Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote: With regard to the argument that the 2nd amendment is needed to fight off tyrannical governments, it's an argument I'm 50/50 on to be honest.
Twice, my country tried to kill the American nation (1776, 1812) and of course the USA had a battle for national survival in 1861, so there's some merit in saying the 2nd was needed to stop that.
But on the other hand, and this is a drum I've banged many a time before, I would argue that in many respects, the tyrannical government is already here.
As far as I'm concerned, the 4th amednment is dead, buried, and we're back home having a memorial service and awkwardly sharing anecdotes about it.
The 1st amendment is under state of constant siege, and the 5th looks like it's going the way of the 4th.
And what has the American reaction been to all this? A shrug of the shoulders.
Now, my own country is going a similar way, as ancient British rights seem to be going out the window, but nobody can seriously argue that the 2nd is an effective counter against tyranny, because nobody seems to give two hoots about their rights going up in smoke.
The 2nd amendment is the final defense against a tyrannical government. Not the first. The first is using the democratic process to change the government from within through elections. We're not so far gone as to need to have a 2nd American Revolution, yet.
I wouldn't say we've been completely shrugging our shoulders either. The last 6 months, especially the Berkely thing, has shed light on how much damage has been done to free speech by those who purport to support it. We might see a backlash against the limitations which have been thrown up over the last 60 years against all Constitutional rights.
Personally, as a neutral observer, and student of American history, I don't like them either. Why? Because during the civil rights era, and back in the day when gun laws were being passed that were designed to stop African-Americans getting their hands on guns, who supported the gun laws?
You guessed it, the NRA.
Yes. But a bigger thing to point out is that at the time the party of gun control(for those same Racist reasons) wasn't the Republican party. Gun control has its roots in racist policies to keep black people unarmed.
Which is only a thing to point out if you're wilfully ignoring the Southern Strategy and the political shift of the 60's like people always do. It's dishonest as hell, and you should know better.
Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote: With regard to the argument that the 2nd amendment is needed to fight off tyrannical governments, it's an argument I'm 50/50 on to be honest.
Twice, my country tried to kill the American nation (1776, 1812) and of course the USA had a battle for national survival in 1861, so there's some merit in saying the 2nd was needed to stop that.
But on the other hand, and this is a drum I've banged many a time before, I would argue that in many respects, the tyrannical government is already here.
As far as I'm concerned, the 4th amednment is dead, buried, and we're back home having a memorial service and awkwardly sharing anecdotes about it.
The 1st amendment is under state of constant siege, and the 5th looks like it's going the way of the 4th.
And what has the American reaction been to all this? A shrug of the shoulders.
Now, my own country is going a similar way, as ancient British rights seem to be going out the window, but nobody can seriously argue that the 2nd is an effective counter against tyranny, because nobody seems to give two hoots about their rights going up in smoke.
The 2nd amendment is the final defense against a tyrannical government. Not the first. The first is using the democratic process to change the government from within through elections. We're not so far gone as to need to have a 2nd American Revolution, yet.
I wouldn't say we've been completely shrugging our shoulders either. The last 6 months, especially the Berkely thing, has shed light on how much damage has been done to free speech by those who purport to support it. We might see a backlash against the limitations which have been thrown up over the last 60 years against all Constitutional rights.
Frazzled wrote: Anti gunners are always terrified at the prospect of following the established procedures to amend the Constitution.
Why do that when they can take nibbles here and there, slowly erode the rights over time so people never really notice.
there's already 20,000 gun laws on the books, what harm would a few more to close the gun show loop holes, and mandatory waiting periods really do?
Gun show loop holes doesn't exist.
As for mandatory waiting periods... I'm ambivalent to that. It won't do what you think it would...
Not selling guns to people who need a caretaker to manage their funds and run their households seems like a no brainer. Yet trump revoked that one.
Trump restored due process in this case. You can still be adjudicated in front of a judge to determine if your mental illness should prohibit your from purchasing/own weapons.
Not selling guns to people on the terrorist watch list seems like another good idea, except to trump and the NRA.
Also ACLU and other prominent groups objected to this.
I get why some dakka members are against that idea, and that can easily be fixed by allowing people to contact the fbi and ask if they're on the list and provide a means to contest it.
The issue is simply that its still exceedingly difficult to get your name OFF the list. Some Congress critters found themselves on this list!
Now... the "no fly" list? We can talk about this... as long as there are robust procedures to review/clean this list up.
I'm the only one saying repeal the 2nd, as I don't think americans are mature enough to handle guns anymore. everyone else just wants rational gun laws so you can't walk into a store during a lunch break and buy enough weapons to shoot up your office or yourself.
Statements like this isn't helpful...
statements like that show the huge error in the system as it's a factual statement
2. Background checks aren't required for gun show purchases in most states: The District of Columbia and 17 states require background checks for some or all private firearm sales but the remaining 33 states do not restrict private, intrastate sales of used firearms between private individuals, whether at gun shows or elsewhere..
3. "Gun show loophole" question has triggered controversy: The term "gun show loophole" has been used to refer to private sellers at gun shows not being required to perform a background check on or record the sale of firearms to private buyers. Gun control advocates complain that the loophole enables prohibited buyers to use gun shows to purchase weapons without a background check. It indicated gun rights enthusiasts counter that there is no loophole and that a federal law requiring background checks for all private party sales, whether at gun shows or not, would exceed the government's authority and be a prelude to registration and confiscation.
I've never been to a gun show where I can purchase a gun from a private dealer without a background check. Maybe that's something either the venue is requiring that for liability reasons (most likely) or the city/state is requiring that.
Now, a private person (non-FFL dealer) to private person? Oh hell yes those things happen.
However, if you knowingly or unknowlingly sell a gun to a prohibited possessor... guess what? You've broken federal laws that puts you in legal jeopardy. And that's even BEFORE an civil liability that may open yourself to if that prohibited possessor used said guns in any criminal act.
Frazzled wrote: Anti gunners are always terrified at the prospect of following the established procedures to amend the Constitution.
Why do that when they can take nibbles here and there, slowly erode the rights over time so people never really notice.
there's already 20,000 gun laws on the books, what harm would a few more to close the gun show loop holes, and mandatory waiting periods really do?
Gun show loop holes doesn't exist.
As for mandatory waiting periods... I'm ambivalent to that. It won't do what you think it would...
Not selling guns to people who need a caretaker to manage their funds and run their households seems like a no brainer. Yet trump revoked that one.
Trump restored due process in this case. You can still be adjudicated in front of a judge to determine if your mental illness should prohibit your from purchasing/own weapons.
Not selling guns to people on the terrorist watch list seems like another good idea, except to trump and the NRA.
Also ACLU and other prominent groups objected to this.
I get why some dakka members are against that idea, and that can easily be fixed by allowing people to contact the fbi and ask if they're on the list and provide a means to contest it.
The issue is simply that its still exceedingly difficult to get your name OFF the list. Some Congress critters found themselves on this list!
Now... the "no fly" list? We can talk about this... as long as there are robust procedures to review/clean this list up.
I'm the only one saying repeal the 2nd, as I don't think americans are mature enough to handle guns anymore. everyone else just wants rational gun laws so you can't walk into a store during a lunch break and buy enough weapons to shoot up your office or yourself.
Statements like this isn't helpful...
statements like that show the huge error in the system as it's a factual statement
2. Background checks aren't required for gun show purchases in most states: The District of Columbia and 17 states require background checks for some or all private firearm sales but the remaining 33 states do not restrict private, intrastate sales of used firearms between private individuals, whether at gun shows or elsewhere..
3. "Gun show loophole" question has triggered controversy: The term "gun show loophole" has been used to refer to private sellers at gun shows not being required to perform a background check on or record the sale of firearms to private buyers. Gun control advocates complain that the loophole enables prohibited buyers to use gun shows to purchase weapons without a background check. It indicated gun rights enthusiasts counter that there is no loophole and that a federal law requiring background checks for all private party sales, whether at gun shows or not, would exceed the government's authority and be a prelude to registration and confiscation.
it does in 33 states.
It's not a gun show loophole. There is no federal law that requires background checks on face to face sales of privately owned firearms so that requirement varies by states. Whether you're at the gun show or at your residence or at a WalMart parking lot the law is the same. I don't have to go to a gun show to buy a rifle without a background check, I can legally do that anywhere in the state already. It's a state law issue and 33 states have permissive laws regarding firearm sales that you don't like. It's not a loophole it's state laws that have been on the books for decades.
I've never been to a gun show where I can purchase a gun from a private dealer without a background check. Maybe that's something either the venue is requiring that for liability reasons (most likely) or the city/state is requiring that.
Now, a private person (non-FFL dealer) to private person? Oh hell yes those things happen.
However, if you knowingly or unknowlingly sell a gun to a prohibited possessor... guess what? You've broken federal laws that puts you in legal jeopardy. And that's even BEFORE an civil liability that may open yourself to if that prohibited possessor used said guns in any criminal act.
If you have an FFL you have to run background checks whether you're selling from your store or at a gun show. If you don't have an FFL and are making a private sale then you're not required by federal law to run a background check, you just have to abide by the federal standards for prohibited persons and comply with any state laws regarding firearm purchases.
whembly wrote: However, if you knowingly or unknowlingly sell a gun to a prohibited possessor... guess what? You've broken federal laws that puts you in legal jeopardy. And that's even BEFORE an civil liability that may open yourself to if that prohibited possessor used said guns in any criminal act.
But making things double plus illegal means we are doing something, and something must be done, anything, this is a thing, lets do it! Think of the children!
Canada has the holy grail of gun laws, every safety feature, BG check, license+registration, mag limits, warrentless searches, you name it.
Yet, even when its in another country, every times some one person abuses firearms there is always a push for yet more restrictions as we still have "too loose" gun laws.
I have no free speech and can technically be exposed to legal ramifications for misgendering someone, free speech has been restricted to death by the same people pushing for ever more gun restriction.
Don't restrict the 1st amendment because nazi's might abuse it, and dont restrict the 2nd because crazy people abuse it.
Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote: With regard to the argument that the 2nd amendment is needed to fight off tyrannical governments, it's an argument I'm 50/50 on to be honest.
Twice, my country tried to kill the American nation (1776, 1812) and of course the USA had a battle for national survival in 1861, so there's some merit in saying the 2nd was needed to stop that.
But on the other hand, and this is a drum I've banged many a time before, I would argue that in many respects, the tyrannical government is already here.
More to the point, I think this idea is woefully outdated.
Back when the 2nd amendment was written, guns were muzzle-loading muskets with a rate of fire measured in minutes per round, and the army any tyrannical government might field would just be a lot of guys with those muskets.
Ok, now the citizen militia has semi-automatic rifles and whatnot - but the army has battle tanks, APCs, helicopter gunships. The air force has even more toys - smart bombs, JSOWs, stealth bombers. How does a civilian militia fight against the modern US war machine?
Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote: With regard to the argument that the 2nd amendment is needed to fight off tyrannical governments, it's an argument I'm 50/50 on to be honest.
Twice, my country tried to kill the American nation (1776, 1812) and of course the USA had a battle for national survival in 1861, so there's some merit in saying the 2nd was needed to stop that.
But on the other hand, and this is a drum I've banged many a time before, I would argue that in many respects, the tyrannical government is already here.
More to the point, I think this idea is woefully outdated.
Back when the 2nd amendment was written, guns were muzzle-loading muskets with a rate of fire measured in minutes per round, and the army any tyrannical government might field would just be a lot of guys with those muskets.
Ok, now the citizen militia has semi-automatic rifles and whatnot - but the army has battle tanks, APCs, helicopter gunships. The air force has even more toys - smart bombs, JSOWs, stealth bombers. How does a civilian militia fight against the modern US war machine?
In theory? Same way the Afghans, Iraqi's, Viet Cong, etc have, It's not about defeating the forces of the state in open battle.
Ok, now the citizen militia has semi-automatic rifles and whatnot - but the army has battle tanks, APCs, helicopter gunships. The air force has even more toys - smart bombs, JSOWs, stealth bombers. How does a civilian militia fight against the modern US war machine?
Current half-baked nihilistic theory that I've heard is that it provides enough of a symbolic but credible threat that it would force active violent response from the military, and with that, eventually, the military would begin to suffer attrition from the weariness and psychological damage of killing their own countrymen en masse. I find it an impressive combination of pessimistic and optimistic, but in all the wrong ways.
From a somewhat more practical point of view, the military appears to have a genuine difficulty coping with people armed with small arms in spite of all its technology, otherwise ours wouldn't have been perpetually playing in the sand for years.
The issue with the gun show loophole is that the two sides view it completely different. The simple fact is this:
I can have two buildings here in Oklahoma City: the big gun store right on I-40, and the building at the fairgrounds not 5 miles from that store. I can walk into both buildings, browse through hundreds of guns and rifles, and buy as many weapons as I want. All the weapons in one building are sold by one person, and all the weapons in the other building are sold by fifty different people. One building has background checks, the other building does not.
One side will argue that there is no gun show loophole, and that private sellers should always be treated as private sellers, even if they come together collectively to create a virtual one-stop store. The other side argues that creating a virtual store should require the same treatment as a real store and that letting private sellers sell collectively is a loophole to avoid the same treatment a single large store would have to follow to sell the same collection of weapons.
And that’s what it boils down to, should a collective of private sellers be classified as private sellers or should they be classified as a collective store.
Personally, I have no problems with regulations that would require background checks for all sales at gun shows. Every art show I have been to manages to have individual artists selling stuff, and the event handles all the payments. You pick what you want, the artist gives you the bill, you pay it at the event office, you go back and pick up your art. There is no reason why gun shows can’t do that. Heck, you can even do that without passing any laws requiring private sellers to conduct background checks. Pass a law that requires organizers of events where private sellers can come together to provide background checks for any weapons sold at their events. No burden for the individual sellers, but a burden for the person organizing the event.
Related question to the gun show issue: is there a limit to how many weapons someone can buy and sell before they become a dealer instead of a collector? And during gun shows in states with waiting lists, does the list apply to gun shows?
Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote: With regard to the argument that the 2nd amendment is needed to fight off tyrannical governments, it's an argument I'm 50/50 on to be honest.
Twice, my country tried to kill the American nation (1776, 1812) and of course the USA had a battle for national survival in 1861, so there's some merit in saying the 2nd was needed to stop that.
But on the other hand, and this is a drum I've banged many a time before, I would argue that in many respects, the tyrannical government is already here.
More to the point, I think this idea is woefully outdated.
Back when the 2nd amendment was written, guns were muzzle-loading muskets with a rate of fire measured in minutes per round, and the army any tyrannical government might field would just be a lot of guys with those muskets.
Ok, now the citizen militia has semi-automatic rifles and whatnot - but the army has battle tanks, APCs, helicopter gunships. The air force has even more toys - smart bombs, JSOWs, stealth bombers. How does a civilian militia fight against the modern US war machine?
A minor correction - it was not 'minutes per round' - it was still rounds per minute, just not a lot of them.
I have fired Revolutionary era weapons more often than I have fired modern arms - and I can get in about three shots per minute. (To be clear - I am not a particularly fast shot - there are many, many people that are faster than I at loading a Brown Bess.)
There is also a very strong argument that the 2nd amendment has very little to do with rebelling or protecting against a tyrannical force, and a great deal to do with making sure that organized militias were allowed and available for putting down slave revolts - in other words - being the tyrannical force.
Remember, by the time the Constitution was signed into law, the US had already put down an armed rebellion.
Here's a better description of the problems with "gun show loophole".
It's premised on the idea that there are laws on the books that required everyone to have a background check done prior to purchasing the weapon.
Which is patently false.
Private sales of guns (outside of gun shows) are legal in just about every state, just as it is perfectly legal to sell one’s car or house to another person without going through a dealer or agent.
Gun shows are subject to all gun laws without exception. There is no loophole that allows any gun laws to be circumvented at gun shows.
Yes, guns are sold and traded at gun shows but mostly by federally firearm licensed (FFL) dealers that must do NIC background checks on every customer. Only a very small number of tables are rented by individual private gun collectors who are not required to be federally licensed. Those individual private owners are NOT federally required to perform the NIC background check... that's the big distinction.
But these private citizens are, however, beholden to the same laws as FFL dealers in making sure that their transactions does not involve prohibited possessors.
Hell... i don't think a law would be necessary... just make that background check simple/easy to access that law abiding private citizen will utilize it for their transactions. (I know I would).
Frazzled wrote: Anti gunners are always terrified at the prospect of following the established procedures to amend the Constitution.
I am all for going this route. Have been the whole time. I believe I have made myself clear on the subject quite a bit. The problem is that it requires a good deal of work to accomplish and we all know congress avoids work like cockroaches avoid light.
We also know there is one side of the aisle that is bought and paid for in large part thanks to the NRA--so it wouldn't happen.
Pretending that "anti-gunners are terrified" of trying to use established procedures is ridiculous. You can't have established procedures function properly when half of a two-party system has been hijacked with obstructionists that work so hard to keep the other party(when they're the minority or the majority) from being able to use those procedures in good faith.
According to OpenSecrets, a site that tracks money in politics, the NRA spent $984,152 on campaign contributions during the 2014 election cycle. It also spent more than $3 million on lobbying in both 2013 and 2014.
So they bought half of congress with 4 million bucks? Seriously?
Or do you think the 30 or so million they spent directly on ads was enough o buy half of congress?
According to OpenSecrets, a site that tracks money in politics, the NRA spent $984,152 on campaign contributions during the 2014 election cycle. It also spent more than $3 million on lobbying in both 2013 and 2014.
So they bought half of congress with 4 million bucks? Seriously?
Or do you think the 30 or so million they spent directly on ads was enough o buy half of congress?
Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote: With regard to the argument that the 2nd amendment is needed to fight off tyrannical governments, it's an argument I'm 50/50 on to be honest.
Twice, my country tried to kill the American nation (1776, 1812) and of course the USA had a battle for national survival in 1861, so there's some merit in saying the 2nd was needed to stop that.
But on the other hand, and this is a drum I've banged many a time before, I would argue that in many respects, the tyrannical government is already here.
More to the point, I think this idea is woefully outdated.
Back when the 2nd amendment was written, guns were muzzle-loading muskets with a rate of fire measured in minutes per round, and the army any tyrannical government might field would just be a lot of guys with those muskets.
Ok, now the citizen militia has semi-automatic rifles and whatnot - but the army has battle tanks, APCs, helicopter gunships. The air force has even more toys - smart bombs, JSOWs, stealth bombers. How does a civilian militia fight against the modern US war machine?
Our army has plenty of trouble with poorly equipped jihadis running around in the desert planting IEDs, performing ambushes, etc...
And everything those insurgencies have thrown at our armed forces pale to what an insurgency here in the US could accomplish. Plus in the event that we do have a 2nd American Revolution, it's quite likely that a good portion of the existing armed forces would also defect and/or get their military bases overrun by rebels who would loot any equipment quite happily. Plus who knows what National Guard units would end up doing.
An insurgency in the US, even if was only a small portion of the population(as happened during the actual revolutionary war), would utterly kick the US army's ass even assuming there was no sympathy for the rebels among the armed forces. We have 308 million people as of the 2010 Census. If you include National Guard and all Army Reserves, the US has about 1 million soldiers. That's 1 soldier for every 308 civilians. 1 soldier for every 9 square kilometers of land area.
But we don’t need guns to defeat our military, guns don’t make a difference, we could do it if we really wanted to by driving a car into the military or by taking over a plane.
Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote: With regard to the argument that the 2nd amendment is needed to fight off tyrannical governments, it's an argument I'm 50/50 on to be honest.
Twice, my country tried to kill the American nation (1776, 1812) and of course the USA had a battle for national survival in 1861, so there's some merit in saying the 2nd was needed to stop that.
But on the other hand, and this is a drum I've banged many a time before, I would argue that in many respects, the tyrannical government is already here.
More to the point, I think this idea is woefully outdated.
Back when the 2nd amendment was written, guns were muzzle-loading muskets with a rate of fire measured in minutes per round, and the army any tyrannical government might field would just be a lot of guys with those muskets.
Ok, now the citizen militia has semi-automatic rifles and whatnot - but the army has battle tanks, APCs, helicopter gunships. The air force has even more toys - smart bombs, JSOWs, stealth bombers. How does a civilian militia fight against the modern US war machine?
And everything those insurgencies have thrown at our armed forces pale to what an insurgency here in the US could accomplish. Plus in the event that we do have a 2nd American Revolution, it's quite likely that a good portion of the existing armed forces would also defect and/or get their military bases overrun by rebels who would loot any equipment quite happily. Plus who knows what National Guard units would end up doing.
What could the local fatuous cheeseburger militia fantasists accomplish that overseas insurgents, many of whom have been fighting in multi-generational conflicts now, could not?
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d-usa wrote: But we don’t need guns to defeat our military, guns don’t make a difference, we could do it if we really wanted to by driving a car into the military or by taking over a plane.
And everything those insurgencies have thrown at our armed forces pale to what an insurgency here in the US could accomplish. Plus in the event that we do have a 2nd American Revolution, it's quite likely that a good portion of the existing armed forces would also defect and/or get their military bases overrun by rebels who would loot any equipment quite happily. Plus who knows what National Guard units would end up doing.
