Maybe if you took off those blinders and earmuffs off and actually LISTENED for a change, I wouldn’t have to wear blinders and earmuffs, because you’d agree with me.
[quote=“cpconstantine, post:17, topic:10635”]
first, define an 'assault rifle"[/quote]
OK, challenge accepted.
Mass, velocity, rate of fire, impact force – all vastly higher with an assault rifle versus a handgun. This is not my opinion. It is science and data and fact.
As I recall one of the issues at Newtown was that the teachers tried to protect the children with their bodies, but the AR-15 assault rifle bullets passed through the teachers easily.
So yeah. I’d be ecstatic if we could just stick to killing people with pistols and shotguns, thanks, and leave the bazookas and RPGs and assault rifles to the military.
3 Likes
Haw! Nice job imitating a mindless right-wing, gun-totin’ troll! 
5 Likes
hehe, first, kudos for using Box O’ Truth as a reference. those guys are awesome
Sadly, you fail the requirements however. Your issue here is with the ammunition. in this case, 5.56mm.
So, as promised, here is something functionally identical, that is not an ‘assault rifle’
http://www.keltecweapons.com/our-guns/plr-16/pistol/
the Kel-Tec PLR-16, it chambers 5.56mm rounds, takes AR style magazines. Legally. it’s a pistol.
your move.
Incorrect, my issue is with the size of the hole a given weapon produces in the human being you fire it at. I thought the image made that pretty clear.
1 Like
you’re still talking about the ammunition… the rifle doesn’t do that, the round does. You can also get AR’s chambered in the tiny 22LR round which (most of the time) does very little damage. if you want to argue that certain calibers of round should be banned, then make that argument for gawds sake. Can I still have my rifle if it only fires handgun rounds? cool, there are plenty of those too. 5.7mm is a pretty nice little round that can be fired from handguns and rifle alike too. The “size of the hole it makes” is only indirectly related to the platform it is fired from. You can’t win an argument on the basis of “I know it when i see it” - they already tried that with obscenity laws.
1 Like
.22LR is tiny, but 5.56x45 isn’t what most people would call large. As rifle rounds go, it’s fairly low-power, even if a rifle that fires it is frequently referred to as “high-powered,” dangerous, and ban-worthy while less-distinctive and much higher-powered hunting rifles are deemed to be okay. I honestly think that people just don’t like how it looks.
1 Like
Wait, the argument here isn’t that because not letting people carry assault rifles wouldn’t remove everything that lets them quickly kill large numbers of people, we ought to be ok with everyone carrying assault rifles, is it? Because there would be so much wrong with that argument.
2 Likes
That’s not my argument. My argument is:
- use science to measure the size of the hole the weapon will produce in a person.
- use science to measure how many holes of that size the weapon can produce in people in a given time frame.
If the answer to #1 is “24 inches” and the answer to #2 is “5 per second”, then there is a problem.
TL; DR
1 Like
As a gun control moderate I normally try to stay out of these things lest I take shit from both sides, but my tech-nerd side has to chime in on this.
You haven’t defined assault rifles, you’ve defined rifles. The NATO 5.56mm round is essentially* identical to the common Winchester .223 hunting round. If you’re in favor of banning hunting rifles, I can respect that on some level, but your definition would classify stuff like this bolt-action three-shot varmint rifle as an “assault” weapon, and that strikes me as intellectually dishonest.
Your definition also doesn’t have any relation to, for example, the one used by the 1994 Federal Assault Weapons Ban, which makes no reference to caliber, automatic fire, magazine size, or other measures of actual killing capacity, and instead is all about purely ergonomic features like detachable magazines, folding stocks, and pistol grips, or improbable attachments like bayonets and grenade launchers (as if bloody grenade launchers weren’t already regulated).
Look, “assault rifle” is a military term invented to describe then-new weapons that were capable of burst or fully-automatic fire (unlike traditional rifles), were light and easy to carry (unlike machine guns), but still fired rifle-caliber bullets capable of long-range accuracy (unlike submachine guns). Take away the autofire and what you have is nothing but a rifle. Tacking the word “assault” onto ordinary rifles serves no possible purpose but to make them sound scary and threatening to voters. That sort of weaselly dishonesty is bullshit when the NRA does it, and it’s still bullshit when gun-control advocates do it.
