire that gun. This is apparently a much bigger issue in those domestic violence shootings, where even where there is a record and rulings barring some one from owning guns (or at least purchasing new ones). They always seem to end up getting them back, or pop up with a gun acquired through personal transfer, or a trip out of state.
That’s the entire thing behind the whole straw purchase thing, every transfer involved there may be entirely legal. But the entire idea is exploit the mish mash of inconsistent regulations we have, which vary heavily even within states to avoid these sorts of checks. And often enough to do so legally. Even outside that system (which yes does involve a lot of illegal sales, and gun running for organized crime). There’s an awful lot of people ordering online, seeking out gun shows, pulling private sales on the secondary market, the whole home built/ghost gun thing, who are specifically doing so to avoid the paper trail. Even though they don’t need to. And while a fair bit of that is probably standard anti-government paranoia, and ultimately harmless. For the shooters and our wive beaters there’s a pretty obvious reason why.
You can’t seize a gun if you don’t know or can’t establish that it exists. And warnings about risky behavior and threats carry a lot less weight when there’s no “holy shit he just bought 12 guns” moment.
What you’re looking at is a massive inter-state commerce problem, where the laws of one area are undermined by another. As well as a big gaping, often totally legal hole in the practical apparatus for enforcement, and practical attempts to impact public safety and the real crime modalities that are a day to day problem. Which is exactly the sort of thing that is the purview of the federal government, and requires plugging those holes nationally.
Do we though? Cause domestic violence is a curiously common precursor to that vast bulk of murders and shootings that are perpetrated by some one closely known to the victim (and almost always a significant other statistically).
While conviction with certain charges related to domestic violence will prevent you from passing a background check, and see a fire arms license revoked and guns seized/surrendered. That is a very hard thing to make happen. Aside from cultural and institutional bars to actually carrying it out. Most domestic violence goes unreported and uncharged. While the sort of no-charges filed, repeated police report history most habitual abusers have creates a paper trail and a public record. What it typically doesn’t do is flag a background check, or (most of the time) provide a legal basis for removing guns for a household. When it does, often if there is assumed to be an immediate danger or a fire arm was involved in the incident, when those charges aren’t filed. Or the abuser doesn’t get convicted. Those guns go back. Usually in pretty short order.
On top of that when we’re looking at these thing. A lot of the time a fire arm is purchased, frequently enough legally, in the lead up to the attack (think real hard about those loop holes). The most dangerous period for a victim of domestic violence is the 3 months after they leave, 2nd most dangerous is in and around any attempt at redress. Whether that is just calling the police, or actually filing charges and fighting hard to make them stick.
Domestic violence runs through a well understood escalation cycle. And calls to police, out reach to family, or intervention of strangers, tends to happen during peaks of escalation. That intervention deprives the abuser of control, and they seek to reassert that control by escalating further. The more control taken away, the more brutal the escalation. And it is more common that not for a gun to be acquired, legally, during this escalation. Or after some one has left. Which means that the opportunity to remove that gun from the equation is often already passed, even if it is acquired in legal fashion. It becomes much harder to predict and prevent if that gun is, legally, acquired without a paper trail.
And we see this dynamic a lot with the mass shooters. There are plenty of exceptions. But the bulk of these guys seem to acquire the gun in the lead up and planning stages not long before they carry out the attack. Again if that is done in a totally legal way, that none the less lacks a paper trail. All those other warning signs we keep hearing were flagged in the lead up. Well they look like something a lot different.
This is a pretty major hole. And the “red flag” and associated fire arms restraining orders under discussion actually come out of discussions on how to plug it. Often time with these domestic abuse murders, where there is any history of police interaction at all. The authorities know full well what is likely to happen. If not that it is going to happen, which is itself often pretty fucking clear. And provided they care (not caring being one of the problems here), there is often very little they can do. We do not have a legal frame work, and the criminal justice system often does not have the authority, to do things that are known to be necessary. When they are necessary, or for long enough to prevent it. Flagging such people in the background check systems. And allowing victims or authorities to request courts remove known guns and suspend fire arms licenses for fixed terms (longer than is currently possible). Is one proposal for how to do that.
And it will not work without universal background checks.
The GOP seems bound and determined to move that over to a mental health flag. And that is a part of the original concept, in part originally targeted at suicides which often have a really similar dynamic in terms of when guns are acquired and difficulty of getting them out of the house. Also at “danger to others” and other temporary psych hold sort of things that apply more directly to the domestic violence circumstance. And the fact that threats of suicide, and even suicide attempts are one method abusers use to manipulate victims and assert control, and often occur in the lead up to violent escalation and killings. But the current discussion seems to want to wedge it into a nebulously useful, disturbing, people with routine psych problems can’t have guns direction. Even though the bulk of the mass shooters aren’t the sort of crazy bananas that makes some one a danger to the public.
This is also the major reason we instituted wait periods and more intense licensing and registration for hand guns in the 90’s. Hand guns at the time were vastly over represented in all of this. But especially in the suicides and the murder by associates (which are disproportionately connected to domestic violence).
There’s nothing much the law can do to convince these people, or prevent them from making the attempt. But it can make it more difficult for them to do so, and create a regulatory frame work that makes it possible to intercede.