What could the local fatuous cheeseburger militia fantasists accomplish that overseas insurgents, many of whom have been fighting in multi-generational conflicts now, could not?
First off, we've got more resources available here. You can do seriously scary stuff with every day household chemicals. It's much easier to source all the materials you'd need for a insurgency here.
Plus it's a numbers thing. There are way way more people here than in Iraq or Afghanistan. You'd be dealing with just way more insurgents than you would over there. Plus you have the psychological deal with your troops fighting their fellow citizens.
Frazzled wrote: Anti gunners are always terrified at the prospect of following the established procedures to amend the Constitution.
Why do that when they can take nibbles here and there, slowly erode the rights over time so people never really notice.
there's already 20,000 gun laws on the books, what harm would a few more to close the gun show loop holes, and mandatory waiting periods really do?
Gun show loop holes doesn't exist.
As for mandatory waiting periods... I'm ambivalent to that. It won't do what you think it would...
Not selling guns to people who need a caretaker to manage their funds and run their households seems like a no brainer. Yet trump revoked that one.
Trump restored due process in this case. You can still be adjudicated in front of a judge to determine if your mental illness should prohibit your from purchasing/own weapons.
Not selling guns to people on the terrorist watch list seems like another good idea, except to trump and the NRA.
Also ACLU and other prominent groups objected to this.
I get why some dakka members are against that idea, and that can easily be fixed by allowing people to contact the fbi and ask if they're on the list and provide a means to contest it.
The issue is simply that its still exceedingly difficult to get your name OFF the list. Some Congress critters found themselves on this list!
Now... the "no fly" list? We can talk about this... as long as there are robust procedures to review/clean this list up.
I'm the only one saying repeal the 2nd, as I don't think americans are mature enough to handle guns anymore. everyone else just wants rational gun laws so you can't walk into a store during a lunch break and buy enough weapons to shoot up your office or yourself.
Statements like this isn't helpful...
statements like that show the huge error in the system as it's a factual statement
2. Background checks aren't required for gun show purchases in most states: The District of Columbia and 17 states require background checks for some or all private firearm sales but the remaining 33 states do not restrict private, intrastate sales of used firearms between private individuals, whether at gun shows or elsewhere..
3. "Gun show loophole" question has triggered controversy: The term "gun show loophole" has been used to refer to private sellers at gun shows not being required to perform a background check on or record the sale of firearms to private buyers. Gun control advocates complain that the loophole enables prohibited buyers to use gun shows to purchase weapons without a background check. It indicated gun rights enthusiasts counter that there is no loophole and that a federal law requiring background checks for all private party sales, whether at gun shows or not, would exceed the government's authority and be a prelude to registration and confiscation.
it does in 33 states.
That only applies to people selling from their private collections. As long as they are not in the gun business to make a living, they can sell the weapons they personally own without a FFL.
FFL holders are required by FEDERAL LAW to conduct background checks at gun shows and have the BATFE Form 4473 filled out before the transfer can go through.
If a private individual wants to sell their personal firearms, they'll do so, whether at a gun show or out of their house. That's why this "gun show loophole" garbage is just that: GARBAGE.
The assumption that US civilians would be a more effective opposition to the US military than the insurgencies that have been fighting it and its allies overseas is disappointingly hubristic.
nfe wrote: The assumption that US civilians would be a more effective opposition to the US military than the insurgencies that have been fighting it and its allies overseas is disappointingly hubristic.
No, it's really not. Read up on insurgencies. The US is one place you would never want to fight an insurgency in.
Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote: With regard to the argument that the 2nd amendment is needed to fight off tyrannical governments, it's an argument I'm 50/50 on to be honest.
Twice, my country tried to kill the American nation (1776, 1812) and of course the USA had a battle for national survival in 1861, so there's some merit in saying the 2nd was needed to stop that.
But on the other hand, and this is a drum I've banged many a time before, I would argue that in many respects, the tyrannical government is already here.
More to the point, I think this idea is woefully outdated.
Back when the 2nd amendment was written, guns were muzzle-loading muskets with a rate of fire measured in minutes per round, and the army any tyrannical government might field would just be a lot of guys with those muskets.
Ok, now the citizen militia has semi-automatic rifles and whatnot - but the army has battle tanks, APCs, helicopter gunships. The air force has even more toys - smart bombs, JSOWs, stealth bombers. How does a civilian militia fight against the modern US war machine?
I had the great pleasure of knowing a man that fought with the French Resistance in WWII. If he were still alive I'd want someone to argue that a militia wouldn't have been effective. They managed with antique firearms and whatever they could capture.
Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote: With regard to the argument that the 2nd amendment is needed to fight off tyrannical governments, it's an argument I'm 50/50 on to be honest.
Twice, my country tried to kill the American nation (1776, 1812) and of course the USA had a battle for national survival in 1861, so there's some merit in saying the 2nd was needed to stop that.
But on the other hand, and this is a drum I've banged many a time before, I would argue that in many respects, the tyrannical government is already here.
More to the point, I think this idea is woefully outdated.
Back when the 2nd amendment was written, guns were muzzle-loading muskets with a rate of fire measured in minutes per round, and the army any tyrannical government might field would just be a lot of guys with those muskets.
Ok, now the citizen militia has semi-automatic rifles and whatnot - but the army has battle tanks, APCs, helicopter gunships. The air force has even more toys - smart bombs, JSOWs, stealth bombers. How does a civilian militia fight against the modern US war machine?
Repeating firearms existed prior to, or developed/produced, during the American Revolution.
Puckle Gun-1718
Giradoni Air Rifle-1779 (famously carried during the Lewis and Clark Expedition)
Kalthoff Repeater-Late 17th Centurt
Cookson Repeater-Late 17th Century
Belton Flintlock-circa 1777: This one was demonstrated to members of the Continental Congress.
So, this tired, old argument of the Founding Fathers crafted the Second with only single shot, muzzle loading flintlock muskets in mind doesn't hold water.
d-usa wrote: How many guns can I buy/sell as a private person before I become a dealer?
Honestly I think people just get distracted by the wording, and by that I mean people who want to ignore the discussion see "loophole" and realize they have an out from actually talking about the topic because it's not really a loophole. A loophole defines an ambiguity or absence in law that allows something that logic/reason/rationality would suggest shouldn't be allowed under said law. For example a law that bans the distribution of alcohol to minors but does not define what distribution means as the law is concerned.
Technically there is no loop hole in gun control laws as it pertains to gun shows. It's just a normal hole, and to be fair I think it's important to recognize this is a hole not just for gun sales but sales of a lot of things. There are innumerable ways to operate as a "private seller" who is for all intents and purposes an unregistered and unlicensed business that completely avoids most of the taxes and regulations associated with being a business. The "gunshow loop hole" is really the same thing, because the laws and regs that define what a business is are pretty easy to avoid if you dash in a little communism, operate out of your garage/shed, wave an American flag, and talk about freedom and how much this big rifle will help you protect yours
d-usa wrote: How many guns can I buy/sell as a private person before I become a dealer?
It's more to do with intent than anything else. If you are trading in firearms with the express purpose of making a profit (i.e. running a business) without a Federal Firearms License, you do so at your own risk. It's a felony under Federal Law. And it's easier to get caught than many might think.
Easy E wrote: I love the "Red Dawn" fantasies in this thread.
My favorite scene from the remake of Red Dawn is still that speech at the end. Just photoshop a turban onto Josh Peck's head and give him a beard and you've probably got a great remake of some speech some Afghani guy gave in a cave somewhere
nfe wrote: The assumption that US civilians would be a more effective opposition to the US military than the insurgencies that have been fighting it and its allies overseas is disappointingly hubristic.
No, it's really not. Read up on insurgencies. The US is one place you would never want to fight an insurgency in.
I wouldn't want to fight one anywhere. I wouldn't make blanket assumptions about the relative effectiveness of the insurgents anywhere, either. Especially not if I was going to be comparing what are frequently the recently deposed actual military, highly trained paramilitaries, and people with fully, if outdated, military hardware fighting a force commanded by a democracy observing international law (to a degree, anyway) with an imagined militia that may or may not materialise in any significant numbers fighting a tyrannical dictatorship/martial state that's ruthless enough to have gone to war with its own people.
Repeating firearms existed prior to, or developed/produced, during the American Revolution.
Puckle Gun-1718
Giradoni Air Rifle-1779 (famously carried during the Lewis and Clark Expedition)
Kalthoff Repeater-Late 17th Centurt
Cookson Repeater-Late 17th Century
Belton Flintlock-circa 1777: This one was demonstrated to members of the Continental Congress.
So, this tired, old argument of the Founding Fathers crafted the Second with only single shot, muzzle loading flintlock muskets in mind doesn't hold water.
Actually, it goes a bit further than that. George Washington himself owned a 15-shot pistol he was quite proud of. Ben Franklin owned a matching set of repeating rifles that "technically" had detachable magazines (totally crude by today's standards though). Franklin stated that his biggest disappointments with those rifles were that they were so rare and expensive that the every-man would never be able to have one, and that he hoped it would one day change. Looks like he got his wish.
d-usa wrote: How many guns can I buy/sell as a private person before I become a dealer?
It's more to do with intent than anything else. If you are trading in firearms with the express purpose of making a profit (i.e. running a business) without a Federal Firearms License, you do so at your own risk. It's a felony under Federal Law. And it's easier to get caught than many might think.
d-usa wrote: How many guns can I buy/sell as a private person before I become a dealer?
Honestly I think people just get distracted by the wording, and by that I mean people who want to ignore the discussion see "loophole" and realize they have an out from actually talking about the topic because it's not really a loophole. A loophole defines an ambiguity or absence in law that allows something that logic/reason/rationality would suggest shouldn't be allowed under said law. For example a law that bans the distribution of alcohol to minors but does not define what distribution means as the law is concerned.
Technically there is no loop hole in gun control laws as it pertains to gun shows. It's just a normal hole, and to be fair I think it's important to recognize this is a hole not just for gun sales but sales of a lot of things. There are innumerable ways to operate as a "private seller" who is for all intents and purposes an unregistered and unlicensed business that completely avoids most of the taxes and regulations associated with being a business. The "gunshow loop hole" is really the same thing, because the laws and regs that define what a business is are pretty easy to avoid if you dash in a little communism, operate out of your garage/shed, wave an American flag, and talk about freedom and how much this big rifle will help you protect yours
That’s what I was trying to get at regarding the arguments about the loophole itself when I made my earlier post.
A building full of guns needs checks or not depending on who is selling all those guns.
d-usa wrote: How many guns can I buy/sell as a private person before I become a dealer?
It's more to do with intent than anything else. If you are trading in firearms with the express purpose of making a profit (i.e. running a business) without a Federal Firearms License, you do so at your own risk. It's a felony under Federal Law. And it's easier to get caught than many might think.
How much money can I make before it’s a business?
Are you selling guns for a living? Are you doing it for the express purpose of turning a profit or supplement your income? It that your primary occupation? Do you have a Federal Firearms License and a local business license?
The amount of money made or invested is irrelevant. It's the intent that is the key.
So there is no quantifiable means to determine if a seller should be required to do a background check. It’s a case of “I know a dealer when I see one”.
d-usa wrote: So there is no quantifiable means to determine if a seller should be required to do a background check. It’s a case of “I know a dealer when I see one”.
If you have a FFL, you are required to perform a check prior to transference of the firearm to the buyer.
We established that. What we are talking about now is that there is no real guideline to determine at which point you need a FFL.
One of the criteria mentioned is “are you supplementing your income”. If I’m short 50 bucks and I am going to get my water turned off tomorrow, I am selling the gun to supplement my income. So does that make me a dealer? What’s the dollar limit elevating me from random citizen selling his gun and FFL supplementing his income by selling his gun?
d-usa wrote: We established that. What we are talking about now is that there is no real guideline to determine at which point you need a FFL.
One of the criteria mentioned is “are you supplementing your income”. If I’m short 50 bucks and I am going to get my water turned off tomorrow, I am selling the gun to supplement my income. So does that make me a dealer? What’s the dollar limit elevating me from random citizen selling his gun and FFL supplementing his income by selling his gun?
d-usa wrote: We established that. What we are talking about now is that there is no real guideline to determine at which point you need a FFL.
One of the criteria mentioned is “are you supplementing your income”. If I’m short 50 bucks and I am going to get my water turned off tomorrow, I am selling the gun to supplement my income. So does that make me a dealer? What’s the dollar limit elevating me from random citizen selling his gun and FFL supplementing his income by selling his gun?
Also curious here. Asking for a friend....
Is that a friend, or a "friend"
Also, is that seriously what the law says? I have no idea what it says but if its that that's a really stupid yard stick. Selling anything supplements income, unless we're using some weird definition of supplement income.
Desubot wrote:He certainly could of just driven into the crowed in some car. and car is really easy to get.
If I remember correctly you usually need show competence to get a license, you are not allowed to use it while intoxicated, and need insurance, regular checks so your car complies with safety standards, and the license to be allowed to use a car can also be revoked if can't comply with those points. Guns are not that controlled.
nfe wrote:The assumption that US civilians would be a more effective opposition to the US military than the insurgencies that have been fighting it and its allies overseas is disappointingly hubristic.
The majority of the population would just hop along with whatever the tyrannic government would do. There is no one switch, law, or incident that makes the government evil and then everyone magically gets their rifles and does the patriotic thing they fantasise about. It's a process and at the end you are on the "tyrannic" side of spectrum without having passed a big warning sign that shows you when you need to act.
After 9/11 the US government did restrict right in all kinds of ways and the population went along with it (± some protests against the Patriot Act and expanded use of national security letter that literary forbid you to talk about them (that sounds like a First Amendment issue). And if you look at how the military and law enforcement are often deified or portrayed as doing the right thing/being the good guys, a lot of "patriots" would probably end up following and working for the needs of a tyrannic government instead of opposing it. Just look at this NRA ad.
So would a reasonable change be to outlaw these conversion kits or conversions in general or add ons to semi-automatic rifles to make them fully or near fully automatic be something that would fly?
I see these kids being illegal soon with only moderate opposition. A number of republican lawmakers are already stating that “accessories” don’t have the same protections as weapons themselves.
Again, if these "common sense gun laws" are the solution, then why do countries like Canada that have already passed them, and laws far more stringent then them, still say more laws are required?
WrentheFaceless wrote: So would a reasonable change be to outlaw these conversion kits or conversions in general or add ons to semi-automatic rifles to make them fully or near fully automatic be something that would fly?
Converting a firearm from semi to full auto is already illegal.
Bumpfire stocks do not alter the mechanical function of the trigger. It is still semi auto. One trigger pull, one shot fired.
They can try to ban the product, of course, but as others have pointed out you can bump fire a semi auto without one anyway.
WrentheFaceless wrote: So would a reasonable change be to outlaw these conversion kits or conversions in general or add ons to semi-automatic rifles to make them fully or near fully automatic be something that would fly?
I suspect it will be easier to put bans and limitations on aftermarket modifications, mostly because it's already really easy to put bans and limitations on aftermarket modifications.
Repeating firearms existed prior to, or developed/produced, during the American Revolution.
Puckle Gun-1718
Giradoni Air Rifle-1779 (famously carried during the Lewis and Clark Expedition)
Kalthoff Repeater-Late 17th Centurt
Cookson Repeater-Late 17th Century
Belton Flintlock-circa 1777: This one was demonstrated to members of the Continental Congress.
So, this tired, old argument of the Founding Fathers crafted the Second with only single shot, muzzle loading flintlock muskets in mind doesn't hold water.
Actually, it goes a bit further than that. George Washington himself owned a 15-shot pistol he was quite proud of. Ben Franklin owned a matching set of repeating rifles that "technically" had detachable magazines (totally crude by today's standards though). Franklin stated that his biggest disappointments with those rifles were that they were so rare and expensive that the every-man would never be able to have one, and that he hoped it would one day change. Looks like he got his wish.
Franklin also liked the little French girls sitting on his lap in their salons when he was stationed there. My favorite line from his first almanac "if you ride a horse, sit close and tight; if you ride a woman, sit gentle and light". Wise man, horny pedophile, that guy. Good thing we have over two hundred years of experience to build upon and develop from those wise old dead guys. Too bad we forgot the "enlightenment" and "age of reason" idea they were always on about. I still think the turkey should have been our national bird. He was on to something there.
WrentheFaceless wrote: So would a reasonable change be to outlaw these conversion kits or conversions in general or add ons to semi-automatic rifles to make them fully or near fully automatic be something that would fly?
Converting a firearm from semi to full auto is already illegal.
Bumpfire stocks do not alter the mechanical function of the trigger. It is still semi auto. One trigger pull, one shot fired.
They can try to ban the product, of course, but as others have pointed out you can bump fire a semi auto without one anyway.
Its a workaround though designed to make the gun fire faster than a reasonable finger can trigger each round.
There was a really good episode of Law and Order where Jack McCoy brought charges against a gun manufacturer for purposefully making a weapon that could be easily modified into an automatic and marketing the weapon as such.
easysauce wrote: Again, if these "common sense gun laws" are the solution, then why do countries like Canada that have already passed them, and laws far more stringent then them, still say more laws are required?
Why do we always need more of it?
This guy speaks of a Canada that isn't really real outside of paranoid gun nuts' fever dreams. There is no war on guns in Canada. I could get a rifle or a handgun if I wanted, within reasonable restrictions.
LordofHats wrote: There was a really good episode of Law and Order where Jack McCoy brought charges against a gun manufacturer for purposefully making a weapon that could be easily modified into an automatic and marketing the weapon as such.
LordofHats wrote: There was a really good episode of Law and Order where Jack McCoy brought charges against a gun manufacturer for purposefully making a weapon that could be easily modified into an automatic and marketing the weapon as such.
The ending was great XD
If I remember correctly, the Judge throws out the jury verdict, berates McCoy for being a douche, and says that laws are to be made through Congress and not the Courts. Good ruling.
LordofHats wrote: There was a really good episode of Law and Order where Jack McCoy brought charges against a gun manufacturer for purposefully making a weapon that could be easily modified into an automatic and marketing the weapon as such.
The ending was great XD
If I remember correctly, the Judge throws out the jury verdict, berates McCoy for being a douche, and says that laws are to be made through Congress and not the Courts. Good ruling.
That's the one! They don't make TV that riveting anymore. No sir.
d-usa wrote:How many guns can I buy/sell as a private person before I become a dealer?
As noted, there is no limit, rather the intent matters. If you buy and sell 200 guns in a year out of a personal collection, thats fine, if you're doing it as part of a collection. If you're actively looking to make money on those, and derive a profit, thats when you need an FFL.
nfe wrote:The assumption that US civilians would be a more effective opposition to the US military than the insurgencies that have been fighting it and its allies overseas is disappointingly hubristic.
Given that the US has a lot more room for groups to hide and move in, far more weapons and ammunition on hand than just about anywhere else on earth, both in an absolute and per capita sense, a much more technologically integrate population, a diverse population that wont automatically make an outsider stick out, and a lot more on hand wealth to devote to such an endeavor, I would not think so.
So if I just inherited a lot of guns and am looking to sell them off to profit, that's cool? (A couple I would keep for sentimental or historical reasons)
d-usa wrote: So if I sell a single gun to make money, because I’m broke, I’m a dealer and need a license?
no, because you're liquidating a collection, which is specifically exempted. If you buy a rifle specifically to turn around and flip 6 months later at a higher price (after whatever new panic buying fad hits peak), then you'd need an FFL.
d-usa wrote: So if I sell a single gun to make money, because I’m broke, I’m a dealer and need a license?
no, because you're liquidating a collection, which is specifically exempted. If you buy a rifle specifically to turn around and flip 6 months later at a higher price (after whatever new panic buying fad hits peak), then you'd need an FFL.
What if you buy a rifle and then six months later when panic buying fads set in again, you decide you want to sell it?
D-usa's making a valid point which is in and of itself a wonderful example of the nonsense that gets spouted out. There's nothing preventing someone from just saying that they're liquidating a collection or "moving up to a new gun" or whatever to simply make some money.
It's one thing for businesses to be regulated like that where a storefront or a building is involved, it's another thing entirely to pretend that Craigslist or Facebook or other social media sites that have the ability for people to post up ads don't exist.
I find a good deal on a used gun in rough shape, pay $100 for it. I clean it up, adjust the trigger, change out the sights, now it’s a nice gun. Next year I’m rough up for money and I sell it to a guy at work. Because it doesn’t look like crap anymore I sell it for $250 bucks. I made $150 on this gun and used that money as income to pay my electric bill.
I bought and sold, turned the gun around, and more than doubled my money. All things listed in this thread as a standard for requiring a FFL.
daedalus wrote: More importantly, is the FFL required for you to call yourself an arms dealer and wear the cool sunglasses?
No. You just need a stupid younger brother, an even stupider Ukrainian uncle, and an actor career scrapping the bottom of the barrel
If you don’t have a FFL you can deal in cannons and have a guy you can call who knows about this stuff, because you never know what might come walking through that door.
