One of the simplest thing you can do with a gun is shoot it at another person, and that’s always banned. And so far as I know there isn’t even a recreational use for shooting inaccurately at a massed target. So…not sure why you are arguing for them here.
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I heard banning things is impossible
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The problem with bump stocks are they exploiting the physics of the mechanical operation of the firearm, while not performing an actual mechanical function that would classify it as a machine gun. In fact when they first game out, the ATF ruled that they weren’t considered machine guns. You can do the same thing with your belt loop and finger. Some guns can do the same thing with a string and key ring.
Trump’s EO had the ATF reclassify them. The problem with the ATF making rulings on what it considers what - and worse - changing their mind after years of saying something different - is that it doesn’t really have the law on their side. It is the ATFs interpretation. (They did a similar thing with Forced Reset Triggers recently, which the ATF is actively going out and knocking on doors to confiscate them.)
Carefully crafted legislation could shore up this grey area, but given the current make up of the House, I don’t see that happening for the next 2 years. Maybe they could have done it during Biden’s first two years.
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There have been no mass attacks in the US using ricin. It’s easy to produce from castor beans.
It’s foolish that ricin is illegal
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Because mass killing is “useful”… I mean, who needs all those useless human beings not being shot. /s
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How about we don’t joke about dead children. why is that so difficult.
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Mandatory Blackadder:
George: You know, that’s the thing I don’t really understand about you, Cap. You’re a professional soldier, and yet, sometimes you sound as though you bally well haven’t enjoyed soldiering at all.
Edmund: Well, you see, George, I did like it, back in the old days when the prerequisite of a British campaign was that the enemy should under no circumstances carry guns – even spears made us think twice. The kind of people we liked to fight were two feet tall and armed with dry grass.
George: Now, come off it, sir – what about Mboto Gorge, for heaven’s sake?
Edmund: Yes, that was a bit of a nasty one – ten thousand Watusi warriors armed to the teeth with kiwi fruit and guava halves. After the battle, instead of taking prisoners, we simply made a huge fruit salad.
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That should make them easier to ban. It’s rather simple: any off-the-shelf mechanism that enables rapid fire or enhances rate-of-fire is banned. See? Anyone who wants to Macgyver something together and practice with it is good-to-go. But if a LEO walks into a gun store and sees a bump stock for sale, that gun dealer loses their license.
Pretending that nothing can be banned is not the same as it being impossible.
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I’m sure they will get right on this once they are done investigating Hunter Biden’s laptop in the hope that they can find something they can use to damage Joe Biden, investigating the “weaponization on of the DOJ” (never mind that they were fine when it was Trump actually doing this), defunding everything they can (other than the military), show trials of Dr. Fauci, investigating why “jobs are going to China” (because of their beloved capitalism and deregulation, naturally), shutting down the government to make Biden look bad, and fixing the “crisis” at the southern border (that was made exponentially worse by Trump policies).
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That’s not a compelling argument. Just because something is “simple” doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be allowed to sell or mass-produce it. Lots of banned/illegal things are simple.
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Exactly. And sometimes, knowing you can’t totally eradicate something with a ban (which is almost everything), the ban is effective at, first reducing the overall number of people who have that thing, because lots of people choose not to flout laws, and second, to have a means of prosecuting someone if they do have that banned thing.
I think banning marijuana was silly for several reasons, but I’ve never heard anyone say you shouldn’t try to ban it because it is a literal weed. 
Or at least not on the level that gun advocates constantly claim any bans or restrictions are just impossible!
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Houses, gasoline, and matches are all legal. What’s up with all these courts saying you can’t simply put the three together?
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it’s always telling that what conservatives attempt to ban.
books about gay and trans people - oh, and gay and trans people? top of the list. stopping needless death: nope, they’re just fine with gun violence
agencies do have to be allowed to have the power to do that. i don’t know the details in this case, but yeah: i’d assume they’re using a factual misinterpretation
the gun legislation they did pass doesn’t seem particularly great. i put myself in the disappointed category. it’s possible with bump stocks though they were counting on the courts, like they’d done with abortion rights for so many years
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I never said it was impossible to ban specific items. But when it comes to technology in general, it is hard to craft laws that have clear definitions that can’t be skirted, or are too broad they encompass things you didn’t intend for them to.
