Clearly not, because as soon as it expired, mass shootings picked up where they left off. Objectively, factually, the 94 AWB worked.
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Are, um, you still talking about the United States of America? Because there are a lot of problems with known fixes that the USA simply refuses to consider.
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Yes! Exactly! So why do we keep having this conversation over and over again? We keep hovering over this chasm with no middle ground.
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Um, that “chasm” is like three inches deep on your side. It’s infinite on the other side. One of the things that continues to be a problem in this debate is that one side is trying to defend a hobby while the other side is trying to defend their existence.
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The line is a gun.
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For the record, most police in UK do not carry a firearm. This not only reduces the rate of cops shooting us, but I don’t recall the last time a UK cop choked someone to death.
The few that do hold them get suspended with pay during the investigation that happens any time they shoot. Every bullet is accounted for.
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And, to be clear, the hobby is often not target shooting or sport hunting but merely collecting weapons and fantasising about how they’d use them. It’s akin to the person who obsessively accumulates Pokemon cards but rarely uses them to play the game, except of course that a trading card – even one wielded by the late Ricky Jay – can’t kill someone.
Every other hobby that has the capacity to result in death or maiming of humans requires licensing and insurance and strict regulation, even if the equipment (e.g. small aircraft, performance cars, parachutes, etc.) is not purpose-designed to do so. It’s long past time that American firearms hobbyists (especially so-called “responsible gun owners”) stop being such selfish babies about this.
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A bit of good news that begins to actually address the issue, not just nitpicking about the definition of a bump stock or other arcane gun-related terms.
Although the headline uses the annoying “assault-style weapons” bafflegab, if the story is accurate the actual legislation “prohibits the manufacture, sale and future purchase of semi-automatic firearms, high-capacity magazines and rapid-fire devices that turn firearms into machine guns.” Existing weapons must be registered.
Illinois is the ninth state to enact an assault weapons ban.
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I don’t much like the term either, insofar as ammosexuals always take it as an opportunity to wank over the technical details and distract from the main issue. If we can re-frame the term as shorthand for “weapons platforms designed to kill and wound (i.e. assault) the largest number of people in the shortest amount of time” we might get somewhere (at least with those debating in good faith).
Such a re-framing might also spark a more mature debate in the U.S. on why any civilian needs (as opposed to supposedly having the Constitutional right) to own such a weapon.
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That’s why I’m pleased with the Illinois wording of “semi-automatic firearms [and] high-capacity magazines”. These are easily-defined terms that are hard to weasel out of, although I would have added “removable magazines”.
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That looks good, right up until “that turn firearms into machine guns.”
Now we’ll get everyone complaining and explaining how it doesn’t actually turn it into a “machine gun” and that a “machine gun” is a very specific technical thing. That anything creating a faster rate of fire not in that exact way by definition didn’t turn it into a “machine gun” and the law doesn’t apply then.
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I don’t know why they haven’t gone with a simple “max rate of fire”, “max ammo capacity”, “max rate of ammo reload speed” definition
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This is the chasm that’s impossible to overcome. All of your posts approach and frame this as a technical regulation on a specific technical implementations used in some guns. It’s a framing that’s designed to assume that everything is fine by default and specific technical implementations cross a line and need to be carved out as not allowed.
The suggestions are all the reverse. Frame everything as behavior of what is happening completely independent of any technical implementation. Then, if desired, carve out specific technical implementations to allow that would otherwise fall into the behavior.
The first is a losing battle. All it does is encourage technical work arounds to circumvent any rule since they no longer use the technical thing being controlled. Trying to compete in that arms race is what creates the complexity. Laws need to continually be updated to deal with new technical implementations not originally contemplated.
There’s no way to rationalize or compromise the two directions. They’re fundamentally talking about different things.
I would suggest that all of that complication is a result of trying to create very specific and small restrictions. That the actual solution is a simple fix. It’s just one we’re not willing to do as a country. At least not yet.
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Hey, telling people what they don’t need is really patronizing. Unless it’s “a country with laws to keep them from being killed in mass shootings”. For some reason that one’s ok to tell people they can’t have.
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Why do you hate freedom? /s
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I love freedom, where people have a chance to be themselves and do what they want with their lives. But there’s just something about the taste of FreedomTM that isn’t the same.
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Unnecessary as far as I can see. Another example of carelessly-worded legislation. Banning semiautomatics should cover that. It’s hard to convert a bolt-action into a machine gun, not that some genius wouldn’t try.
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This is the part where ammosexuals who want to sound reasonable shed crocodile tears over the Second Amendment making such a broad approach “regrettably impossible”. Of course, that’s just another BS argument.
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