LordofHats wrote: [
No. You just need a stupid younger brother, an even stupider Ukrainian uncle, and an acting career scrapping the bottom of the barrel
Oh man, now if only I could grow out my Travolta hair.
d-usa wrote: I find a good deal on a used gun in rough shape, pay $100 for it. I clean it up, adjust the trigger, change out the sights, now it’s a nice gun. Next year I’m rough up for money and I sell it to a guy at work. Because it doesn’t look like crap anymore I sell it for $250 bucks. I made $150 on this gun and used that money as income to pay my electric bill.
I bought and sold, turned the gun around, and more than doubled my money. All things listed in this thread as a standard for requiring a FFL.
In this case, no. You would not need an FFL. You didn't buy the gun with the intent of reselling it. The profit you made is irrelevant. Heck, you could buy a gun for the intent of selling it and take a LOSS and it be illegal. Buy a gun for giggles, find out it's rare, and make $1 million profit, A-Okay.
d-usa wrote: I find a good deal on a used gun in rough shape, pay $100 for it. I clean it up, adjust the trigger, change out the sights, now it’s a nice gun. Next year I’m rough up for money and I sell it to a guy at work. Because it doesn’t look like crap anymore I sell it for $250 bucks. I made $150 on this gun and used that money as income to pay my electric bill.
I bought and sold, turned the gun around, and more than doubled my money. All things listed in this thread as a standard for requiring a FFL.
As with so many things in law, particularly with the ATF, intent it what matters. If you bought that gun for $100 because it was neat, and you did all the stuff to it because you thought it would enhance your enjoyment of the gun, then selling it when you need cash isn't an issue, again, you're liquidating a collection. If you bought that gun specifically to enhance and resell for a profit, and made all those modifications to specifically increase its resale value, then yeah, you'd need an FFL.
The same end results may be illegal or legal based not on their own merits but on the intents that drove the actions to that result. Intent makes all the difference in the world with the ATF.
As Cuda said, you can end up taking a loss on a sale and it be illegal without an FFL, or make a million bucks and it be perfectly legal to not need an FFL. Intent is everything.
I intend to collect 1911s this month, next month I’m not a fan of them anymore and I now intent to collect Glocks. I’m liquidating all my 1911s and happen to make a profit. I can buy more Glocks. I will probably liquidate that collection the month after that and make a profit again but I intend to collect AR-15 clones that month. I don’t intent to buy and sell for profit, I’m just very eclectic and have changing tastes. Just collecting things over here, it’s not my fault that changing my collect constantly makes a profit. That’s not my intent. That’s why I’m always at gun shows, increasing and liquidating my collection.
That kind of thing would likely get you in trouble, regardless of whether or not it was technically legal. It would look like you were doing it for profit, and would likely result in a trial. Prove that you are an eclectic collector of weird stuff, and it might fly, depending on if you can convince a jury.
d-usa wrote: I find a good deal on a used gun in rough shape, pay $100 for it. I clean it up, adjust the trigger, change out the sights, now it’s a nice gun. Next year I’m rough up for money and I sell it to a guy at work. Because it doesn’t look like crap anymore I sell it for $250 bucks. I made $150 on this gun and used that money as income to pay my electric bill.
I bought and sold, turned the gun around, and more than doubled my money. All things listed in this thread as a standard for requiring a FFL.
As with so many things in law, particularly with the ATF, intent it what matters. If you bought that gun for $100 because it was neat, and you did all the stuff to it because you thought it would enhance your enjoyment of the gun, then selling it when you need cash isn't an issue, again, you're liquidating a collection. If you bought that gun specifically to enhance and resell for a profit, and made all those modifications to specifically increase its resale value, then yeah, you'd need an FFL.
The same end results may be illegal or legal based not on their own merits but on the intents that drove the actions to that result. Intent makes all the difference in the world with the ATF.
As Cuda said, you can end up taking a loss on a sale and it be illegal without an FFL, or make a million bucks and it be perfectly legal to not need an FFL. Intent is everything.
Yup and if we're going spend pages discussing FFL questions then we should defer to the ATF since their opinion is the one that counts.
https://www.atf.gov/file/100871/download
And this highlights the issue with who is a dealer/collector/hobby gun owner, who might all sell st gun shows, but only some are required to do background checks.
And that’s what people usually talk about when they mention the “gun show loophole”. It’s not that gun shows are doing something that is against the law, but that there is a feeling that it can be a nebulous “I know who is a dealer when I see one” standard that determines who needs a FFL, and we have showsln that even in this thread it’s pretty hard to nail down where collectors and private sellers end and where dealers begin. It’s not that they are not doing checks when they should, but that that are not required to do checks when people feel they should be.
Gun Shows, like Art Shows and Antique Shows and Flea Markets feel like a business, and the distinction between private seller or corporate business owner seems arbitrary and/or irrelevant when you are at a commercial event that feels like a big store. I admit it’s as much a “I know a store when I see one” as the “I know a dealer when I see one” examples I gave.
But gun shows as a whole would be a place I am okay with requiring background checks for every person selling there, FFL or private. I don’t think you need to require that private sellers run the checks. But I would be fine with requiring that event organizers conduct background checks for all weapons sold at their event. They are making a profit from the gun sales in the form of booth fees, they organized the event for the purpose of selling guns at the event, so I don’t see an issue with having them be tasked with conducting the checks. The private seller can fill out the form, they can turn it into the event organizer to run the check, and then finish the transaction if the check comes back clear.
Don’t make it a burden for a private seller, make it the responsibility of the person making a profit from the gun show.
d-usa wrote: The issue with the gun show loophole is that the two sides view it completely different. The simple fact is this:
I can have two buildings here in Oklahoma City: the big gun store right on I-40, and the building at the fairgrounds not 5 miles from that store. I can walk into both buildings, browse through hundreds of guns and rifles, and buy as many weapons as I want. All the weapons in one building are sold by one person, and all the weapons in the other building are sold by fifty different people. One building has background checks, the other building does not.
One side will argue that there is no gun show loophole, and that private sellers should always be treated as private sellers, even if they come together collectively to create a virtual one-stop store. The other side argues that creating a virtual store should require the same treatment as a real store and that letting private sellers sell collectively is a loophole to avoid the same treatment a single large store would have to follow to sell the same collection of weapons.
And that’s what it boils down to, should a collective of private sellers be classified as private sellers or should they be classified as a collective store.
Personally, I have no problems with regulations that would require background checks for all sales at gun shows. Every art show I have been to manages to have individual artists selling stuff, and the event handles all the payments. You pick what you want, the artist gives you the bill, you pay it at the event office, you go back and pick up your art. There is no reason why gun shows can’t do that. Heck, you can even do that without passing any laws requiring private sellers to conduct background checks. Pass a law that requires organizers of events where private sellers can come together to provide background checks for any weapons sold at their events. No burden for the individual sellers, but a burden for the person organizing the event.
Related question to the gun show issue: is there a limit to how many weapons someone can buy and sell before they become a dealer instead of a collector? And during gun shows in states with waiting lists, does the list apply to gun shows?
The issue is that the requirements for background checks etc aren't tied to the act of selling a firearm they are tied to maintaining a federal firearms license. If you have a FFL you must comply with the federal laws that come with it and if you don't have an FFL then you don't have to comply with federal requirements for FFLs. The federal govt can't regulate private intrastate commercial transactions so if you want to require background checks from private sellers you need to tackle it at the state level.
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d-usa wrote: And this highlights the issue with who is a dealer/collector/hobby gun owner, who might all sell st gun shows, but only some are required to do background checks.
And that’s what people usually talk about when they mention the “gun show loophole”. It’s not that gun shows are doing something that is against the law, but that there is a feeling that it can be a nebulous “I know who is a dealer when I see one” standard that determines who needs a FFL, and we have showsln that even in this thread it’s pretty hard to nail down where collectors and private sellers end and where dealers begin. It’s not that they are not doing checks when they should, but that that are not required to do checks when people feel they should be.
Gun Shows, like Art Shows and Antique Shows and Flea Markets feel like a business, and the distinction between private seller or corporate business owner seems arbitrary and/or irrelevant when you are at a commercial event that feels like a big store. I admit it’s as much a “I know a store when I see one” as the “I know a dealer when I see one” examples I gave.
But gun shows as a whole would be a place I am okay with requiring background checks for every person selling there, FFL or private. I don’t think you need to require that private sellers run the checks. But I would be fine with requiring that event organizers conduct background checks for all weapons sold at their event. They are making a profit from the gun sales in the form of booth fees, they organized the event for the purpose of selling guns at the event, so I don’t see an issue with having them be tasked with conducting the checks. The private seller can fill out the form, they can turn it into the event organizer to run the check, and then finish the transaction if the check comes back clear.
Don’t make it a burden for a private seller, make it the responsibility of the person making a profit from the gun show.
If the ATF concluded that gun show organizers were running shows with the intent of profiting from gun sales and therefore needed an FFL in order to run a gun show I wouldn't have a problem with it. Without making the organizers obtain an FFL they won't be required to run checks.
Nostromodamus wrote: They can try to ban the product, of course, but as others have pointed out you can bump fire a semi auto without one anyway.
You can bump fire without an aftermarket stock, but it's nearly impossible to do so with any sort of actual aiming, other than "thataway, kinda". The slidefire/bumpfire stocks allow you to make it a lot more aim-able, depending on how strong and practiced you are.
So far as banning the product is should be pretty easily done because there are only like, two vendors that make them.
Nostromodamus wrote: They can try to ban the product, of course, but as others have pointed out you can bump fire a semi auto without one anyway.
You can bump fire without an aftermarket stock, but it's nearly impossible to do so with any sort of actual aiming, other than "thataway, kinda". The slidefire/bumpfire stocks allow you to make it a lot more aim-able, depending on how strong and practiced you are.
So far as banning the product is should be pretty easily done because there are only like, two vendors that make them.
If anything, just add it to the NFA items (while deregulate the supressors).
I recall that my grandfather had a rifle that had a trigger type mechanism that sat in front of your finger, opposite the actual trigger. Never knew the name of it, but I presume that's something of the same sort?
If the ATF concluded that gun show organizers were running shows with the intent of profiting from gun sales and therefore needed an FFL in order to run a gun show I wouldn't have a problem with it. Without making the organizers obtain an FFL they won't be required to run checks.
The sticky issue would probably be that while organizers are profiting from the fact that guns are being sold at the event, they are not profiting from the actual guns sales conducted at the event. The argument would likely boil down to “booth fees” vs “getting a cut of each sale”.
I think this has been the most civil approach towards talking about the gun show “loophole” we’ve managed to have here though.
If the ATF concluded that gun show organizers were running shows with the intent of profiting from gun sales and therefore needed an FFL in order to run a gun show I wouldn't have a problem with it. Without making the organizers obtain an FFL they won't be required to run checks.
The sticky issue would probably be that while organizers are profiting from the fact that guns are being sold at the event, they are not profiting from the actual guns sales conducted at the event. The argument would likely boil down to “booth fees” vs “getting a cut of each sale”.
I think this has been the most civil approach towards talking about the gun show “loophole” we’ve managed to have here though.
I think it would have to be approached from the angle you've laid out. Gun shows are de facto storefronts, booths are rented with the intent to use them to facilitate gun sales because gun shows are events that are designed to facilitate gun shows. All of the profits earned are derived from gun sales either directly or indirectly but the intent of the event is clear and it is overtly advertised. Gun shows are intended to be essentially pop up gun stores so it makes sense to require organizers to have an FFL.
Private sellers can still try to make sales through their own efforts, if you decide to sell a shotgun because you're giving up duck hunting you still don't need an FFL but if you bring it to a gun show then the organizer needs to run a background check on the purchaser.
Even if such a law or ATF ruling was put in place I still think making NICS accessible to the public is a really goood idea. I don't think there's a compelling reason for the DoJ to prevent any individual selling a firearm from accessing NICS.
Frazzled wrote: Anti gunners are always terrified at the prospect of following the established procedures to amend the Constitution.
And pro-gunners remain in denial that the 2nd amendment has been interpreted differently in the past, and has every chance of being interpreted differently in the future.
Ouze wrote: As an update, police are operating under the assumption he had help, and that he had an escape plan. No elaboration on the latter in the article.
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amanita wrote: Wow...I just learned that the perpetrator in the Las Vegas shooting also targeted huge jet fuel storage tanks in range of the hotel.
I think shooting fuel tanks to cause an explosion only works in the movies.
What about shooting to cause a leak and hitting the leaking fuel with tracer rounds afterwards?
I think mythbusters tackles a variation of shooting gas tanks I think.
Ouze wrote: As an update, police are operating under the assumption he had help, and that he had an escape plan. No elaboration on the latter in the article.
Where you getting this? Thats... deeply disturbing...
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amanita wrote: Wow...I just learned that the perpetrator in the Las Vegas shooting also targeted huge jet fuel storage tanks in range of the hotel.
I think shooting fuel tanks to cause an explosion only works in the movies.
It takes intense heat to ignite fuel tanks like that... or, influx of oxygen. (or both). Simply pew pewing the containers generally isn't enough.
Ouze wrote: As an update, police are operating under the assumption he had help, and that he had an escape plan. No elaboration on the latter in the article.
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amanita wrote: Wow...I just learned that the perpetrator in the Las Vegas shooting also targeted huge jet fuel storage tanks in range of the hotel.
I think shooting fuel tanks to cause an explosion only works in the movies.
What about shooting to cause a leak and hitting the leaking fuel with tracer rounds afterwards?
I think mythbusters tackles a variation of shooting gas tanks I think.
Ouze wrote: As an update, police are operating under the assumption he had help, and that he had an escape plan. No elaboration on the latter in the article.
Where you getting this? Thats... deeply disturbing...
There are multiple identical sources so I think the accurate answer is "the AP". Here's one. Don't bother reading the actual article, it's just a single line.
Sheriff Joseph Lombardo did not provide details, but said officials believe Paddock planned to survive and had made plans to escape following the carnage.
If the ATF concluded that gun show organizers were running shows with the intent of profiting from gun sales and therefore needed an FFL in order to run a gun show I wouldn't have a problem with it. Without making the organizers obtain an FFL they won't be required to run checks.
The sticky issue would probably be that while organizers are profiting from the fact that guns are being sold at the event, they are not profiting from the actual guns sales conducted at the event. The argument would likely boil down to “booth fees” vs “getting a cut of each sale”.
I think this has been the most civil approach towards talking about the gun show “loophole” we’ve managed to have here though.
I think it would have to be approached from the angle you've laid out. Gun shows are de facto storefronts, booths are rented with the intent to use them to facilitate gun sales because gun shows are events that are designed to facilitate gun shows. All of the profits earned are derived from gun sales either directly or indirectly but the intent of the event is clear and it is overtly advertised. Gun shows are intended to be essentially pop up gun stores so it makes sense to require organizers to have an FFL.
Private sellers can still try to make sales through their own efforts, if you decide to sell a shotgun because you're giving up duck hunting you still don't need an FFL but if you bring it to a gun show then the organizer needs to run a background check on the purchaser.
Even if such a law or ATF ruling was put in place I still think making NICS accessible to the public is a really goood idea. I don't think there's a compelling reason for the DoJ to prevent any individual selling a firearm from accessing NICS.
And it would leave the current process for a private sales via word of mouth/etc unchanged, normal everyday private-to-private sales can be conducted without checks.
Automatically Appended Next Post: I wonder if they don’t want to flood the system with calls by making it open for everyone and people having their paperwork filled out completely wrong causing lots of delays.
Although that might be helped somewhat by requiring everyone to register for an account (not a license) and doing an online class before being able to conduct checks.
Ouze wrote: As an update, police are operating under the assumption he had help, and that he had an escape plan. No elaboration on the latter in the article.
Where you getting this? Thats... deeply disturbing...
There are multiple identical sources so I think the accurate answer is "the AP". Here's one. Don't bother reading the actual article, it's just a single line.
Thanks.
Sheriff Joseph Lombardo did not provide details, but said officials believe Paddock planned to survive and had made plans to escape following the carnage.
I mean... that changes things a bit no?
Still... how in Elvis' bunghole you'd expect to escape from that!?!? Casinos are one of the most heavily watched/secured facilities....
d-usa wrote:I find a good deal on a used gun in rough shape, pay $100 for it. I clean it up, adjust the trigger, change out the sights, now it’s a nice gun. Next year I’m rough up for money and I sell it to a guy at work. Because it doesn’t look like crap anymore I sell it for $250 bucks. I made $150 on this gun and used that money as income to pay my electric bill.
I bought and sold, turned the gun around, and more than doubled my money. All things listed in this thread as a standard for requiring a FFL.
If you want to get an FFL and go through NICS, no one is against that. Now if you want to go through the hassle of tracking (and keeping) every Serial Number on record (that can be subject to audits at any time) over one gun, be me guest. You can also go through an FFL as a third party and pay them to run the check. I know here in MO you can have a local Sheriff's office oversee the transfer if there's a concern about getting held up and having the weapon stolen. There's a multitude of ways to protect yourselves and others while trying to trade or sell guns.
Deference to those you know and using your intuition hasn't failed very much in this nation. I live in a state that allows for private transfers between non-prohibited possessors and the amount of crime committed with those weapons is almost nil (3% at best per a 1994 FBI study). With the preponderance of weapons available in the US and a population that is not only growing fairly quickly but it widely diverse, it makes me wonder where all of the risk is that gun collectors and hobbyists who know one another are a threat to society. I've purchased quite a few guns off of the books (totally legal here, most of them older and collectable) and done some trading as well. None of my small circle would be considered dangerous or crazy, everyone I've ever met at a show that is a private seller has been quite level headed or is a dabbler in the industry, not a full blown salesman.
Gordon Shumway wrote:So if I just inherited a lot of guns and am looking to sell them off to profit, that's cool? (A couple I would keep for sentimental or historical reasons)
Sure, just as long as the State you live in permits it.
easysauce wrote:Again, if these "common sense gun laws" are the solution, then why do countries like Canada that have already passed them, and laws far more stringent then them, still say more laws are required?
Why do we always need more of it?
I am amazed anyone bothers owning a firearm in Canada, or parts of the US.
What's inversely puzzling is Canada's stance regarding vintage machine guns, their DEWAT standards are far more rational than those down here in here in the US.
nfe wrote:The assumption that US civilians would be a more effective opposition to the US military than the insurgencies that have been fighting it and its allies overseas is disappointingly hubristic.
Speaking strictly hypothetically, please read about the Partisans in the USSR and Tito's Partizans in Yugoslavia during WWII. None of those partisans would be considered well trained or armed by modern standards and they managed to help defeat one of the strongest militaries in world history. There's an estimated 400 million firearms available in the US (I suspect mostly due to the fact that there are a lot of trophies and antiques that aren't pertinent to modern firearm concerns), there's no way that the US military could confiscate every gun that exists. It's as much a wet dream as the end of the desire murder, which is the primary reason this issue never goes away.
Easy E wrote:I love the "Red Dawn" fantasies in this thread.
The problem is, the fantasy involves killing their own countrymen. SAD!
It's horrible, I am of the opinion that situation will never happen, even if the command structure were so compromised to turn on the American populace, our military isn't large enough to subjugate the US as a whole (technology is nice, but when the Army is as small as it is with regards to trigger-pullers right now, it's all academic) many States have legitimate militias that are recognized by State governments and the average foot soldier is not a compliant zombie to the point that they would turn their weapons on their own countrymen.
Vaktathi wrote: I'm going to take some issue with this part of your statement, mainly for the fact that those technical details often are not necessarily irrelevant.
Sure, my bad. My post wasn't clear. I didn't mean to imply that no technical details ever matter, I was only referring to the tendency of people on the pro-gun side to pick up incorrect technical details from mass shootings and only worry about those, and not the larger story. I've seen a lot of threads focus on a media report describing an attacker wielding, for example, an AK47, when actually the weapon was from some other family of semi-auto rifles and just happened to have a banana magazine.
I agree that technical details do matter, and this has a negative and often bizarre impact on the legalities of various firearms. I was referring to a specific rhetorical trick that some in the pro-gun movement use to deflect from the real issue in the wake of a mass shooting.
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Prestor Jon wrote: Really? You think that the only reason we haven't repealed the 2nd amendment is because of NRA lobbying money? You're going to completely dismiss the tens of millions of gun owners in states that are predominantly represented in Congress by Republicans?
Both you and Kanluwen are wrong.
Kanluwen is wrong when he says the primary impact of the NRA is their lobbying money. The NRA is a tiny funder. In recent election cycles the NRA has given somewhere between 1 and 1.5 million, almost all to Republicans. When campaigns run over a billion, the NRA's contribution is irrelevant.
But you're also wrong, in your strange assumption that somehow 10s of millions of voters represent anything more than a tiny minority. There are more than 120 million active voters in the US. A 10 million strong voting block in almost all circumstances is an irrelevant bit of noise. It's the libertarian party. It's the number who think the US stop having a standing army.