I would not go by TV. Prop armories have to comply with the same regulations as everyone else, and bans on automatic and some other classes of weapons mean that they’re garnering supply of anything automatic or similarly restricted on the same “pre-ban” basis as anyone/where else.
What this means is that actual, real world accurate, military weapons are in short supply. And what a prop armory stocks is tied intimately to its licensing level. This makes certain props, and certain prop houses more expensive. It’s relatively common to purchase newly manufactured, legal, non-military fire arms and customize them to either more closely resemble military weapons they were derived from. Or substitute them (you see a lot of long barreled semi-auto MP5 derivatives). Or on the budget end purchase common military enough weapons, and bolt unrelated parts and cosmetic shit to them to make them look like plausibly military.
Mini-14s were a popular option for that in the 70’s an 80’s because they were cheaply available, especially used. But almost anything you see like that is entirely custom done by a prop house rather than something off the shelf. Lower the budget the more common that was, and anything produced for a film was often sold off to or reused by TV productions where budgets are lower. I might be mis-remembering but IIRC the A-Team guns were acquired/re-purposed from Escape From New York.
We can go back to the pig discussion from before. These are not people are thinking “wouldn’t it be cool to be a sniper” or looking to put the biggest hole possible in the 5 people standing closest to them. The goal is to kill as many people as possible, in as short a time frame as possible. Pistol’s do not offer the same medium range, damage potential, or accuracy as the assault rifles do. Pistols are still a common elements in these, and they were more common (along with shot guns) before the expiration of the AWB and the recent boom in tactical .223 semi-autos. In general body counts were lower, and still are lower where a pistols are the primary weapon used.
These are generally speaking not people looking to get away, looking to target specific or single people. And it and I would not call it the “zeitgeist”. These idiots have over time iterated on a theme, and arrived at the very thing these rifles are designed for. And to say it again you’re never going to remove all the danger no matter what the subject.
Here’s the thing about that.
The sort of military sniping you’re talking about takes a shit ton of training. And in the sniping over marksman role. It involves two people. Range finding equipment. And math. Even simply firing over range with the semi-auto, lower caliber guns, requires quite a lot of practice and training to do well. There have been a number of these killers who have been experienced shooters or even military trained. But the bulk of them appear to be relatively new to it. And there is a definite trend of acquiring the guns and learning to use them in the immediate run up to the attack. Often in a time scale of less than one year. I am a fairly experienced shooter (or at least a good shot). And I have no clue how to properly use a scope. I could run out and grab a scoped rifle right now, and without significant figuring it out. I’d probably shoot better with the iron sights at normal target ranges. Anything long range would be hopeless.
Now I have fired a .223 AR15 right next to a .308 Garand, since you brought up .308 earlier. And more over I did this standing right next to a friend who had never fired a gun before.
It was absolutely startling how fast, and how easily you could get very accurate shots out of the AR, at nearly any range we shot it at. Especially compared to the Garand. And that went for my friend as well. He couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn with the Garand after the first shot, but with the AR he clustered up towards the center of the paper pretty much from the start. And shooting them right next to each other. In the time it took me to put 5 rounds accurately on a target, he’d put like 15 up there.
A lot looser grouping sure. But when its shooting people in the chest rather than who gets closest to the middle on a paper target. That doesn’t matter.
So this:
Is baseball states. It doesn’t matter for the discussion. The existence of a specialized military role, or a specialized round or gun isn’t really pertinent. You don’t need to wonder why sniper attacks aren’t happening. Cause the answer is that terrorists are looking to do the sort of things that snipers are for. You don’t need to ponder why they aren’t using whichever round, because those rounds aren’t meant for what they’d like to do. And you don’t need to wonder if snipers would opt for semi-auto .223 tacticool rifles, because you can look up the few of there have been over the last decade and see that they have. Hell the Vegas shooter was essentially operating as a sniper, bump stocks or not, and he had a room stocked with guns of various sorts. Including scoped sniper style, bolt actions. But most of what he brought, and the guns he opted to start with. Were .223 assault rifles.
Listing off ammo formats and focusing on the thing that isn’t happening doesn’t address the fundamentals of what is happening. And this is very much what I mentioned before about specificity. Narrow in on this one dynamic, and since its very, very hard to figure out a way to impact that, without impacting anything else. It looks like there’s not practical solution. And then there’s this also potentially dangerous thing and it looks even less effective because it won’t impact that.
If you take a step back you start to notice there are some common culprits, some common gaps. That there may be a problem beyond “crime” and that our response to safety issues and even crime does not have to completely prefigure them.
“Militia”
There’s some utility in diving down into it and figuring out how these things work. Is this thing really dangerous? How and why? Where are these things being used how and by whom? When you get right down to it “I like it” is as valid a justification as anything else for just about any category of thing you might think up. And I generally believe that the law should avoid restricting people’s actions and what’s available to them, without some compelling public interest for doing so. In some instances where to draw the line on that is pretty clear, like say murder. And in others it much less so, even when its absolutely clear that restriction is necessary. In cases like that it pays to actually understand what you’re looking at so you can weigh the validity of claims you hear, and figure out how to actually do the thing.
Most of the interest I’ve got in fire arms, and pretty much any interest I have at all in actually shooting them. Rolls out of that. I’ve gone and done things like I described above with the two different military, semi auto rifles. That taught me something important.
Narrowing the conversation to who can name more kinds of bullets is not that.