*There are minor differences, but the terminal ballistics are about the same.
1 Like
you’d be correct if rifles were the cause of most gun deaths in Amerca. They aren’t, so how is banning them a solution to gun deaths? I’m not a subscriber do the do something, anything school of risk mitigation. The wrong action is often worse than no action.
that’s a different argument from “ban assault rifles” then isn’t it, because lots of other things that you wouldn’t call out as an assault rifle could match your parameters. And if that’s your stance, fine, can we stop changing the goalposts now? And yes, technically speaking, you certainly could make a coherent argument for limits on muzzle energies in weaponry - it wouldn’t make a huge amount of difference of course, because that’s not the only factor governing round lethality (arguments over ‘stopping power’ have gone on for years in firearms circles). - but you’d be making a coherent argument at least.
As for rate of fire, I hate to break it to you dude, but civilians only have access to semi-automatic weaponry, and semiauto weapons fire as fast as you can pull the trigger. For some people, that’s very fast indeed.
4 Likes
The thing is, though, we have to rely on elected officials to do this, and the thing to do would be to disarm citizens, and do away with the War on Drugs. The thing is, they’d do the former but not the latter, and argue that cops need to continue to be militarized because of gangbangers and The Terrorists.
1 Like
Personally I find Mass Shootings to be a non-issue. They are so rare and uncommon that the chances of you being in one is extremely remote. The last thing we need is poorly thought out laws as a knee jerk reaction. Case in point the billions we have wasted in security theatre with the TSA.
To put things in perspective, since 1983 there have been ~560 deaths in mass shooting (defined as a shooting where 4 or more people died.) Last year 516 were murdered in Chicago alone. While sensational and tragic when it happens, it is an extremely rare occurrence.
People want to fixate on “assault rifles” (a completely subjective term), as big, bad, scary rifles that are just one messed up burrito order from ending the world as we know it. The simple fact is these guns are rarely used in crimes. Blunt objects, fists, and knives account for more murders than rifles (note, a rifle could mean a non-assault rifle, as the statistic do not differentiate the two.) This was a widely shown fact after CT.
When you actually look at the numbers, the AR-15 is simply not dealing the death portrayed by the the media and talking heads. The media gets so many things wrong about their gun violence reporting, it’s shameful they no longer have the integrity to do the most basic of fact checking. The AR-15 is the most popular platform on the market today. It is the Lego of guns, because you can start slapping on all kinds of crap to make it look and perform better. They became extremely popular around 2004 when Clinton’s Assault Rifle Ban sunset. Nothing makes Americans want something more than to tell them they can’t have it (booze, drugs, porn, etc).
Personally I don’t see the logic of punishing millions of gun owners because a very small fraction of people misuse or break the law with them. Drunk driving kills 22x as many people per year, yet I think most would agree it would be absurd to ban alcohol. Or at least close down all the bars so people would be less likely to be on the road after drinking.
1 Like
And what’s the point of laws that aren’t obeyed?
Oh, those scofflaws!
Scoffing at our laws, making a mockery of our system of justice. Why, I’ll show them! I’ll… shake my fist at them!
And that's pretty much it, right? I mean, if they're gonna ignore the law there's not a whole lot we can do about it.
<shrugs>
So I take it you’re a gun owner? Cuz you have a Constitutional right to like, be in a militia, right? And Americans have a right to guns because like the Constitution says, we need armed citizens to form militias in a hurry. In case like, the slaves decide to revolt. That’s exactly why people can have guns, right? It’s right there in the Constitution. So I’m just curious – which militia are you in? Do you like, get together and practice on weekends? Being Militia Guys and all?
Many folks are legally in a militia without even realizing it. In many states, every able bodied male between the ages of 18 and 45 is considered to be automatically part of the state militia, to be called upon as required (and provide their own weapons). You’d be surprised how many 19th century laws remain on the books today. Add that to the fact there there are actually a great many folks who ARE part of a drilling militia, especially out here in New England, where many of us literally live on top of major historical locations from the revolutionary war.
Hmm! Takes all kinds, I guess. Even romanticizing, totally out-of-it and anachronistic ones.
1 Like
Wow - really - slave revolts? You got nothing so you go with race baiting?