But in the case of the NRA, that 10 million voter block is well organised, embedded in the Republican party and extremely well placed strategically. If a Republican votes on anything to restrict gun rights, the NRA will organise and make sure that everyone of its voters in that electorate gets out and vote for that candidate's primary opponent.
It is the classic example of a minority opinion dominating a single issue.
There's no reason to strip constitutionally protected rights away from people because they're bad at math.
There is no possible way that you think the reason people have their finances managed for them is because they struggle a bit with their maths.
That was a really good article. I don't agree with all of it, and think it missed a few important points. For instance it was dismissive to ignore Australia's results, instead the piece should have made mention of how much more complex Australia's position on gun's is*, but overall it was a good piece with some well thought out arguments. Thanks.
*The often reported fact that since the gun buy back there's been no mass shootings is simplistic. For instance there's now more guns in Australia than there were when the buyback happened. And while mass shootings have disappeared, there's still plenty of shootings. What has dropped considerably is suicides.
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Grey Templar wrote: I'm well aware of political shift. But the same parties are still on the same side of the aisle in terms of gun control. So it seems silly for one side to keep pushing for gun control when it was started for racist reasons, reasons which they now abhor. So why they keep pushing it? They should drop it like a hot potato, tainted fruit and all that.
Yeah, because if one people decades ago wanted to do something for a racist reasons, then no person can ever possibly believe in that same cause for a different reason. That's definitely a real thing that you certainly apply to all your own political beliefs.
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Grey Templar wrote: 35,000 deaths. 2/3 of which are suicides and thus have no business being included in your figure.
Nope, feth that. Your view here isn't just wrong, it's fething awful.
Every suicide is a preventable tragedy. It doesn't matter if the trigger is pulled by the victim or another person, each instance is a life lost that should not have been lost.
And yes, gun proliferation drives suicide. When a person is having suicidal impulses the absolute worse thing you can do is have objects in the house that cause them to keep thinking about suicides, these objects are known as triggers. And yeah, there's no better trigger than a gun.
Doubt that this works like this? In Israel they stopped letting soldiers take weapons home on weekends. Suicides among soldiers dropped by 40%.
Then it's like saying this one place with .00003% of violence is two times as worse as a place with .000015% of violence. Technically true, but its misleading. Both places have really low rates of violence. Differences between them are like rounding errors.
Quoting the rate of frequency with no regard for the impact of the event is absurd. When the murder rate is 4 times as high, in the US that means 7,500 more people murdered every year than would otherwise be the case. That's like having 2.5 9/11 events every year.
It's not a fething rounding error.
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Frazzled wrote: Translation: you don't have the votes so resort to unelected judges.
In 1876 the Supreme Court held that "The right to bear arms is not granted by the Constitution; neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence". In 1939 the Supreme Court said "Second Amendment did not protect weapon types not having a reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia."
Pro-gun types could have pushed for a constitutional amendment, changing the wording of the 2nd amendment to say 'everybody should be able to get guns for whatever purpose they want' or something to that effect. But, in your own words, they didn't have the votes so they resorted to unelected judges. They began a long campaign of arguing that the Second Amendment should be interpreted very differently. And over time they won, and now it's widely held it does support broad private gun ownership. And this victory was so complete that many people are ignorant that it was ever interpreted differently.
So yes, it is a battle over the opinions of unelected judges. But it always have been, and if you think that the pro-gun lobby didn't fight the same battle you're kidding yourself.
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Prestor Jon wrote: Background checks are required by Federal law, that's why we have the NIC system (https://www.fbi.gov/services/cjis/nics) it's an electronic system, there is no wait time beyond the time it takes to pull up the website, type in the information and get the response in regards to whether or not the person has a criminal record that would prohibit him/her from owning firearms. It takes minutes at most. If members of Congress or the Federal govt really wanted every gun sale to go through a background check all they need to do is put a portal to the NIC system on the DOJ website so everyone can use it. Then you would never have a private sale without a background check because every citizen could run a NICs check in a few minutes on their smart phone. The DOJ could do that tomorrow, it wouldn't even require any legislative action by congress and it would be a measure that has the support of most gun owners and most importantly it would actually help prevent sales to bad people.
Why isn't this done? Because the dishonesty in the debate over the right to gun ownership is the same dishonesty that is found in every political issue,
Thanks some interesting info that I wasn't fully aware of, and I agree that making the check easily available, either through a portal or publicly accessible terminals makes good sense.
And I agree that one major reason this process isn't in place is because of political manipulation. However, where you see a federal conspiracy to control this through licensed gun owners, I seems far more obvious to me that it's an attempt by licensed gun sellers to manipulate the law to make sure they control more of the gun trade and make more of the money.
But I think the overall point is something we agree on - much could be gained through common sense reform of existing laws, that would reduce inconvenience on gun owners, and put some actually useful gun control measures in place.
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Grey Templar wrote: Indeed. Police and Firemen are there to deal with the aftermath of crimes and fires. At best, a policeman might get very very very lucky and catch a criminal in the act once in a blue moon while he's tooling around, but that wasn't prevention, it was fast response to a crime in progress. But Firemen certainly don't prevent fires, they just put them out once they start.
This is absolutely false. Modern policing makes crime prevention a major focus of its work. Situational crime prevention, data collection used to predict future crime hotspots and build policy and processes in anticipation of that, violence prevention strategies like breaking the loop, and targeted programs to remove opportunities, skills and equipment used in crime is a regular part of modern policing.
"This is not to say that race didn't play a role - it absolutely did. Nor is it to deny that the Republicans sometimes exploited (and still exploit) racial issues to motivate voters"
The article you cited accepts as that the parties switched position on race, the South switched from Democrat to Republican. The only thing it disputes is the idea that the shift happened suddenly, in 1964, and that other factors than race were also relevant (and even then it misses the mark, as it makes no consideration that many people's opposition to economic programs is based in racial bias).
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Grey Templar wrote: Plus you have the psychological deal with your troops fighting their fellow citizens.
I find it really fascinating that pro-gun people are so aware of the psychological impact on US soldiers for fighting US citizens, but don't spend a single second thinking about the morale impact on rebellious US citizens having to fight US soldiers.
Is there any group in the US held in higher regard than its soldiers? So do you guys honestly think that when a revolution calls to take up arms against the US military, that everyone will agree and sign on to start killing servicemen?
This shows that people who think it'll be the US population vs the army have a really simplistic understanding of the politics of revolution. Look at Syria to found out how it would actually play out. It'll be some of the army, plus some of the population, vs a different bit of the army and a different bit of the population, and whole bunch of foreign powers giving assistance to both sides.
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cuda1179 wrote: I had the great pleasure of knowing a man that fought with the French Resistance in WWII. If he were still alive I'd want someone to argue that a militia wouldn't have been effective. They managed with antique firearms and whatever they could capture.
The French resistance was actually broadly ineffective. They were built up during the war for propaganda purposes in the UK and US, and after the war in France.
There have been lots of effective resistance movements, of course. But not in France during the war.
But if you read about those resistance movements, what you learn is that they had very effective systems in place, cell structures that allowed co-ordination and support, but didn't risk compromise if one cell was infiltrated or captured. When you build those kind of systems then getting your hands on guns is easy. The IRA spent 100 years in a country with very strict gun controls, but today they're still finding weapon caches buried out the countryside, the IRA had so many guns they lost track of massive stockpiles of them. The IRA got their hands on those guns because they had effective structures in place.
If you don't have those structures in place, then your revolution will fail, no matter how many private guns you start with. And if you have those cell structures in place, then it is not hard to get large stockpiles of guns.
And it would leave the current process for a private sales via word of mouth/etc unchanged, normal everyday private-to-private sales can be conducted without checks.
Which is why I'm always baffled that once there is some sort of established term (the famous gun-show loophole) everyone just gets focused on making it as narrow as possible.
Problem is private sales and straw purchases, period. Straw purchasing is forbidden, but the law is toothless because without some massive evidence you can't make a case.
Unless there's a central gun register it just can't be done.
The 2nd amendment is the final defense against a tyrannical government. Not the first. The first is using the democratic process to change the government from within through elections. We're not so far gone as to need to have a 2nd American Revolution, yet.
Stupid argument. Any attempt by civilians trying to throw down America's goverment with rifles, even with full auto rifles, is doomed to fail and death unless they get US america(at least significant part. Say half as a minimum) with them.
If they can get then they can get weapons anyway whether they had them before or not.
If they can't they are dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead. Dead so much it's not even funny. Bunch of civilians with rifles against US army. Good luck! Maybe you last few seconds with that once combat starts.
d-usa wrote: I find a good deal on a used gun in rough shape, pay $100 for it. I clean it up, adjust the trigger, change out the sights, now it’s a nice gun. Next year I’m rough up for money and I sell it to a guy at work. Because it doesn’t look like crap anymore I sell it for $250 bucks. I made $150 on this gun and used that money as income to pay my electric bill.
I bought and sold, turned the gun around, and more than doubled my money. All things listed in this thread as a standard for requiring a FFL.
The point is are you doing it on a regular basis, to make a goddamned living and turn a steady profit. But you (and others) are playing the semantics game, or just skimming posts.
It's the "maintaining a livelyhood" part that you and Gordon are ignoring.
Ouze wrote: As an update, police are operating under the assumption he had help, and that he had an escape plan. No elaboration on the latter in the article.
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amanita wrote: Wow...I just learned that the perpetrator in the Las Vegas shooting also targeted huge jet fuel storage tanks in range of the hotel.
I think shooting fuel tanks to cause an explosion only works in the movies.
Yeah, I want to see a picture showing the tanks in relation to his kill zone(s). I suspect as a result of using the bump stocks he had rounds going high quite a bit. A guy willing to buy all he did and prep this would have bought a few magazines worth of tracers if he wanted to start fires by shooting fuel tanks... Very easy to get if you want them.
nfe wrote:The assumption that US civilians would be a more effective opposition to the US military than the insurgencies that have been fighting it and its allies overseas is disappointingly hubristic.
Given that the US has a lot more room for groups to hide and move in, far more weapons and ammunition on hand than just about anywhere else on earth, both in an absolute and per capita sense, a much more technologically integrate population, a diverse population that wont automatically make an outsider stick out, and a lot more on hand wealth to devote to such an endeavor, I would not think so.
You would not think what? That it's hubristic? It really is. Assuming, without recourse to any data stretching far beyond 'lots of citizens like guns and outdoorshmanship and they live in a big country', that (the general) you could more competently engage the US military than people who have been embedded in conflicts for generations, are composed primarily of soldiers, ex-soldiers, or people trained by those soldiers, and that have access to modern military level hardware is the very definition of hubris.
RE: the couple folks who've thrown examples at me of poorly trained or terribly equipped insurgencies who've been effective. That's really beside the point. Firstly, I was responding to people alluding to current/recent insurgencies in Western Asia in their 'if they can do it - think how good we'd be!' assumptions; and secondly, II'm not saying that a poorly trained force can't be effective, especially when operating in its native habitat against a force unfamiliar with it, and I'm not saying that the US population couldn't muster any effective opposition to a tyrannical oppressor. I'm saying that the assumption that they'd do it better than others without drawing upon any actual data is foolishly arrogannt.
The 2nd amendment is the final defense against a tyrannical government. Not the first. The first is using the democratic process to change the government from within through elections. We're not so far gone as to need to have a 2nd American Revolution, yet.
Stupid argument. Any attempt by civilians trying to throw down America's goverment with rifles, even with full auto rifles, is doomed to fail and death unless they get US america(at least significant part. Say half as a minimum) with them.
If they can get then they can get weapons anyway whether they had them before or not.
If they can't they are dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead. Dead so much it's not even funny. Bunch of civilians with rifles against US army. Good luck! Maybe you last few seconds with that once combat starts.
Additionally, if the US government really wanted a specific bunch of US citizens dead, they wouldn't bother sending in people with guns to do it. They'd just drone some houses from five miles away. The grunts would just investigate the ruins to try and count how many died exactly.
Never mind that if the US breaks down and militias start fighting over who gets to rebuild, guns are going to be absolutely everywhere. Individuals purchasing weapons won't actually matter. The real useful thing will be mass organisation.
"Funny" statistic. In past 50 years deaths related to guns in America has killed MORE Americans than all the wars America has taken part in it's history. Not half bad! Americans are clearly better killing Americans than non-Americans are.
nfe wrote: The assumption that US civilians would be a more effective opposition to the US military than the insurgencies that have been fighting it and its allies overseas is disappointingly hubristic.
Huge ubran environment with endless supply of small arms and ammunition and skilled shooters? Many capable of making their own ammunition? In a real insurgency situation in the US. You'd need a 20 million man army to hold any ground.
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tneva82 wrote: "Funny" statistic. In past 50 years deaths related to guns in America has killed MORE Americans than all the wars America has taken part in it's history. Not half bad! Americans are clearly better killing Americans than non-Americans are.
Almost 50% of our war casualties were Americans killing Americans anyways. Not getting our asses kicked in war is something to be proud of - not to make stupid points about non existent gun violence and suicides (which are on par with other developed western nations - we just kill ourselves with guns here.)
Can I just say, regardless anything else, that it's hard to be sympathetic with a side of an argument if one of the points they make is the *threat of violence* if they don't get their way?
Luke_Prowler wrote: Can I just say, regardless anything else, that it's hard to be sympathetic with a side of an argument if one of the points they make is the *threat of violence* if they don't get their way?
It's not a threat. It's a guarantee. Any gun grab in the USA is going to cost lives - lots of em. I'm also not sure where you are coming from ether because both sides are threatening violence.
As a neutral, it's also clear to me that politics of any issue in the USA has become so polarised, that reasonable debate and compromise are now non-existent.
Not just in the gun debate, but in health care and trying to get a budget passed in Congress.
With regards to the gun debate, you have extremists on both sides: the all gunz are evil, and anybody who own one is evil, side Vs. from my cold dead hands and why shouldn't I be able to own a nuke, brigade.
And sadly, the reasonable people in between these extremisms, have been pushed aside.
Xenomancers wrote: Huge ubran environment with endless supply of small arms and ammunition and skilled shooters? Many capable of making their own ammunition? In a real insurgency situation in the US. You'd need a 20 million man army to hold any ground.
No, you wouldn't, because you aren't considering a realistic scenario. You're neglecting two factors that make civilian guns useless:
1) A situation where violent resistance is morally justified implies an oppressive and thoroughly evil government. You know, the sort of government that doesn't care too much about killing too many people and will just bomb resistance into submission without concern for collateral damage. Insurgencies fighting the current US military can succeed because the US has to at least pretend to care about hurting innocent victims. They have to send in soldiers on the ground to act as police, they can't just call in a B-52 strike and flatten any town that shows signs of disobedience. If the US occupation force didn't have any moral limits the effectiveness of those insurgencies would be vastly diminished.
2) A situation where violent resistance is morally justified is not going to magically happen out of nowhere. The government is not going to go full Nazi just for fun, it's going to start doing awful things because the people who voted for that government want it. It isn't just going to be an occupation force that a resistance group has to fight, it's going to be their fellow citizens. Where are you going to go when your neighbors hate you and will cheer on the police as they come to drag you off to the death camps? Who is going to fight alongside you? What good is your AR-15 going to do when a vigilante mob with their own AR-15s shoots you, while the police stand by and watch? Resistance against an occupying foreign power can work when the majority of the population supports the resistance even if they aren't brave enough to fight directly, and can provide the cover the resistance needs to operate successfully. It's a very different situation when you're talking about resistance against a domestic threat that the majority of the population voted to create.
The simple fact here is that the idea of random civilians with AR-15s opposing tyranny is wishful thinking at best, and fantasies about murdering government officials because of a dispute over tax rates at its worst.
Luke_Prowler wrote: Can I just say, regardless anything else, that it's hard to be sympathetic with a side of an argument if one of the points they make is the *threat of violence* if they don't get their way?
It's not a threat. It's a guarantee. Any gun grab in the USA is going to cost lives - lots of em. I'm also not sure where you are coming from ether because both sides are threatening violence.
Wow, congratulations on 100% not sating my concerns or fears. Reread what you said in a mobster voice and maybe you'll consider why I called it a threat.
Luke_Prowler wrote: Can I just say, regardless anything else, that it's hard to be sympathetic with a side of an argument if one of the points they make is the *threat of violence* if they don't get their way?
It's not a threat. It's a guarantee. Any gun grab in the USA is going to cost lives - lots of em. I'm also not sure where you are coming from ether because both sides are threatening violence.
Wow, congratulations on 100% not sating my concerns or fears. Reread what you said in a mobster voice and maybe you'll consider why I called it a threat.
So you're afraid that the US government will become a totalitarian system that will ignore the rules that are in place to guide it, and completely denounce everything the nation has stood for, for over two hundred years, in an attempt to break into our homes and take our property away from us?
Yeah, I could see how that would be a fearful thing.
sebster wrote: [
In 1876 the Supreme Court held that "The right to bear arms is not granted by the Constitution; neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence". In 1939 the Supreme Court said "Second Amendment did not protect weapon types not having a reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia."
I'd like to point out that the 1939 Heller case was a set-up by anti-gun politicians, prosecutors, and an activist judge. With an under-the-table handshake deal the judge in that case (very anti-gun) made a pro-gun verdict that was intentionally unconstitutional with the sole intent to have it appealed to the Supreme Court, some of its members openly anti-gun. They did this because they knew the Defendant was going into witness protection and couldn't appear himself, nor could he afford to send his lawyer. The Government got to have their side, and ONLY their side heard. Even then the decision was a mixed bag that was viewed as a victory by both sides.
djones520 wrote: So you're afraid that the US government will become a totalitarian system that will ignore the rules that are in place to guide it, and completely denounce everything the nation has stood for, for over two hundred years, in an attempt to break into our homes and take our property away from us?
Yeah, I could see how that would be a fearful thing.
Let's be realistic here, the right to own any gun you want is hardly "everything the nation has stood for", and opposition to the idea of the government taking your property hasn't stopped us from banning stuff in the past. Confiscating illegal guns is not any different from confiscating illegal drugs.
Luke_Prowler wrote: Can I just say, regardless anything else, that it's hard to be sympathetic with a side of an argument if one of the points they make is the *threat of violence* if they don't get their way?
It's not a threat. It's a guarantee. Any gun grab in the USA is going to cost lives - lots of em. I'm also not sure where you are coming from ether because both sides are threatening violence.
djones520 wrote: So you're afraid that the US government will become a totalitarian system that will ignore the rules that are in place to guide it, and completely denounce everything the nation has stood for, for over two hundred years, in an attempt to break into our homes and take our property away from us?
Yeah, I could see how that would be a fearful thing.
Let's be realistic here, the right to own any gun you want is hardly "everything the nation has stood for", and opposition to the idea of the government taking your property hasn't stopped us from banning stuff in the past. Confiscating illegal guns is not any different from confiscating illegal drugs.
The entire point is that violence is the option to be used for when the government goes apeshit on us. As ardent a defender of the 2nd that I am, where the country to come together, and pass an amendment that takes that right away, then so be it. That is the way it's supposed to be done.
But if the plan is to go all Thomas Gage on us, then yeah, expect Concord and Lexington to occur all over again.
djones520 wrote: So you're afraid that the US government will become a totalitarian system that will ignore the rules that are in place to guide it, and completely denounce everything the nation has stood for, for over two hundred years, in an attempt to break into our homes and take our property away from us?
Yeah, I could see how that would be a fearful thing.
Let's be realistic here, the right to own any gun you want is hardly "everything the nation has stood for", and opposition to the idea of the government taking your property hasn't stopped us from banning stuff in the past. Confiscating illegal guns is not any different from confiscating illegal drugs.
The entire point is that violence is the option to be used for when the government goes apeshit on us. As ardent a defender of the 2nd that I am, where the country to come together, and pass an amendment that takes that right away, then so be it. That is the way it's supposed to be done.
But if the plan is to go all Thomas Gage on us, then yeah, expect Concord and Lexington to occur all over again.
That is basically my litmus test for "Constitution Ueber Alles" types. There are lots of folks who will say that the government can take the guns from their cold dead hands after getting all the bullets first even if the 2nd is repealed or a SCOTUS ruling narrows it. And to me that shows that those folks don't care about the constitution, they only care about guns.
As if tyranny of the mob is not just as capable to oppress the people or as unlikely to happen as this Abaddon-equse ruiner of all that's good and pure you're trying you present the government as. The democratic process demands those with in it can make their say without the fear of violenece or violence being used on them. Something gun rights activist have failed on, with my example just being one.
djones520 wrote: The entire point is that violence is the option to be used for when the government goes apeshit on us. As ardent a defender of the 2nd that I am, where the country to come together, and pass an amendment that takes that right away, then so be it. That is the way it's supposed to be done.
But if the plan is to go all Thomas Gage on us, then yeah, expect Concord and Lexington to occur all over again.
See my previous post for why this whole idea that violent revolution is relevant in 2017 is wishful thinking at best, and murder fantasies at worst.
Kilkrazy wrote: To go back to basics, why do ordinary civilian people want/need to own guns?