A good example of this is the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban. This ban did not ban assault weapons. If you saw the rifles available at every gun shop you would say, “Wait, those are clearly assault weapons, why aren’t they banned??” Because they were OK due to the specifications of the law.
Doesn’t mean an AWB would be impossible to craft - but that it takes care and planning in how it is written.
I like this idea as it would ban commercial items, but not be as absurd as to ban a string with some key rings tied to them. It also wouldn’t criminalize 3D printed bump stocks that makers could make for themselves.
That seems overly broad with out some clarification on what is “rapid fire” or “enhances rate of fire”. There are tons of after market triggers which are semi-auto only (not force reset or binary, but just plain Jane semi-auto) that will enhance your rate of fire because the pull is shorter, smoother, and/or lighter. Especially those used in competitions. It won’t be as fast as a bump stock, but it definitely enhances rate of fire.
Perhaps something like “uses the inertia of recoil combined with the mechanism to reset the trigger and enable rapid fire” would be along the right path.
They also need to update the law to include forced reset triggers. Like I said, they recently reversed their ruling on these and are actively confiscating them. IMO their case against them is even stronger than bump stocks, but who knows how challenges will play out.
Right. You could maybe get the Senate to pass an update on the laws, but I don’t see the House doing it. But I dunno, maybe there are enough moderate Republican’s left that a laws specifically only shoring up the definitions of a machine gun could pass. NFA items are something you can get “I support the 2nd Amendment, but…” people support.
I mean, I have. It grows wild in Kansas.
They should have the power to clarify if something runs afoul of the law or not. They shouldn’t have the power to broaden the scope of the laws, to add language that isn’t there. That’s not how laws are supposed to work.
I know, people, want laws broadened, fine. But IMO we don’t want law enforcement agencies the power to expand what they consider to be illegal or not. They need to enforce the law as written, not decide that “We are going to include this thing too, even though it doesn’t meet the law’s definitions.”
Perhaps with it being banned on EO, and really, bump stocks aren’t a hill most gun owners even care about so it hasn’t been in the fore front of the discussion, no one was thinking about them.
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I don’t mean on forums like this, though, or in casual conversation. I mean in the state or federal level of discourse carried on by lawmakers and pundits. I haven’t heard it at that level.
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i don’t know the specific language in this case so it’s hard for me to comment. the language written into laws can sometimes be precise, and sometimes be quite broad.
the fights over what the epa can or cannot decide are often examples of this.
yeah, i suspect something like that
the republicans ( and even the nra ) were encouraging the use of existing powers to ban bump stocks after the las vegas gun murders. probably cynically knowing it could be fought in court later on when the public was overwhelmed by other issues
https://www.cnn.com/2017/10/06/politics/gun-control-bump-stock-debate/index.html
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I love the fact that the completely fictitious Mboto Gorge has taken on a life of its own. An episode of Endeavour (a serious, not comic, crime drama series, for those who don’t know it) had an Army regiment that kept a drum as part of their regimental regalia to memorialise the heroism of a drummer boy at Mboto Gorge. I’ve even encountered people who believe that Mboto Gorge was an actual historical battle that involved the British Army.
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It’s not even my country, but the hypocrasy over “we must ban this book” (1A: free speech, free press, and in your examples trying to create an established religion) coming out of the same mouth as “2A is absolute” boils my piss.
Even as it’s coming out of the same party that pushed “originalist” Supreme Court Justices. Somehow the originalists are blind to “as part of a well-regulated militia”. (I know, I know, there’s 200 years of case law on that b.s. The point being that the originalists showed no regard for case law in Dobbs.)
Or whether an 18th century Enlightenment Framer would recognise anything today as a firearm. Or maybe even if they’d be able to tell the difference between what you could get at the hardware store vs what is restricted military tech.
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same.
for a long time i was confused about how conservatives established their positions - and the convincing answer ive found is white privilege
if we assume that white conservative men primarily want to keep the exclusive privileges that they historically have had: then and only then is it possible to find consistency
they’re even willing to throw out the reality that more guns equal more death, just so that nothing in their life has to change … even if it’d help to make other people’s lives more safe.
it’s… infuriating. and depressing
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Sounds like an example of the contrary, since it was highly effective at it’s intended purpose (accomplished a 3x reduction in mass shootings).
Nope.
Would still be banned in that definition; and good riddance - those triggers sound like cheating in competition!
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