Not in order of importance:
1. Hunting (shooting, stalking, culling.)
2. Target shooting, from Olympic pistol to Clay pigeon.
3. Self-defence.
4. Feeling safer. Not the same than self-defence, because it's owning the gun that gives them the feeling.
5. Collection (after all, here is a forum about collecting miniatures, isn't it ?)
Luke_Prowler wrote: Can I just say, regardless anything else, that it's hard to be sympathetic with a side of an argument if one of the points they make is the *threat of violence* if they don't get their way?
It's not a threat. It's a guarantee. Any gun grab in the USA is going to cost lives - lots of em. I'm also not sure where you are coming from ether because both sides are threatening violence.
Wow, congratulations on 100% not sating my concerns or fears. Reread what you said in a mobster voice and maybe you'll consider why I called it a threat.
Good. Its MEANT to be a threat. You want a civil war, this is how you get a civil war.
Xenomancers wrote: Huge ubran environment with endless supply of small arms and ammunition and skilled shooters? Many capable of making their own ammunition? In a real insurgency situation in the US. You'd need a 20 million man army to hold any ground.
No, you wouldn't, because you aren't considering a realistic scenario. You're neglecting two factors that make civilian guns useless:
1) A situation where violent resistance is morally justified implies an oppressive and thoroughly evil government. You know, the sort of government that doesn't care too much about killing too many people and will just bomb resistance into submission without concern for collateral damage. Insurgencies fighting the current US military can succeed because the US has to at least pretend to care about hurting innocent victims. They have to send in soldiers on the ground to act as police, they can't just call in a B-52 strike and flatten any town that shows signs of disobedience. If the US occupation force didn't have any moral limits the effectiveness of those insurgencies would be vastly diminished.
2) A situation where violent resistance is morally justified is not going to magically happen out of nowhere. The government is not going to go full Nazi just for fun, it's going to start doing awful things because the people who voted for that government want it. It isn't just going to be an occupation force that a resistance group has to fight, it's going to be their fellow citizens. Where are you going to go when your neighbors hate you and will cheer on the police as they come to drag you off to the death camps? Who is going to fight alongside you? What good is your AR-15 going to do when a vigilante mob with their own AR-15s shoots you, while the police stand by and watch? Resistance against an occupying foreign power can work when the majority of the population supports the resistance even if they aren't brave enough to fight directly, and can provide the cover the resistance needs to operate successfully. It's a very different situation when you're talking about resistance against a domestic threat that the majority of the population voted to create.
The simple fact here is that the idea of random civilians with AR-15s opposing tyranny is wishful thinking at best, and fantasies about murdering government officials because of a dispute over tax rates at its worst.
No one said it would be pretty. It would be downright ugly. Also - I wasn't considering a full Nazi style government that would be okay with destroying half of it's cities to end long hold outs. It's also reasonable to assume that such a government would have the entirety of the world against it - in which a large local resistance force willing to do daring gak because their cities are being destroyed would be extremely useful. There is also no way the US war-machine could run without it's infrastructure intact and US infrastructure is dangerously weak.
d-usa wrote: Other than the one that kicked out the English, how many uprisings and civil wars have been successful?
The Civil war would have been over in months if Lee took Washington when he could have. He - as a true believer in the nation - did not want to sac his own capital city. He wanted a political solution at that point. If he could have seen the future - he would have gone on the offensive right there - nothing would could have stopped him.
d-usa wrote: Other than the one that kicked out the English, how many uprisings and civil wars have been successful?
The Civil war would have been over in months if Lee took Washington when he could have. He - as a true believer in the nation - did not want to sac his own capital city. He wanted a political solution at that point. If he could have seen the future - he would have gone on the offensive right there - nothing would could have stopped him.
Well thats subject to another thread. Also Lee wasn't in charge of anything if you recollect, only after Bull Run I.
d-usa wrote: Other than the one that kicked out the English, how many uprisings and civil wars have been successful?
The Civil war would have been over in months if Lee took Washington when he could have. He - as a true believer in the nation - did not want to sac his own capital city. He wanted a political solution at that point. If he could have seen the future - he would have gone on the offensive right there - nothing would could have stopped him.
Well thats subject to another thread. Also Lee wasn't in charge of anything if you recollect, only after Bull Run I.
True - good memory. Point is that the confederates could have won the war after bullrun if they seized the initiative. Lee was commander of virgina forces at that time - he could and considered launching the attack.
djones520 wrote: So you're afraid that the US government will become a totalitarian system that will ignore the rules that are in place to guide it, and completely denounce everything the nation has stood for, for over two hundred years, in an attempt to break into our homes and take our property away from us?
Yeah, I could see how that would be a fearful thing.
Let's be realistic here, the right to own any gun you want is hardly "everything the nation has stood for", and opposition to the idea of the government taking your property hasn't stopped us from banning stuff in the past. Confiscating illegal guns is not any different from confiscating illegal drugs.
It's completely different.
No where in the Constitution the right to illegal drugs is in the text. You can make the case that the Federal government, by virtue of the 10th amendment, shouldn't have any laws regard illicit drugs and leave it to the states to make that determination.
Whereas you have the 2nd Amendment that expressly confirms right to self defense (...people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed).
So... yeah... the nation has stood for quite a long time with 2nd Amendment protecting this inalienable right.
I don't think "feeling safer" is a valid response. You can feel safer with or without guns, and many (perhaps most) people feel safer without -- either way you might be right or wrong abuot your feeling, and changing it would be a matter of emotional education.
However you can't go stalking or target shooting without guns.
The Nation stood because people agreed that it should remain standing, and people with guns have been taking away these inalienable rights from huge numbers since the day it was founded.
Politicians don’t touch the 2nd because they like having a job and getting the power and attention that comes with being a representative, not because they are afraid of angry folks with guns.
To move away from the historical/civil war arguments here, and back on to current affairs, it appears that bipartisan momentum to ban bump fire stocks exists.
Whether this will go ahead or not is anyone's guess, though with a GOP house, senate, presidency and SC, I would be surprised.
Personally, on the subject, I guess I don't care that much either way, I always found bump stocks to be more of a gimmick than anything else, mostly useful for turning dollars into noise for people to be impressed on YouTube or having silly fun at a range, and are prone to reliability and functionality issues on top of being awkward to use, though I'm also of the opinion that, given their gimmicky nature and the fact that you can replicate their effect with a belt loop and a thumb pretty easily, the rush to ban these feels more like a bandwagon "we're doing *something*" attempt to snag politcally low hanging fruit, mainly for publicity's own sake. Wont be terribly impressed, bothered, upset, disappointed or excited either way.
Imagine you're caught in a parallel twilight zone universe for today.
Someone approaches you and offers you a choice.
If you give up all your guns right now, and promise never to buy another one, he would undo the massacre in Las Vegas. If you choose to keep your guns, or refuse to make the promise, the massacre stands.
Rather personally disturbing news that this donkey-cave was looking...and had booked hotel rooms...at Lollapalooza this year. My Godson and two of his friends attended the festival and stayed with us while they were in town.
Imagine you're caught in a parallel twilight zone universe for today.
Someone approaches you and offers you a choice.
If you give up all your guns right now, and promise never to buy another one, he would undo the massacre in Las Vegas. If you choose to keep your guns, or refuse to make the promise, the massacre stands.
What do you do?
Does it include the thousands of plastic guns we all play with? if so no dice.
Imagine you're caught in a parallel twilight zone universe for today.
Someone approaches you and offers you a choice.
If you give up all your guns right now, and promise never to buy another one, he would undo the massacre in Las Vegas. If you choose to keep your guns, or refuse to make the promise, the massacre stands.
What do you do?
Tell him he's a dick for extorting people instead of just using that magic time machine to go back in time and stop the massacre.
djones520 wrote: So you're afraid that the US government will become a totalitarian system that will ignore the rules that are in place to guide it, and completely denounce everything the nation has stood for, for over two hundred years, in an attempt to break into our homes and take our property away from us?
Yeah, I could see how that would be a fearful thing.
Let's be realistic here, the right to own any gun you want is hardly "everything the nation has stood for", and opposition to the idea of the government taking your property hasn't stopped us from banning stuff in the past. Confiscating illegal guns is not any different from confiscating illegal drugs.
It's completely different.
No where in the Constitution the right to illegal drugs is in the text. You can make the case that the Federal government, by virtue of the 10th amendment, shouldn't have any laws regard illicit drugs and leave it to the states to make that determination.
Whereas you have the 2nd Amendment that expressly confirms right to self defense (...people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed).
So... yeah... the nation has stood for quite a long time with 2nd Amendment protecting this inalienable right.
The constitution can and has been changed over time. The interpretation and application of the constitution's contents can and have changed over time. The constitution is not some kind of divine absolute handed down from on high, the contents are neither self-justifying nor self-implementing. The idea that one particular interpretation, of one particular passage that happens to be the popular convention at the moment is hardly a sound ground on which to make grand claims in broad terms of what the nation does, has or should stand for.
Imagine you're caught in a parallel twilight zone universe for today.
Someone approaches you and offers you a choice.
If you give up all your guns right now, and promise never to buy another one, he would undo the massacre in Las Vegas. If you choose to keep your guns, or refuse to make the promise, the massacre stands.
What do you do?
Keep my guns.
Now proceed to label me as some sort of heartless monster, as that's evidently your desire with this bait question.
Imagine you're caught in a parallel twilight zone universe for today.
Someone approaches you and offers you a choice.
If you give up all your guns right now, and promise never to buy another one, he would undo the massacre in Las Vegas. If you choose to keep your guns, or refuse to make the promise, the massacre stands.
What do you do?
Tell him he's a dick for extorting people instead of just using that magic time machine to go back in time and stop the massacre.
Tell him he's thinking much too small by focusing on the Vegas attack to save 50 when he could go back in time and stop Hitler or Jesus and save millions of lives instead.
d-usa wrote: The Nation stood because people agreed that it should remain standing, and people with guns have been taking away these inalienable rights from huge numbers since the day it was founded.
Politicians don’t touch the 2nd because they like having a job and getting the power and attention that comes with being a representative, not because they are afraid of angry folks with guns.
djones520 wrote: So you're afraid that the US government will become a totalitarian system that will ignore the rules that are in place to guide it, and completely denounce everything the nation has stood for, for over two hundred years, in an attempt to break into our homes and take our property away from us?
Yeah, I could see how that would be a fearful thing.
Let's be realistic here, the right to own any gun you want is hardly "everything the nation has stood for", and opposition to the idea of the government taking your property hasn't stopped us from banning stuff in the past. Confiscating illegal guns is not any different from confiscating illegal drugs.
It's completely different.
No where in the Constitution the right to illegal drugs is in the text. You can make the case that the Federal government, by virtue of the 10th amendment, shouldn't have any laws regard illicit drugs and leave it to the states to make that determination.
Whereas you have the 2nd Amendment that expressly confirms right to self defense (...people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed).
So... yeah... the nation has stood for quite a long time with 2nd Amendment protecting this inalienable right.
If the right to keep and bear Arms is inalienable, why aren't you allowed to own a battleship, or a nuclear weapon? I'll give you a hint: because it's not actually inalienable.
Imagine you're caught in a parallel twilight zone universe for today.
Someone approaches you and offers you a choice.
If you give up all your guns right now, and promise never to buy another one, he would undo the massacre in Las Vegas. If you choose to keep your guns, or refuse to make the promise, the massacre stands.
What do you do?
Tell him he's a dick for extorting people instead of just using that magic time machine to go back in time and stop the massacre.
Tell him he's thinking much too small by focusing on the Vegas attack to save 50 when he could go back in time and stop Hitler or Jesus and save millions of lives instead.
This is all very silly and off topic and Marmatag should feel bad for fishing with such low quality bait.
A good take on time travel and changing history is Stephen King's 11/22/63, which deals with the JFK assassination. Like most King books, it's a great story, and it appears he did his research (within the bounds of a fictional book that has time travel)
Imagine you're caught in a parallel twilight zone universe for today.
Someone approaches you and offers you a choice.
If you give up all your guns right now, and promise never to buy another one, he would undo the massacre in Las Vegas. If you choose to keep your guns, or refuse to make the promise, the massacre stands.
What do you do?
An interesting thought experiment. I would say no - heres why. Assuming this guy was crazy and just wanted to kill people and being a millionaire - he easily could have acquired an explosive device which could have caused much more damage.
d-usa wrote: The Nation stood because people agreed that it should remain standing, and people with guns have been taking away these inalienable rights from huge numbers since the day it was founded.
Politicians don’t touch the 2nd because they like having a job and getting the power and attention that comes with being a representative, not because they are afraid of angry folks with guns.
I’m not taking about deaths, I’m taking about inalienable rights.
Slavery, segregation, internment camps, treatment of Native Americans, police abuse. And that’s the loss of alianable rights at the hand of the good guys with guns while the other good guys with guns are standing by to fight off the tyrannical government if they ever come for their inalienable rights.
Pulled this from several twittah post and websites:
Yesterday's press conf... (warning, it's long):
TIMELINE:
*10:05pm shooting begins. Suspect on 32nd floor.
*10:12pm First two officers arrive on 31st floor stating gunfire origin on 32nd floor.
*10:15pm Last shots fired by suspect.
*10:17pm First two officers arrive on 32nd floor.
*10:18pm Security guard, Jose Campos tells police he was shot and exact room location.
*10:26-10:30pm Eight additional officers arrive on 32nd floor. Begins evacuation.
*10:55pm Eight additional officers arrive at suspect hotel room door.
*11:20pm Initial room breach. Suspect located. 2nd Door (room) identified.
*11:27pm Second breach, 2nd room. Radio: All Clear – Suspect Down.
I'm amazed at how quickly the police got to the floor...
*Paddock led a secretive life. No social media presence.
*Paddock previously scouted a prior venue.
*over 200 strafing rounds were fired through the door at the responding Mandalay Bay security guard, Jose Campos.
*several of the weapons Paddock was using jammed during the shooting.
*gunman had an apparent escape strategy (unidentified).
*non of the cameras discovered (4) were recording.
*suspect vehicle held ten 1lb containers of tannerite explosive. Two 20lb containers of tannerite and an additional 1,600 rounds of ammunition.
*no idea why Paddock did not utilize explosives. Why bring them?
*police still seeking tips on Stephen Paddock activity for months, weeks, days up to the event.
*motive still unknown. Local LEO does not know results from FBI interview with Ms. Danley.
*the possibility of an accomplice is strong.
*there was a great deal of premeditation involved in carrying out this attack.
*possibility of Paddock having done pre-surveillance of alternate attack venue.
*thousands of rounds of ammunition present in room.
*no suicide note was found in the room.
*assumption is Paddock stopped shooting because security guard knock spooked him.
*Paddock was gambling at some points prior to the shooting. Did not appear to have companion for gambling.
*Paddock purchased 33 weapons in October 2016. Police are interested in what took place in/around October 2016 to elicit his bulk purchase of firearms.
*police see evidence he planned to survive and escape. Would not elaborate.
*residence in Reno large ammo and firearms. Residence in Mesquite large ammo and firearms. All indications point toward having some form of assistance.
Google map is pretty good if you take the time to fiddle with it... but, I'm not sure how I can post just the image. Here's a good one when fished from google images (look at center slide):
whembly wrote: Pulled this from several twittah post and websites:
Yesterday's press conf... (warning, it's long):
TIMELINE:
*10:05pm shooting begins. Suspect on 32nd floor.
*10:12pm First two officers arrive on 31st floor stating gunfire origin on 32nd floor.
*10:15pm Last shots fired by suspect.
*10:17pm First two officers arrive on 32nd floor.
*10:18pm Security guard, Jose Campos tells police he was shot and exact room location.
*10:26-10:30pm Eight additional officers arrive on 32nd floor. Begins evacuation.
*10:55pm Eight additional officers arrive at suspect hotel room door.
*11:20pm Initial room breach. Suspect located. 2nd Door (room) identified.
*11:27pm Second breach, 2nd room. Radio: All Clear – Suspect Down.
I'm amazed at how quickly the police got to the floor...
*Paddock led a secretive life. No social media presence.
*Paddock previously scouted a prior venue.
*over 200 strafing rounds were fired through the door at the responding Mandalay Bay security guard, Jose Campos.
*several of the weapons Paddock was using jammed during the shooting.
*gunman had an apparent escape strategy (unidentified).
*non of the cameras discovered (4) were recording.
*suspect vehicle held ten 1lb containers of tannerite explosive. Two 20lb containers of tannerite and an additional 1,600 rounds of ammunition.
*no idea why Paddock did not utilize explosives. Why bring them?
*police still seeking tips on Stephen Paddock activity for months, weeks, days up to the event.
*motive still unknown. Local LEO does not know results from FBI interview with Ms. Danley.
*the possibility of an accomplice is strong.
*there was a great deal of premeditation involved in carrying out this attack.
*possibility of Paddock having done pre-surveillance of alternate attack venue.
*thousands of rounds of ammunition present in room.
*no suicide note was found in the room.
*assumption is Paddock stopped shooting because security guard knock spooked him.
*Paddock was gambling at some points prior to the shooting. Did not appear to have companion for gambling.
*Paddock purchased 33 weapons in October 2016. Police are interested in what took place in/around October 2016 to elicit his bulk purchase of firearms.
*police see evidence he planned to survive and escape. Would not elaborate.
*residence in Reno large ammo and firearms. Residence in Mesquite large ammo and firearms. All indications point toward having some form of assistance.
Google map is pretty good if you take the time to fiddle with it... but, I'm not sure how I can post just the image. Here's a good one when fished from google images (look at center slide):
doesnt surprise me that he had jams, but for what he invested in those guns, he could probably have afforded a proper belt fed papered MG or illegally converted one, still wondering why he thought a clutch of AR15's was a better idea. Theres obviously a lot of thought and preplanning that went into this, but the tools chosen for this massacre are...curious, though im guessing someone whod do something like this probably has a few nuts loose somewhere anyway.
TheCustomLime wrote: Does anyone know why the guy did it? I can't just wrap my head around the motive.
still appears to be a complete mystery from what publicly available info there is.
djones520 wrote: So you're afraid that the US government will become a totalitarian system that will ignore the rules that are in place to guide it, and completely denounce everything the nation has stood for, for over two hundred years, in an attempt to break into our homes and take our property away from us?
Yeah, I could see how that would be a fearful thing.
Let's be realistic here, the right to own any gun you want is hardly "everything the nation has stood for", and opposition to the idea of the government taking your property hasn't stopped us from banning stuff in the past. Confiscating illegal guns is not any different from confiscating illegal drugs.
It's completely different.
No where in the Constitution the right to illegal drugs is in the text. You can make the case that the Federal government, by virtue of the 10th amendment, shouldn't have any laws regard illicit drugs and leave it to the states to make that determination.
Whereas you have the 2nd Amendment that expressly confirms right to self defense (...people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed).
So... yeah... the nation has stood for quite a long time with 2nd Amendment protecting this inalienable right.
If the right to keep and bear Arms is inalienable, why aren't you allowed to own a battleship
You can. Only thing stopping people would be because how prohibitedly expensive to purchase/build and operate it.
In the Constitution, the Letter of Marque was used to enable PRIVATELY owned warships to be used in the name of country. Back in those days, these private ship owners had enough firepower to lay waste to coastal towns.
If I was stupidely rich, I'd love to have an operational Iowa-class battle ship. Or, commission the Montana-class to be built:
, or a nuclear weapon?
I was wrong earlier... you can as there's no law preventing you from owning it. Again, ridiculously expensive and tech knowhow to build/maintain... just ask North Korea and Iran.
I'll give you a hint: because it's not actually inalienable.
That's horsepuckey... hence why Alexander Hamilton argued ferverntly for it.
djones520 wrote: So you're afraid that the US government will become a totalitarian system that will ignore the rules that are in place to guide it, and completely denounce everything the nation has stood for, for over two hundred years, in an attempt to break into our homes and take our property away from us?
Yeah, I could see how that would be a fearful thing.
Let's be realistic here, the right to own any gun you want is hardly "everything the nation has stood for", and opposition to the idea of the government taking your property hasn't stopped us from banning stuff in the past. Confiscating illegal guns is not any different from confiscating illegal drugs.
It's completely different.
No where in the Constitution the right to illegal drugs is in the text. You can make the case that the Federal government, by virtue of the 10th amendment, shouldn't have any laws regard illicit drugs and leave it to the states to make that determination.
Whereas you have the 2nd Amendment that expressly confirms right to self defense (...people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed).
So... yeah... the nation has stood for quite a long time with 2nd Amendment protecting this inalienable right.
If the right to keep and bear Arms is inalienable, why aren't you allowed to own a battleship, or a nuclear weapon? I'll give you a hint: because it's not actually inalienable.
Actually, it's not illegal to own either of those things. It's merely illegal to criminally use a WMD.
And there is nothing illegal about owning a battleship. And that's something that the Founders would have been familiar with. Private citizens often owned warships, and the usually took better care of them then Navies did(because they had the money to do it).
d-usa wrote: Other than the one that kicked out the English, how many uprisings and civil wars have been successful?
In the US North American Territory?
*USA
*Texas
*California
*Comanche Nation
*Red Cloud
*Republic of Jones
*Old Coke
Failures:
*Shay's rebellion
*The War of Southern Plantation Owners
*Seminoles, Sioux, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Comanche, Kiowa, Black Foot, Crow....
*White Lightning Wars
Successful against the US I meant.
Comanche Nation
Red Cloud
Old Coke.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Kilkrazy wrote: I don't think "feeling safer" is a valid response. You can feel safer with or without guns, and many (perhaps most) people feel safer without -- either way you might be right or wrong abuot your feeling, and changing it would be a matter of emotional education.
However you can't go stalking or target shooting without guns.
A valid response is NOT required. It is a fundamental right, on the same level of freedom of speech, press, assembly, and the right to Boogie.
If you ban platform shoes and disco balls, then only criminals will have disco balls!*
*Oops look like my disco ball just fell into a lake.
Imagine you're caught in a parallel twilight zone universe for today.
Someone approaches you and offers you a choice.
If you give up all your guns right now, and promise never to buy another one, he would undo the massacre in Las Vegas. If you choose to keep your guns, or refuse to make the promise, the massacre stands.
Imagine you're caught in a parallel twilight zone universe for today.
Someone approaches you and offers you a choice.
If you give up all your guns right now, and promise never to buy another one, he would undo the massacre in Las Vegas. If you choose to keep your guns, or refuse to make the promise, the massacre stands.
What do you do?
Steal your time machine, with my gun.
Surprised this hypothetical time guy doesn't just go back and make sure the redcoats win. under brit rule we wouldnt have the second amendment. every problem solved
Also apparently had massive quantities of explosives in his car
Had multiple venues scouted out
Possible accomplice, note left but not suicide, planned to escape
What would drive a rich old white guy to do this?
I haven't seen which corner of the derposphere this guy inhabits, but there are communities out there to radicalise you, regardless of your tastes.
Spend some time on r/ the donald, and see for yourself. It's frankly deplorable. There's subreddits for all kinds of nutters, but that one rises to the top with the most regularity.
I can see many reasons. Maybe sparking the fire for a US civil war. By reading the recent developpments, it seems like he didn't intend to die into this - he killed himself rather than being caught by the police. What is sure is that he planned all of this for quite some time.
I can see many reasons. Maybe sparking the fire for a US civil war. By reading the recent developpments, it seems like he didn't intend to die into this - he killed himself rather than being caught by the police. What is sure is that he planned all of this for quite some time.
The problem is that most of the reasons for doing this kind of thing also require that you broadcast those reasons to the world. There's only one reason I can think of for doing this and not telling anybody why: you want to troll the world and keep yourself famous forever as armchair analysts wonder for decades on History Channel programs why you did it.
Also apparently had massive quantities of explosives in his car
Had multiple venues scouted out
Possible accomplice, note left but not suicide, planned to escape
What would drive a rich old white guy to do this?
I haven't seen which corner of the derposphere this guy inhabits, but there are communities out there to radicalise you, regardless of your tastes.
Spend some time on r/ the donald, and see for yourself. It's frankly deplorable. There's subreddits for all kinds of nutters, but that one rises to the top with the most regularity.
yeah, there's some seriously off kilter communities on the web.
I'm a gun nerd, but taking a look at the politics section of something like akfiles.com or ar15.com is...well, terrifying. This board at its worst is downright tame compared to the normal fare at these places.
Congress' most powerful Republican says lawmakers should examine "bump-stocks", a rapid-fire accessory used by the gunman in Sunday's Las Vegas massacre.
House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan told a radio talk show: "Clearly that's something we need to look into."
Texas Senator John Cornyn - the number two Republican in the Senate - has called for hearings into the devices.
uh huh.
But the accessories can be obtained without the extensive background checks required of automatic weapons.
They typically cost less than $200 (£150) and allow nearly 100 high-velocity bullets to be fired in just seven seconds, according to one company advert.
One of the most popular manufacturers of bump-stocks, Slide Fire, said they had sold out "due to extreme high demands" since the Las Vegas shooting.
djones520 wrote: So you're afraid that the US government will become a totalitarian system that will ignore the rules that are in place to guide it, and completely denounce everything the nation has stood for, for over two hundred years, in an attempt to break into our homes and take our property away from us?
Yeah, I could see how that would be a fearful thing.
Let's be realistic here, the right to own any gun you want is hardly "everything the nation has stood for", and opposition to the idea of the government taking your property hasn't stopped us from banning stuff in the past. Confiscating illegal guns is not any different from confiscating illegal drugs.
It's completely different.
No where in the Constitution the right to illegal drugs is in the text. You can make the case that the Federal government, by virtue of the 10th amendment, shouldn't have any laws regard illicit drugs and leave it to the states to make that determination.
Whereas you have the 2nd Amendment that expressly confirms right to self defense (...people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed).
So... yeah... the nation has stood for quite a long time with 2nd Amendment protecting this inalienable right.
If the right to keep and bear Arms is inalienable, why aren't you allowed to own a battleship, or a nuclear weapon? I'll give you a hint: because it's not actually inalienable.
Actually, it's not illegal to own either of those things. It's merely illegal to criminally use a WMD.
And there is nothing illegal about owning a battleship. And that's something that the Founders would have been familiar with.
Are you going to put muzzleloaders on that battleship?
Also apparently had massive quantities of explosives in his car
Had multiple venues scouted out
Possible accomplice, note left but not suicide, planned to escape
What would drive a rich old white guy to do this?
I haven't seen which corner of the derposphere this guy inhabits, but there are communities out there to radicalise you, regardless of your tastes.
Spend some time on r/ the donald, and see for yourself. It's frankly deplorable. There's subreddits for all kinds of nutters, but that one rises to the top with the most regularity.
yeah, there's some seriously off kilter communities on the web.
I'm a gun nerd, but taking a look at the politics section of something like akfiles.com or ar15.com is...well, terrifying. This board at its worst is downright tame compared to the normal fare at these places.
djones520 wrote: So you're afraid that the US government will become a totalitarian system that will ignore the rules that are in place to guide it, and completely denounce everything the nation has stood for, for over two hundred years, in an attempt to break into our homes and take our property away from us?
Yeah, I could see how that would be a fearful thing.
Let's be realistic here, the right to own any gun you want is hardly "everything the nation has stood for", and opposition to the idea of the government taking your property hasn't stopped us from banning stuff in the past. Confiscating illegal guns is not any different from confiscating illegal drugs.
It's completely different.
No where in the Constitution the right to illegal drugs is in the text. You can make the case that the Federal government, by virtue of the 10th amendment, shouldn't have any laws regard illicit drugs and leave it to the states to make that determination.
Whereas you have the 2nd Amendment that expressly confirms right to self defense (...people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed).
So... yeah... the nation has stood for quite a long time with 2nd Amendment protecting this inalienable right.
If the right to keep and bear Arms is inalienable, why aren't you allowed to own a battleship, or a nuclear weapon? I'll give you a hint: because it's not actually inalienable.
Actually, it's not illegal to own either of those things. It's merely illegal to criminally use a WMD.
And there is nothing illegal about owning a battleship. And that's something that the Founders would have been familiar with.
Are you going to put muzzleloaders on that battleship?
Again, nothing illegal about any of the weapons on that battleship. There would be more regulations regarding the nuclear reactor running it.
I can think of a lot of reasons the guy didn't bring everything into the room. Maybe he got paranoid and thought someone was onto him - or he just got tired of lugging huge weight up to his room. In any case - it seems he was planning a whole lot of destruction. The question is why.
d-usa wrote: Other than the one that kicked out the English, how many uprisings and civil wars have been successful?
Well, there was the RedNeck rebellion, Coalminer's rebellion (National Guard used as private thugs), Second Battle of Athens (1946 I want to say?), Steel minors revolt (not technically the Government, but the company had Government approval for violence), and an instance in Oklahoma in the 1920's when a Private company convinced the Governor that the National Guard should be their private goon squad to rough up union protestors. Armed men were able to hold off the National Guard long enough that they weren't able to machine-gun unarmed women and children sitting in tents.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
AlmightyWalrus wrote: [
If the right to keep and bear Arms is inalienable, why aren't you allowed to own a battleship, or a nuclear weapon? I'll give you a hint: because it's not actually inalienable.
You actually can own a Battleship. It would require a TON of money, but you can do it.
I'll give you a hint: because it's not actually inalienable.
That's horsepuckey... hence why Alexander Hamilton argued ferverntly for it.
Are felons allowed to own weapons?
Convicted felons lose their rights to vote and own weapons.
So much for "inalienable" rights then, eh?
Rights can be alienated, up to and including ones life, through due process as a result of one's actions. But it has to be a consequence of ones own actIons and go through an established process, open to public scrutiny.
That said, black powder guns are not considered firearms, a convicted felon may own one of those
Imagine you're caught in a parallel twilight zone universe for today.
Someone approaches you and offers you a choice.
If you give up all your guns right now, and promise never to buy another one, he would undo the massacre in Las Vegas. If you choose to keep your guns, or refuse to make the promise, the massacre stands.
What do you do?
Tell him he's a dick for extorting people instead of just using that magic time machine to go back in time and stop the massacre.
Tell him he's thinking much too small by focusing on the Vegas attack to save 50 when he could go back in time and stop Hitler or Muhammad and save millions of lives instead.
I'm going to go ahead and assume his motivations ultimately boil down to erectile dysfunction. We should assume that for every mass shooter. How many crazies will want to copycat "Limpy McFlaccid"?
The choice of tannerite for an explosive is an interesting one. It's stable and not even flammable, but it can be set off by high impact such as a rifle round. Makes one wonder how that fit into the plan.
amanita wrote: The choice of tannerite for an explosive is an interesting one. It's stable and not even flammable, but it can be set off by high impact such as a rifle round. Makes one wonder how that fit into the plan.
Reports are that he had planned to escape, so he could have had additional targets/attacks in mind. Possibly park the car somewhere and shoot it up until it explodes.
If they are made illegal, or any other changes are brought in, is the average American gun owner likely to turn in any the already own?
I ask because being a Brit, my impression of gun owners is very much skewed. To me, they're all baying loonies, because that's how they're commonly portrayed.
Not intended to be a troll post, and not seeking controvesy for its own sake. My mental image is inaccurate!
Sometimes the procedure is that guns manufactured before the ban of a particular detail will remain legal so long as they're provably manufactured before the date. So gun companies tend to go nuts with making more or buying up existing stock since they'll be able to sell them for more after the ban.
If they are made illegal, or any other changes are brought in, is the average American gun owner likely to turn in any the already own?
I ask because being a Brit, my impression of gun owners is very much skewed. To me, they're all baying loonies, because that's how they're commonly portrayed.
Not intended to be a troll post, and not seeking controvesy for its own sake. My mental image is inaccurate!
if they follow previous "bans", such as with Automatic weapons, existing items wont be required to be surrendered, but no new ones allowed into the market. Whether they require registration as an NFA item or not...we'll see, my guess would be yes, in which case itll be a $200 tax stamp and paperwork to the ATF plus inflated market prices to get ahold of one.
Interesting to see that moving forward, more interesting will be what effect this may have on internal GOP politics.
Not being a gun enthusiast or anything, but bump firing mechanisms seem like something you could make at home without a huge amount of effort depending on the gun (maybe not as pretty as the ones manufacturers currently sell, but functional).
Interesting to see that moving forward, more interesting will be what effect this may have on internal GOP politics.
Not being a gun enthusiast or anything, but bump firing mechanisms seem like something you could make at home without a huge amount of effort depending on the gun (maybe not as pretty as the ones manufacturers currently sell, but functional).
You can literally use a string and your belt loop. Fugly as all hell and gimmicky.
Most gun enthusiasts think it's an impractical range toy and not something you'd ever use when hunting or self defense.
Interesting to see that moving forward, more interesting will be what effect this may have on internal GOP politics.
Not being a gun enthusiast or anything, but bump firing mechanisms seem like something you could make at home without a huge amount of effort depending on the gun (maybe not as pretty as the ones manufacturers currently sell, but functional).
You are correct. You can also get the same effect with a thumb and a belt loop.
Interesting to see that moving forward, more interesting will be what effect this may have on internal GOP politics.
Not being a gun enthusiast or anything, but bump firing mechanisms seem like something you could make at home without a huge amount of effort depending on the gun (maybe not as pretty as the ones manufacturers currently sell, but functional).
Correct. You also don't even need a device to bump fire a semi auto.
I'm not surprised the white house supports a ban on those stocks, as they want to be seen as "doing something".
Interesting to see that moving forward, more interesting will be what effect this may have on internal GOP politics.
Not being a gun enthusiast or anything, but bump firing mechanisms seem like something you could make at home without a huge amount of effort depending on the gun (maybe not as pretty as the ones manufacturers currently sell, but functional).
You can literally use a string and your belt loop. Fugly as all hell and gimmicky.
Most gun enthusiasts think it's an impractical range toy and not something you'd ever use when hunting or self defense.
Yeah I've seen people bump firing like that. I was thinking something more like a bump stock but DIY home style; just something that lets the grip float but only in the direction of recoil so you can still keep a good firm hold on the arse end of the gun to be able to aim half decently. I'm thinking a couple of pipes, a makeshift grip and a linear bearing.
Of course not something terribly useful for hunting or self defence. I more meant as in even if you ban them you could whip something up at home and it'd still be effective for shooting in to crowds of people.
Interesting to see that moving forward, more interesting will be what effect this may have on internal GOP politics.
Not being a gun enthusiast or anything, but bump firing mechanisms seem like something you could make at home without a huge amount of effort depending on the gun (maybe not as pretty as the ones manufacturers currently sell, but functional).
Correct. You also don't even need a device to bump fire a semi auto.
I'm not surprised the white house supports a ban on those stocks, as they want to be seen as "doing something".
I am surprised the NRA supports it though.
It’s a stupid toy, with no practical purpose other than shooting away a ton of money in ammo at the range, or spray-n-pray against a large group of people.
The NRA probably realizes that this one toy will be the one thing to become the poster-child of this attack and the reason why it was so deadly. The NRA probably realizes that this will affect (I’m guessing) less than 1% of all gun owners in the US.
And, probably the main reason why the NRA is okay with this, it gives them talking points in the future. Whatever the next restriction will be after this, it will let the NRA declare “it’s never enough for liberals, we let them restrict our rights in 2017, now they are back for more, slowly chipping away is what they do”.
Shrewd politics. The winds are blowing against them right now and they stand to lose a lot of face by blindly opposing any new legislation. If they instead support an ineffective ban they get to appear to be one of the good guys when they're really just throwing rotten meat at a rabid dog to keep it from biting of their leg.
23 rifles(?) and from the pics not cheap ones plus at least 12 large capacity magazines + various sights.
It's not as if this is a spur of the moment act (as we know) it took planning and investment. Just curious as to how much investment.
Cheers
Andrew
PS Though I know its my opinion, I could see the bump stocks being banned completely, with no grandfathering rights. They are an addition, a supplement if you like and not the actual gun itself. Kind of like banning a particular make of tyre. The tyre goes not the car.
AndrewC wrote: If my American friends can answer a question?
How much did this guy spend?
From the pictures Ive seen, assuming 23 mid-high end AR's with optics, upgrades, etc?
Probably at least $50k. $50-100k would be my guess, somewhere in there.
PS Though I know its my opinion, I could see the bump stocks being banned completely, with no grandfathering rights. They are an addition, a supplement if you like and not the actual gun itself. Kind of like banning a particular make of tyre. The tyre goes not the car.
In general in the US, the government cannot ban something and then post facto seize it, no matter what it is.
AndrewC wrote: If my American friends can answer a question?
How much did this guy spend?
From the reports he had 15 stocks so that's $3K
23 rifles(?) and from the pics not cheap ones plus at least 12 large capacity magazines + various sights.
It's not as if this is a spur of the moment act (as we know) it took planning and investment. Just curious as to how much investment.
The stocks had been going down in price - they were $200 when introduced but they were commonly about $100 last I saw. I bought mine for $100 a few years ago.
It's impossible to estimate how much the telescopic sights were, because glass varies wildly - you can get $50 scopes or you can get $7,000 scopes. I will say that I saw some eotech holo scopes, those run about $350-$400.
We don't know a breakdown of how many of what rifles, and again there is a lot of variability there. The Daniels Defense are a mid to high range AR - around $3000 apiece. He had at least one AK - those are usually pretty cheap, $600ish.
Those big Surefire mags are a bit spendy as well, like $150 apiece for the 100 round mags.
AndrewC wrote: If my American friends can answer a question?
How much did this guy spend?
From the pictures Ive seen, assuming 23 mid-high end AR's with optics, upgrades, etc?
Probably at least $50k. $50-100k would be my guess, somewhere in there.
Probably just pocket change for this guy from what it sounds like. He would gamble away 40k in a single night. Turns out Bernie Sanders was right, the problem isn't guns, it's rich people!
PS Though I know its my opinion, I could see the bump stocks being banned completely, with no grandfathering rights. They are an addition, a supplement if you like and not the actual gun itself. Kind of like banning a particular make of tyre. The tyre goes not the car.
In general in the US, the government cannot ban something and then post facto seize it, no matter what it is.
Yeah, they can confiscate them if anybody is dumb enough to try to sell them at a gun show or something like that I guess. But other than prohibiting them from being sold (which would include private sellers as well) there really isn't much you can do about the ones that are out there. I'd expect demand to pick up before they get banned though, just because people will want to buy the stupid toy just to stick it to the government.
Shrewd politics. The winds are blowing against them right now and they stand to lose a lot of face by blindly opposing any new legislation. If they instead support an ineffective ban they get to appear to be one of the good guys when they're really just throwing rotten meat at a rabid dog to keep it from biting of their leg.
That and they get to drive another round of windfall sales for the gun industry by scaremongering everyone about how the government wants to take all your guns and bullets, which really works best when the government actually bans things on occasion.
I used the car metaphor after the bull bars carryon in the UK many years back. People were affixing metal bull bars onto their cars not realising the results of hitting a pedestrian with them. They were subsequently banned and any car carrying the bars was seized and the bars removed and destroyed.
You could own them, but the minute they were affixed to the car they could be confiscated.
I could forsee a similar attitude in the US.
Cheers
Andrew
So a middle aged man drops $75K on guns and equipment with no apparent motive and nobody picked up on it? I understand on a fundamental logical basis that you can't anticipate that. But at the same time surely there should have been alarm bells going off somewhere.
In general in the US, the government cannot ban something and then post facto seize it, no matter what it is.
I am trying to remember back when I lived in California and they had a state ban on all assault rifles and you were forced to turn it in or face consequences. If it was a rifle and had a pistol grip with a magazine, then it was banned. Maybe they just banned magazines over 10 rounds - maybe someone in CA from back in the late 80's or early 90's can refresh my memory.
I apologise in advance to any American dakka members if I've fethed this up
but with regard to the NRA and bump stocks, there was a BBC article explaining why they are supporting a ban on them.
I'm on the move, and I can't post the link(it's awkward on my phone) and I forgot half the article.
but anyway, the NRA are shifting the blame onto Obama and the ATF for not doing the paperwork properly or something with regards to these.
And because it's a federal thing, it's a simple fix and doesn't require Congress or something, and that stops Democrats from adding on extra stuff to ban more stuff or something.
It's something along those lines and it's good Congress tactics by the NRA but very cynical. Hoped that made sense
whembly wrote: It's the ATF a few years ago who determined that it's kosher. Because there's no moving parts...
The call is for the ATF to re-review that ruling.
They can reclassify it as an NFA item, which would make it really hard/more scrutiny to acquire.
And thus stop Congress from drafting new laws and thus stopping the Democrats from banning more stuff. The NRA are a cunning bunch of fethers.
Cheers whembly that's what I was trying to say
Actually the ATF is using it's executive branch's prerogative and making these regulatory rulings... there's nothing stopping Congress from passing additional laws/restrictions.
They can pass a law outright banning these bumpstock, and Trump can sign it... and there's nothing the ATF could do to reverse that.
whembly wrote: It's the ATF a few years ago who determined that it's kosher. Because there's no moving parts...
The call is for the ATF to re-review that ruling.
They can reclassify it as an NFA item, which would make it really hard/more scrutiny to acquire.
And thus stop Congress from drafting new laws and thus stopping the Democrats from banning more stuff. The NRA are a cunning bunch of fethers.
Cheers whembly that's what I was trying to say
Actually the ATF is using it's executive branch's prerogative and making these regulatory rulings... there's nothing stopping Congress from passing additional laws/restrictions.
They can pass a law outright banning these bumpstock, and Trump can sign it... and there's nothing the ATF could do to reverse that.
And the NRA and the GOP can say they worked across the aisle to get restrictions passed.
And in 2018 they can say “look, they want more, it’s never enough” come campaign time.
whembly wrote: It's the ATF a few years ago who determined that it's kosher. Because there's no moving parts...
The call is for the ATF to re-review that ruling.
They can reclassify it as an NFA item, which would make it really hard/more scrutiny to acquire.
And thus stop Congress from drafting new laws and thus stopping the Democrats from banning more stuff. The NRA are a cunning bunch of fethers.
Cheers whembly that's what I was trying to say
Actually the ATF is using it's executive branch's prerogative and making these regulatory rulings... there's nothing stopping Congress from passing additional laws/restrictions.
They can pass a law outright banning these bumpstock, and Trump can sign it... and there's nothing the ATF could do to reverse that.
And the NRA and the GOP can say they worked across the aisle to get restrictions passed.
And in 2018 they can say “look, they want more, it’s never enough” come campaign time.
And it costs them nothing except a gimmicky tool.
Can you blame them??? That's smart politics...
Bonus points if they're able to get that suppressor legislation to pass along with that.
It's clear IMO, that the media are looking for something to carry the can for this awful crime, and bump stocks are public enemy number 1.
The NRA have stolen a march on everybody else by getting there first and being the people to propose this ban.
It takes people by surprise, the NRA can raise their hands and say they tried to act in the national interest, the bump stocks get banned, and it's a win for the NRA.
And like you say, the NRA can say in future that it's never enough to satisfy the Democrats, which plays to the NRA supporters.
It's good tactics, and utterly cynical, but politics was always a rough old trade.
In general in the US, the government cannot ban something and then post facto seize it, no matter what it is.[/quot]
I am trying to remember back when I lived in California and they had a state ban on all assault rifles and you were forced to turn it in or face consequences. If it was a rifle and had a pistol grip with a magazine, then it was banned. Maybe they just banned magazines over 10 rounds - maybe someone in CA from back in the late 80's or early 90's can refresh my memory.
CA's AWB in general required registration eith onerous conditions on use, orr disposal, though not outright no-choice confiscation.
The confiscation instance that did arise in CA is actually rather weird. They basically post-facto added a version of the SKS to the ban list that could have a detachable mag added. Well, they did that and got people to register them, but then the court decided that since the registry had already closed, those post facto guns basically couldnt be registered and had to be surrendered. A very awkward situation and I think it went under the radar because nobody tried to fight it over what was, at the time, a $100 gun.
So a middle aged man drops $75K on guns and equipment with no apparent motive and nobody picked up on it? I understand on a fundamental logical basis that you can't anticipate that. But at the same time surely there should have been alarm bells going off somewhere.
You'd think. I read this article the other day, though:
Gun ownership is not tracked in anywhere near a useful way. It is *illegal* for it to be computerised and easily searchable, due to lobbying from groups like the NRA. It's all down to the dude in this article and his staff, manually searching his warehouse and shipping containers containing millions of bloody paper records.
This, America, is your starting point. The car comparison has already been made, let's explore further.
1) To operate a car you must undergo thorough training, and pass both a written and a practical test to qualify for a license
2) Car ownership is tracked, stored in a database and is easily searchable
3) Car insurance is mandatory
I'd suggest at the very least the same should be required for gun ownership.
So a middle aged man drops $75K on guns and equipment with no apparent motive and nobody picked up on it? I understand on a fundamental logical basis that you can't anticipate that. But at the same time surely there should have been alarm bells going off somewhere.
You'd think. I read this article the other day, though:
Gun ownership is not tracked in anywhere near a useful way. It is *illegal* for it to be computerised and easily searchable, due to lobbying from groups like the NRA. It's all down to the dude in this article and his staff, manually searching his warehouse and shipping containers containing millions of bloody paper records.
This, America, is your starting point. The car comparison has already been made, let's explore further.
1) To operate a car you must undergo thorough training, and pass both a written and a practical test to qualify for a license
2) Car ownership is tracked, stored in a database and is easily searchable
3) Car insurance is mandatory
I'd suggest at the very least the same should be required for gun ownership.
All of the above are required for driving a motor vehicle on public roads. Not for owning a motor vehicle.
If you build a kit car for use on private property (e.g. if you live in a rural area and have enough land to do so, or have it transported to a private raceway), or collect cars and simply house them in a garage and never drive them, etc, then you dont need a license, nothing need go through the DMV, you dont need training, and in general you can be as shmammered as you want while operating it, as long as you dont take it onto a public road. It's a public resource management issue.
With firearms, most public resource use issues are already controlled, such as hunting (need training and license, tags for animals and limits on kills, often ammo and mag restrictions or caliber requirements, etc). But, with both cars and guns, simple possession neednt go through anything.
So a middle aged man drops $75K on guns and equipment with no apparent motive and nobody picked up on it? I understand on a fundamental logical basis that you can't anticipate that. But at the same time surely there should have been alarm bells going off somewhere.
You'd think. I read this article the other day, though:
Gun ownership is not tracked in anywhere near a useful way. It is *illegal* for it to be computerised and easily searchable, due to lobbying from groups like the NRA. It's all down to the dude in this article and his staff, manually searching his warehouse and shipping containers containing millions of bloody paper records.
This, America, is your starting point. The car comparison has already been made, let's explore further.
1) To operate a car you must undergo thorough training, and pass both a written and a practical test to qualify for a license
2) Car ownership is tracked, stored in a database and is easily searchable
3) Car insurance is mandatory
I'd suggest at the very least the same should be required for gun ownership.
I disagree with your analogy, but I understand why you're coming from this angle.
whembly wrote: It's the ATF a few years ago who determined that it's kosher. Because there's no moving parts...
The call is for the ATF to re-review that ruling.
They can reclassify it as an NFA item, which would make it really hard/more scrutiny to acquire.
Making bump sticks NFA items won't stop people from buying them. There are literally millions of NFA items purchased every year, mostly suppressors and short barreled rifles. A good percentage of the gun owners I know have either a SBR or a suppressor or both. Granted I don't think bump fore stocks are particularly popular and being an NFA item won't make them more in demand but you could thousands of them get sold next year as NFA items.
So a middle aged man drops $75K on guns and equipment with no apparent motive and nobody picked up on it? I understand on a fundamental logical basis that you can't anticipate that. But at the same time surely there should have been alarm bells going off somewhere.
You'd think. I read this article the other day, though:
Gun ownership is not tracked in anywhere near a useful way. It is *illegal* for it to be computerised and easily searchable, due to lobbying from groups like the NRA. It's all down to the dude in this article and his staff, manually searching his warehouse and shipping containers containing millions of bloody paper records.
This, America, is your starting point. The car comparison has already been made, let's explore further.
1) To operate a car you must undergo thorough training, and pass both a written and a practical test to qualify for a license
2) Car ownership is tracked, stored in a database and is easily searchable
3) Car insurance is mandatory
I'd suggest at the very least the same should be required for gun ownership.
I disagree with your analogy, but I understand why you're coming from this angle.
Gun registration is DOA in America.
The states with the most guns are unlikely to ever create registries and there's no federal jurisdiction to impose a federal registry. Plus the 300+ million unregistered guns in circulation and no way to enforce registration of them even if every state required it. See Connecticut as an example of this.
PS Though I know its my opinion, I could see the bump stocks being banned completely, with no grandfathering rights. They are an addition, a supplement if you like and not the actual gun itself. Kind of like banning a particular make of tyre. The tyre goes not the car.
In general in the US, the government cannot ban something and then post facto seize it, no matter what it is.
they tried with alcohol didnt they? (honestly dont remember)
So a middle aged man drops $75K on guns and equipment with no apparent motive and nobody picked up on it? I understand on a fundamental logical basis that you can't anticipate that. But at the same time surely there should have been alarm bells going off somewhere.
You'd think. I read this article the other day, though:
Gun ownership is not tracked in anywhere near a useful way. It is *illegal* for it to be computerised and easily searchable, due to lobbying from groups like the NRA. It's all down to the dude in this article and his staff, manually searching his warehouse and shipping containers containing millions of bloody paper records.
This, America, is your starting point. The car comparison has already been made, let's explore further.
1) To operate a car you must undergo thorough training, and pass both a written and a practical test to qualify for a license
2) Car ownership is tracked, stored in a database and is easily searchable
3) Car insurance is mandatory
I'd suggest at the very least the same should be required for gun ownership.
Private car ownership and drivers licenses are only tracked on a state level, not a federal/national level and the main purpose of licensing is to help the state pay for roads, you can be a pretty terrible and irresponsible driver and still own a car and get a license which is part of why we have so many auto deaths every year. I'd honestly prefer if they did something about people using cell phones while driving as I'm many times more likely to be hurt & killed by a distracted driver on a cell phone than facing the risk of being shot by somebody.
Insurance isn't mandatory in every state and farming vehicles or ones driven exclusively on private land don't need it at all, same with licenses and vehicle registration. You only need those if you are using public roadways. Certain types of vehicles are exempt from standard safety features etc. Only commercial vehicles like freight trucks are regulated by both federal and state laws. There also isn't a requirement to have a license in order to own a car, you can own as many cars as you want regardless of if you have a valid license or not. It's not uncommon for people who have lost their license for drunk driving or multiple accidents to still have cars sitting around in their yard. Legally they can't drive them, but if the cops aren't around chances are they get driven. Similar occurs with all the cars being driven by illegal "undocumented" immigrants, they have no licenses or paperwork but own cars or the cars are all registered "to their cousin" aka meaning they have no title yet have valid plates from the state. It's common practice to go buy a junker car for cash somewhere and provide false information on the title, you also provide a false copy of your insurance form when registering the plates or get insurance for that month then cancel it immediately after the plates are renewed. It's a giant shell game and the state turns a blind eye and rubber stamps stuff as long as they get their money in the process.
For a long time even criminal records were not shared between states and in many cases it's still very difficult to deal with and catch a criminal dealing in multiple states unless the FBI gets involved since state level authorities don't have legal power outside of their home state. While you are allowed to drive your car into other states (canada & mexico) drivers licenses aren't valid except in their home state so they can't be used for bond in the event you get a ticket, so that means you either hand over cash or get arrested. Where if you are in your homestate you can post the license as bond until your court date.
Americans view state level legal powers vs federal level to be a pretty vast difference in scope and reach which is why states have varying guns regulations but a federal standard would be met with a lot of resistance. While we are a single country states all have a lot of variety in their regional and geographic needs and a somewhat different cultural identity. We're all Americans but the average person from Texas is going to have some very different opinions and outlook than somebody from New York or LA. There's a lot of states where guns are a vital part of every day life as rural areas depend on them for hunting and fishing, where urban centers like downtown LA or NY don't. This is further compounded by the huge geographic expanse between out states, many of our states are larger than entire countries in other areas of the world so getting a common agreement about how federal law should be applied is not an easy task. Americans highly prefer having their home state make decisions that they would not want to see applied at a federal level.
they tried with alcohol didnt they? (honestly dont remember)
No. Prohibition under the 18th amendment only banned the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcohol. (EDIT: import and export too I apparently) Consuming it through your mouth was still completely legal, and there was no law calling for all alcohol to be turned over. Everyone who wrote the amendment and supported it just figured that if you couldn't make, sell, or move it that eventually it would all get drunk and there wouldn't be anymore or what remained would sit unable to reach anyone who wanted it, which I suppose makes sense in the wild fantasy reality of Prohibitionists.
they tried with alcohol didnt they? (honestly dont remember)
No. Prohibition under the 18th amendment only banned the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcohol. (EDIT: import and export too I apparently) Consuming it through your mouth was still completely legal, and there was no law calling for all alcohol to be turned over. Everyone who wrote the amendment and supported it just figured that if you couldn't make, sell, or move it that eventually it would all get drunk and there wouldn't be anymore or what remained would sit unable to reach anyone who wanted it, which I suppose makes sense in the wild fantasy reality of Prohibitionists.
PS Though I know its my opinion, I could see the bump stocks being banned completely, with no grandfathering rights. They are an addition, a supplement if you like and not the actual gun itself. Kind of like banning a particular make of tyre. The tyre goes not the car.
In general in the US, the government cannot ban something and then post facto seize it, no matter what it is.
they tried with alcohol didnt they? (honestly dont remember)
Yes, the govt can't make you a criminal via post facto legislation. If you legally bought a bump fire stock and then the govt makes it illegal to sell them you can't be criminally charged for buying one/owning one prior to the law making them illegal.
There is no chance of the authorities seizing any of them because there is no record of who owns them. The stocks aren't a gun you don't have to go through a FFL to buy them you don't have to pass a background check there's no way to know who owns one.
Will there also be a call to ban trigger cranks and binary triggers?
I think it was reported that a significant amount of the 20+ had the bump-stocks
Edit: 12 guns out of the ones found in the room had bump-stocks
And several had jammed.
Lesson: Bump stocks and hot barrels don't go well together. He would have been better off firing semi auto and using the fancy Eotech and other sights he had.
Automatically Appended Next Post: I do find it humorous that a novelty gun mod used ONCE in a crime will now be the subject of a Federal ban (or at least heavy Federal regulation). How ludicrous can you get?
Hey , those let you shoot REALLY fast and inaccurately until you jam! Better make 'em hard to get!
Going back to the topic after this long and interesting digression on gun control:
Anyone wonder yet who was getting the feed from all these cameras he set up? I've been looking around and no one has said anything about them beyond none of them were recording anything locally, and some of the cameras had no logical use in this circumstance, unless you wanted to be sure he was really there and shooting.
also, he failed to make use of the tannerite car bomb he had outside. Which seems like a huge waste of effort to have not been used.
From youtube, this is a car containing the same amount of tannerite he had in his:
BaronIveagh wrote: Going back to the topic after this long and interesting digression on gun control:
Anyone wonder yet who was getting the feed from all these cameras he set up? I've been looking around and no one has said anything about them beyond none of them were recording anything locally, and some of the cameras had no logical use in this circumstance, unless you wanted to be sure he was really there and shooting.
The conspiracy nut in my wonders if this was all one big distraction while the "real" crime was taking place elsewhere in Vegas. Did any bank/casino vaults suddenly lose millions/billions in bearer bonds?
The conspiracy nut in my wonders if this was all one big distraction while the "real" crime was taking place elsewhere in Vegas. Did any bank/casino vaults suddenly lose millions/billions in bearer bonds?
Most casinos only keep a few million in cash on hand for that very reason.
It is so amazing that pro-gun activists will claim gun control laws will only stop law abiding citizens getting guns, that criminals will still get them just as easily. Then moments later those exact same people will claim guns are needed because if the government turns bad and you need to fight it, there'll be no way to get any guns if you don't already have them.
I mean come on guys, either gun control stops black market guns, or it doesn't.
cuda1179 wrote: I'd like to point out that the 1939 Heller case was a set-up by anti-gun politicians, prosecutors, and an activist judge. With an under-the-table handshake deal the judge in that case (very anti-gun) made a pro-gun verdict that was intentionally unconstitutional with the sole intent to have it appealed to the Supreme Court, some of its members openly anti-gun. They did this because they knew the Defendant was going into witness protection and couldn't appear himself, nor could he afford to send his lawyer. The Government got to have their side, and ONLY their side heard. Even then the decision was a mixed bag that was viewed as a victory by both sides.
You mean Miller, not Heller. Miller was the 1939 case, Heller was 2008.
Anyhow, what's interesting in your answer is this "have it appealed to the Supreme Court, some of its members openly anti-gun". Take away the loaded language of 'openly anti-gun', and replace with the neutral 'Supreme Court Justices who believed the 2nd applied only to the regulation of a militia' and you have to accept the point I was making in the first place - that the 2nd amendment right to guns is subjective, has been understood by people and the courts very differently over the history of your country, and that there is no reason it might not be understood differently in the future.
As such, this idea that the right is what it is and the only way around it is with a constitutional amendment is false. When the 2nd was more narrowly defined, the pro-gun side didn't get stuck thinking about the impossibility of a constitutional amendment that gave guns to everyone. They just did the work of changing how the 2nd is interpreted.
The same ability now sits with gun control advocates. There's nothing saying they'll be successful, and so far they're doing a hopeless job of it, but forever is a long time.
sebster wrote: It is so amazing that pro-gun activists will claim gun control laws will only stop law abiding citizens getting guns, that criminals will still get them just as easily. Then moments later those exact same people will claim guns are needed because if the government turns bad and you need to fight it, there'll be no way to get any guns if you don't already have them.
I mean come on guys, either gun control stops black market guns, or it doesn't.
...it doesn't.
Additionally, as shown by this LV shooter, no amount of laws would've stopped him for acquiring any weapons.
Peregrine wrote: Let's be realistic here, the right to own any gun you want is hardly "everything the nation has stood for", and opposition to the idea of the government taking your property hasn't stopped us from banning stuff in the past. Confiscating illegal guns is not any different from confiscating illegal drugs.
There is literally right now laws being drafted in congress to make it easier for the Federal government to take land that it wants to use for the border wall.
Peregrine wrote: Let's be realistic here, the right to own any gun you want is hardly "everything the nation has stood for", and opposition to the idea of the government taking your property hasn't stopped us from banning stuff in the past. Confiscating illegal guns is not any different from confiscating illegal drugs.
There is literally right now laws being drafted in congress to make it easier for the Federal government to take land that it wants to use for the border wall.
...you mean... eminent domain? In which the government would be forced to pay you just compensation for the land? How on earth does that have anything to do with the conversation on hand??
....unless the "point" passed me a long time ago...
d-usa wrote: I think “just because we can” and “just fun to shoot stuff” are also reasons.
'Because they're cool and when you shoot them they make a loud noise and fire a piece of metal downrange at crazy speed and it's an amazing adrenaline rush' is also a really good reason.
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whembly wrote: ...you mean... eminent domain? In which the government would be forced to pay you just compensation for the land? How on earth does that have anything to do with the conversation on hand??
....unless the "point" passed me a long time ago...
Eminent domain as it stands isn't a very efficient tool for government to take land for its border wall. There are still cases grinding their way through the courts from Bush's border wall expansion. So there's new laws being drafted that will greatly reduce the grounds under which any land grabs can be contested.
And the point is to show the weird discrepancy in which people talk very strongly about some vague, hypothetical government action to take something... but when governments go about taking stuff, shock and surprise there's no armed rebellion. When it does happen, like the Bundy clan, almost everyone recognises them as a bunch of crazies making a terrible choice, even if they're sympathetic to their original dispute.
It will, hopefully, make people realise that all the talk about how they'll totally be badass resistance fighters if they come for our guns is just a bit of fantasy roleplay.
If you believe that the letter written by Alexander Hamilton to be so universally wise, I expect you must be spending a lot of your time lobbying the federal government to disband the military; "If standing armies are dangerous to liberty, an efficacious power over the militia, in the body to whose care the protection of the State is committed, ought, as far as possible, to take away the inducement and the pretext to such unfriendly institutions."
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whembly wrote: Can you blame them??? That's smart politics...
Bonus points if they're able to get that suppressor legislation to pass along with that.
My guess is the GOP will take a single bill to the floor, that legalises silencers while it bans bump stocks. This costs the gun control crowd an argument, that the GOP will never pass a gun control measure, but it costs them no support among their own pro-gun base because they're losing something minor and getting something they really want.
It's a similar ploy to what they just did with CHIP, funding the program again but doing it by taking the funding out of Medicare. The difference this time, though, is that banning bump stocks while you legalise silencers is a pretty good change.
No. The actual answer is that it isn't a binary state where either it is just as easy to get a gun whether they're illegal or not, or if guns are illegal then you cannot get one no matter what. Instead when guns are illegal they become harder to get, exactly how much harder would depend on your criminal connections and how much money you've got. So organised criminal gangs, especially ones already working in smuggling, then yeah it won't be hard for them. But most people have no such connections, and so there will be a hurdle placed in front of them.
To get back to the point about accessing guns for a rebellion, any moderately successful rebellion is going to have org structures similar to the organised criminals, they will be well placed to get their hands on plenty of guns.
Additionally, as shown by this LV shooter, no amount of laws would've stopped him for acquiring any weapons.
But everything he had was legal. If that kit was illegal then any attempt to acquire it, no matter how much money he had to burn, meant a risk of being detected by law enforcement. Not saying he would have been stopped, but it's just plain wrong to deny that it could not have happened at all.
sebster wrote: It will, hopefully, make people realise that all the talk about how they'll totally be badass resistance fighters if they come for our guns is just a bit of fantasy roleplay.
Well, you just have to prepare correctly to keep the fantasy alive.
Spoiler:
Anyway so far as the cameras, I don't want to wander too far into Alex Jones territory here, but the idea the cameras - which were not recording - were streaming elsewhere is a pretty fair one, I think.
So a middle aged man drops $75K on guns and equipment with no apparent motive and nobody picked up on it? I understand on a fundamental logical basis that you can't anticipate that. But at the same time surely there should have been alarm bells going off somewhere.
You'd think. I read this article the other day, though:
Gun ownership is not tracked in anywhere near a useful way. It is *illegal* for it to be computerised and easily searchable, due to lobbying from groups like the NRA. It's all down to the dude in this article and his staff, manually searching his warehouse and shipping containers containing millions of bloody paper records.
This, America, is your starting point. The car comparison has already been made, let's explore further.
1) To operate a car you must undergo thorough training, and pass both a written and a practical test to qualify for a license
2) Car ownership is tracked, stored in a database and is easily searchable
3) Car insurance is mandatory
I'd suggest at the very least the same should be required for gun ownership.
Private car ownership and drivers licenses are only tracked on a state level, not a federal/national level and the main purpose of licensing is to help the state pay for roads, you can be a pretty terrible and irresponsible driver and still own a car and get a license which is part of why we have so many auto deaths every year. I'd honestly prefer if they did something about people using cell phones while driving as I'm many times more likely to be hurt & killed by a distracted driver on a cell phone than facing the risk of being shot by somebody.
why worry about distracted drivers though, they kill less people than people with guns. they're statistically meaningless right?
Yet there's road signs up everywhere saying it's illegal, there's awareness campaigns saying how bad it is, and police out actively looking for drivers using their phones.
Seems like a lot of wasted effort for something so insignificant. If we can pass all those laws, spend all that money for ads, and it don't seem to overwork our police, makes you wonder why it can't be done for guns as well.
It's time for all guns to be treated like cars, registered, licensed and insured.
After all the horror the victims just went through, they're now preparing for the next horrific event, the hospital bill. I really hope they all sue the estate and any company with his name on it for the costs.
PS, I also find the we need guns to protect ourselves from the government, to be utter nonsense. If a cop shows up on your door with a warrant to seize your guns, are you really going to raise your guns to that officer? What about blue lives matters? or the common statement after any police shooting "if you reach for a gun, they're going to kill you"
and lastly about fun with statistics, if you bring a gun into your house it is magnitudes more likely to be used on yourself or your family, than to even prevent a crime, let alone the near non existent home invasion.
they tried with alcohol didnt they? (honestly dont remember)
No. Prohibition under the 18th amendment only banned the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcohol. (EDIT: import and export too I apparently) Consuming it through your mouth was still completely legal, and there was no law calling for all alcohol to be turned over. Everyone who wrote the amendment and supported it just figured that if you couldn't make, sell, or move it that eventually it would all get drunk and there wouldn't be anymore or what remained would sit unable to reach anyone who wanted it, which I suppose makes sense in the wild fantasy reality of Prohibitionists.
Neet thanks.
And even then, IIRC it was still legal to make alcohol for personal consumption. I think there was also exemptions for religious organizations(communion in Catholic Churches).
But everything he had was legal. If that kit was illegal then any attempt to acquire it, no matter how much money he had to burn, meant a risk of being detected by law enforcement. Not saying he would have been stopped, but it's just plain wrong to deny that it could not have happened at all.
You're incorrectly assuming a total ban on something. When really that's actually very rare to totally ban something.
I personally don't expect the "ban on bump stocks" to actually be a ban. It will just classify Bump Stocks as automatic weapons. Meaning it's still very much possible to legally acquire them via expensive licenses. And existing bump stocks will be grandfathered in.
Money was clearly not in short supply for this guy, so even if this legislation all went through decades ago, he still had every means to acquire the gear he had.
And if push came to shove, thumb and a belt loop would accomplish the same thing as a bump stock.
why worry about distracted drivers though, they kill less people than people with guns. they're statistically meaningless right?
Yet there's road signs up everywhere saying it's illegal, there's awareness campaigns saying how bad it is, and police out actively looking for drivers using their phones.
Seems like a lot of wasted effort for something so insignificant. If we can pass all those laws, spend all that money for ads, and it don't seem to overwork our police, makes you wonder why it can't be done for guns as well.
It's time for all guns to be treated like cars, registered, licensed and insured.
Statistically accidents involving distracted drivers are far more frequent than shooting and result in hundreds of millions of dollars in property damage and medical bills. (if not ranging into the billions) A quick google search is listing cell phone usage causing an estimated 1.6 million accidents in a year with about 3,400 fatalities. The fatalities are less than shooting victims but there's close to 400k people injured in the cell phone caused accidents where shooting injuries were listed at about 73k, that's 5.4x as many people injured in cell phone driving accidents which also incur a staggering amount of property damage and medical care which is why the insurance aspect for cars is stressed so heavily. Those numbers are specifically from cell phone caused accidents and it doesn't include regular accidents, drunk driving and people just being plain ol' stupid behind the wheel. (which puts their overall fatalities much higher than gunshot related deaths)
While I don't live my life in constant paranoia of being killed by a driver on a cell phone or a drunk driver it's far more likely to happen than being shot. I'm constantly around bad driving and seeing people on their phones and so it's something that does enter my mind as I'm exposed to it. Despite being in Chicago aka murder capitol of the world I have no concerns about being shot as the risks are far less as long as I don't live in the south side and if I'm not a minority, even then it's very marginal but getting hurt or killed by a car is a very distinct and real probability. At least in IL cars are less regulated than guns are. (with the exception of the insurance requirement which is easily skirted)
There's an easy autofix for cell phone driving and that would be for the phone companies to disable texting and calls anytime the system detects a phone moving more than 5mph, but if you dare make that suggestion people will absolutely lose their minds cause 'mah rights to texting can't be infringed! feth anybody else that's on the road with me.
sirlynchmob wrote: [and lastly about fun with statistics, if you bring a gun into your house it is magnitudes more likely to be used on yourself or your family, than to even prevent a crime, let alone the near non existent home invasion.
Actually, this needs a bit of clarification and context. Overall, yes, that statistic is correct. However, that only counts deaths. Accidental shootings are more likely to be lethal than shooting at (or simply brandishing a weapon without firing) an intruder. A gun doesn't need to be lethal to protect you.
Areas known to have high gun concentrations are also less likely to be the subject of a robbery, so not only is there a deterrence factor, but it also skews the results of comparative studies.
Also a hugely disproportionate number of "accidents" with guns fall into some pretty predictable demographics. Follow some pretty simple rules and you are less likely to kill yourself than an intruder. Don't have a chemical dependency, don't own illegal weapons, don't be involved in criminal activities, and don't have a history of mental illness. That more than evens out the statistics right there. In addition, those that have carry and conceal permits are less likely to have accidents. Not having children also a large variable, as is training, location, and education level. An elderly, college educated, single, white woman living in a bad urban neighborhood, with a CCW permit, training, and no kids is significantly more likely to use it in self defense than on themselves.
As for home invasions not being a thing, according to the Washington post there are 8,000 reported home invasions per day in the US. That's about 3 million per year. There are 116 million households in the US according to the US census. That means that the average household has a 2.5% chance of a home invasion in any particular year. 60% of home invasions have 2 or more intruders, with 60% of all rapes occurring during such crimes.
why worry about distracted drivers though, they kill less people than people with guns
I'm waaaay more worried about someone running me the feth over with a car than I am about getting shot, and I'm a gunless person living in a red state with super lenient gun laws.
It will, hopefully, make people realise that all the talk about how they'll totally be badass resistance fighters if they come for our guns is just a bit of fantasy roleplay.
They would be so useless as a "tyranical goverment throwers" not even funny.
Maybe idea was good when rifle was pinacle of weapons. Not these days. It's outdated idea that bunch of civilians with rifle could throw out goverment that has army with it.
And even having gun doesn't make you soldier. Not even training shooting accurately makes you a soldier. Civilian with gun, even if he spends 10 hours a day on a shooting range, is still going to be outclassed as a soldier. Even if goverment would play it "fair" and limit itself to ONLY infantry with rifles civilians would still loose. And you think tyranical goverment is going to limit options to just soldiers?
Real way to deal with tyranical goverment is for army to not obey. They are the ones that can ACTUALLY throw down tyranical goverment and the support they can get.
It will, hopefully, make people realise that all the talk about how they'll totally be badass resistance fighters if they come for our guns is just a bit of fantasy roleplay.
They would be so useless as a "tyranical goverment throwers" not even funny.
Maybe idea was good when rifle was pinacle of weapons. Not these days. It's outdated idea that bunch of civilians with rifle could throw out goverment that has army with it.
And even having gun doesn't make you soldier. Not even training shooting accurately makes you a soldier. Civilian with gun, even if he spends 10 hours a day on a shooting range, is still going to be outclassed as a soldier. Even if goverment would play it "fair" and limit itself to ONLY infantry with rifles civilians would still loose. And you think tyranical goverment is going to limit options to just soldiers?
Real way to deal with tyranical goverment is for army to not obey. They are the ones that can ACTUALLY throw down tyranical goverment and the support they can get.
Kinda odd saying rifles in the hands of civilians are useless, when a single guy with civilian grade arms just ambushed and murdered 50 people. What he did was absolutely deplorable but it shows what can be done with planning and not needing military grade weapons. Civilians with guns certainly aren't going to win a fight in stand up battle against soldiers, but if they engage in ambushes and hit and run attacks they can seriously slow and erode an armies ability to function. Ambush soldiers then upgrade by taking their weapons. A lot of civilians fighters would die in the process but there's way more of us than the army and as we found out in Vietnam and have been reminded in the middle east the civilian resistance tends blend with the rest of the population where soldier do not.
It will, hopefully, make people realise that all the talk about how they'll totally be badass resistance fighters if they come for our guns is just a bit of fantasy roleplay.
They would be so useless as a "tyranical goverment throwers" not even funny.
Maybe idea was good when rifle was pinacle of weapons. Not these days. It's outdated idea that bunch of civilians with rifle could throw out goverment that has army with it.
And even having gun doesn't make you soldier. Not even training shooting accurately makes you a soldier. Civilian with gun, even if he spends 10 hours a day on a shooting range, is still going to be outclassed as a soldier. Even if goverment would play it "fair" and limit itself to ONLY infantry with rifles civilians would still loose. And you think tyranical goverment is going to limit options to just soldiers?
Real way to deal with tyranical goverment is for army to not obey. They are the ones that can ACTUALLY throw down tyranical goverment and the support they can get.
Wrong.
Even the most tyrannical government can't go scorched earth on its own cities and civilians. There is no point being king of the ashes. And eventually your own soldiers will stop obeying, because they're also citizens of your country.
You can only go scorched earth on a foreign populace that you are occupying, you can't do it to your home turf. You'll lose all ability to function. The worst oppressive governments in history haven't done this, even when there is open rebellion. It's simply not possible.
The various insurgencies the US has been fighting over the last 50-60 years has shown that a world class military can be held in check by opposition only armed with small arms and the occasional bomb/grenade. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and all the various smaller conflicts the US has been involved in.
An Airforce doesn't do much when you're trying to fight an insurgency in your own country. There aren't easy targets to just bomb the crap out of, again because you can't go scorched earth otherwise you'll definitely lose everything. You might occasionally hit a point of resistance, but it's going to be a losing battle. Especially if your airstrips are getting hit with hit and run attacks, fuel deliveries are harassed, etc... The US is also huge. If there was a place that the airforce was called to do an airstrike on, most likely by the time any planes showed up the fight would be over. The rebels fading back into the general populace or countryside.
Grey Templar wrote: You're incorrectly assuming a total ban on something. When really that's actually very rare to totally ban something.
I personally don't expect the "ban on bump stocks" to actually be a ban. It will just classify Bump Stocks as automatic weapons. Meaning it's still very much possible to legally acquire them via expensive licenses. And existing bump stocks will be grandfathered in.
Money was clearly not in short supply for this guy, so even if this legislation all went through decades ago, he still had every means to acquire the gear he had.
And if push came to shove, thumb and a belt loop would accomplish the same thing as a bump stock.
You've shifted the question. Here's whembly's actual statement "no amount of laws would've stopped him for acquiring any weapons". Notice what whembly said - 'no amount of laws'. But you've tried to answer as if whembly had said "a weak form ban just on bump stocks that will be grandfathered would not have stopped him".
Now, in terms of the question you actually answered, I agree with you - the law that will likely be passed would have done nothing to stop this guy if it was in place before the attack, and will do nothing to stop the next guy. But that is a million miles away from a claim that no gun laws could possibly stop this happening, which is what whembly had claimed.
Grey Templar wrote: If there was a place that the airforce was called to do an airstrike on, most likely by the time any planes showed up the fight would be over. The rebels fading back into the general populace or countryside.
Except in any realistic scenario the general populace that voted in the oppressive government hands over the resistance, if the vigilante mobs don't just kill them instead.
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stanman wrote: Kinda odd saying rifles in the hands of civilians are useless, when a single guy with civilian grade arms just ambushed and murdered 50 people. What he did was absolutely deplorable but it shows what can be done with planning and not needing military grade weapons. Civilians with guns certainly aren't going to win a fight in stand up battle against soldiers, but if they engage in ambushes and hit and run attacks they can seriously slow and erode an armies ability to function. Ambush soldiers then upgrade by taking their weapons. A lot of civilians fighters would die in the process but there's way more of us than the army and as we found out in Vietnam and have been reminded in the middle east the civilian resistance tends blend with the rest of the population where soldier do not.
A massacre is NOT the same thing as an effective military attack. The single guy with civilian arms murdered 50 innocent victims that were standing there helplessly with no way to fight back. And, in the end, what did he accomplish? 50 people are dead, and no greater objective was achieved. Killing random people does not win a war.
tneva82 wrote: Real way to deal with tyranical goverment is for army to not obey. They are the ones that can ACTUALLY throw down tyranical goverment and the support they can get.
The best weapon to use against a tyrannical state today isn't a gun. Fighting a state with guns is fighting it at its own game, a losing proposition. The most successful resistances have been carried out relying foremost on bombs. They can cause a lot more damage than a gun. They can be armed and activated remotely. They can be built into just about anything. They leave visible scars that can't just be brushed over or aside. They are a lot harder for the complacent elements of the population to ignore. They can be scrapped together from the contents of a general store if you know how. The people waging wars against powerful states haven't had a lot of success doing it with guns these days. The people who have achieved the most success have done so with bombings and propaganda.
But propaganda is a bad word, so the fantasy resistance people dream of wouldn't dare use it (which is ironic and hypocritical but w/e). Bombings are for cowards and terrorists, so the fantasy resistance people dream of wouldn't dare use it.
Which is how you know that the fantasy resistance is all just a lot of hot air from people with more dreams than sense. They honestly seem to think that their patriotic spirit will carry the day like in some Hollywood action movie, which is also ironic because Hollywood is for liberals or something like that (I hear), but there really are people like the Bundy's out there who have a massively inflated sense of their own importance and capacity to achieve an end with nothing more than their ego and a weapon that a cynical man might suggest is just compensating
stanman wrote: Statistically accidents involving distracted drivers are far more frequent than shooting and result in hundreds of millions of dollars in property damage and medical bills. (if not ranging into the billions) A quick google search is listing cell phone usage causing an estimated 1.6 million accidents in a year with about 3,400 fatalities.
This is true, but you know what the thing is? The number of accidents caused by drivers distracted by their phones has increased as the number of people with cell phones has increased. As those phones have become more functional and used for more than just calls and texting, then the number of distracted drivers has increased as well.
No-one anywhere would disagree that the increased supply of phones is a factor in the increased number of distracted drivers. But anytime I say that the increased stock of guns is a factor in the increased rate of gun homicides, gun suicides and gun accidents, people argue against then endlessly.
There's an easy autofix for cell phone driving and that would be for the phone companies to disable texting and calls anytime the system detects a phone moving more than 5mph, but if you dare make that suggestion people will absolutely lose their minds cause 'mah rights to texting can't be infringed! feth anybody else that's on the road with me.
No, it's because there can be more people in the car than just the driver.
I think so long as someone is out there with a will and desire to hurt others they will find a way. Whether this person has guns or not. You can mitigate the access to things they can use to harm others. But at the end of the day this person is going to hurt people. And a person like that is not going to care about obeying any laws either.
This is a tough situation cause even if people in the audience had proper guns and could fire back during the panic. They would be firing at a hotel full of hundreds of innocent people in their rooms all around the shooter.
Grey Templar wrote: If there was a place that the airforce was called to do an airstrike on, most likely by the time any planes showed up the fight would be over. The rebels fading back into the general populace or countryside.
Except in any realistic scenario the general populace that voted in the oppressive government hands over the resistance, if the vigilante mobs don't just kill them instead.
Not necessarily true. There is a reason "seized power" is a thing that is said to occur. Generals or politicians who get a substantial portion of the armed forces on their side can install themselves as dictator without the population being fully on-board, though they generally at least have to have the general population be at least not bothered enough to object immediately.
The population can also change their mind over time. It might have seemed a good idea to elect Mr Despot president for life at first, but things aren't as cool as you thought they would be.
Rigged elections are also a thing. Plus in the US anyway barely half of eligible voters actually vote anyway, so it's quite possible for someone to get elected without support from even a majority of the actual population.
Grey Templar wrote: Rigged elections are also a thing. Plus in the US anyway barely half of eligible voters actually vote anyway, so it's quite possible for someone to get elected without support from even a majority of the actual population.
Thargrim wrote: I think so long as someone is out there with a will and desire to hurt others they will find a way. Whether this person has guns or not. You can mitigate the access to things they can use to harm others. But at the end of the day this person is going to hurt people. And a person like that is not going to care about obeying any laws either.
This is ultimately the crux of it. Limiting the means a person has to cause harm is ultimately not a solution. You need to focus on why they want to cause harm in the first place, focusing on the tools they used is wasted effort.
This is a tough situation cause even if people in the audience had proper guns and could fire back during the panic. They would be firing at a hotel full of hundreds of innocent people in their rooms all around the shooter.
Well yeah, nobody is arguing that that would have helped this specific situation.
Grey Templar wrote: Rigged elections are also a thing. Plus in the US anyway barely half of eligible voters actually vote anyway, so it's quite possible for someone to get elected without support from even a majority of the actual population.
cuda1179 wrote: with 60% of all rapes occurring during such crimes.
Yeah, this is a stat that gets passed around by companies selling all kinds of personal security stuff, from guns to cameras to private patrols. In case you couldn't guess, stats passed around by companies that need you to be afraid to buy their products are rarely a very reliable source of crime statistics. And shockingly enough, this particular claim just happens to be one of the sillier efforts. It's actually a doubling down on bs, because it relies on both myths around home invasion, and myths around rape. In around 2/3 of rapes the attacker is known to the victim, and in most cases there's no overt physical force used at all, pressure and implied threat is used. That's a sad and sobering reality and is important for peopel to understand for us to make real steps in preventing rape.
But there's stuff like the above, playing on the silly old myth that rape mostly strangers breaking in to your house to hold you down while you scream and fight.
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stanman wrote: Kinda odd saying rifles in the hands of civilians are useless, when a single guy with civilian grade arms just ambushed and murdered 50 people. What he did was absolutely deplorable but it shows what can be done with planning and not needing military grade weapons. Civilians with guns certainly aren't going to win a fight in stand up battle against soldiers, but if they engage in ambushes and hit and run attacks they can seriously slow and erode an armies ability to function. Ambush soldiers then upgrade by taking their weapons. A lot of civilians fighters would die in the process but there's way more of us than the army and as we found out in Vietnam and have been reminded in the middle east the civilian resistance tends blend with the rest of the population where soldier do not.
Attrition tactics are very effective against an overseas occupying power with whom you will eventually hit a time and dollar limit that they will not want to pay. But when its your own government those tactics have a much more limited value. An evil domestic government isn't going to give up because you ambushed some soldiers with IEDs and small arms.
"Now I have dismantled congress, executed the Supreme Court justices and burned the constitution, the USA is mine to rule with an iron fist! What's that, a series of ambushes on military convoys killed 100 soldiers over two weeks? I can't have that on my conscious. Call the whole evil empire off. Give them back their country. I'm just gonna raid Fort Knox and escape in a rocket to the moon."
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Grey Templar wrote: Even the most tyrannical government can't go scorched earth on its own cities and civilians. There is no point being king of the ashes. And eventually your own soldiers will stop obeying, because they're also citizens of your country.
You probably need to do some reading on Cambodia. There's others, but that's a good place to start.
The various insurgencies the US has been fighting over the last 50-60 years has shown that a world class military can be held in check by opposition only armed with small arms and the occasional bomb/grenade. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and all the various smaller conflicts the US has been involved in.
No, none of those militaries were held in check. In each case the US took control of every part of the country it wanted to control. What the insurgencies did was cede that land, and engage in small scale raids and ambushes, aiming to cause enough attrition that the US got tired of the time, money and lives paid.
That's a great way of winning a war against a foreign occupier, but it's a hopeless strategy against a domestic government. A government has a price point where it will abandon some overseas geopolitical aim and bring its troops back home, but no such price point exists where it will give up trying to be a government inside its own borders.
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LordofHats wrote: The best weapon to use against a tyrannical state today isn't a gun. Fighting a state with guns is fighting it at its own game, a losing proposition. The most successful resistances have been carried out relying foremost on bombs. They can cause a lot more damage than a gun. They can be armed and activated remotely. They can be built into just about anything.
It is rather telling that people who insist that they need guns in order to fight in case the government goes bad seem to have no concern about the extremely tight controls on explosives, which as you say would be the key weapon in any resistance.
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Thargrim wrote: I think so long as someone is out there with a will and desire to hurt others they will find a way. Whether this person has guns or not. You can mitigate the access to things they can use to harm others. But at the end of the day this person is going to hurt people. And a person like that is not going to care about obeying any laws either.
The problem with this argument is you either have to believe that Americans are more likely to decide they want to go and kill a whole bunch of random people, or that maybe accessibility to weapons makes it more likely to happen.
Again, see the cell phone thing. No-one on earth would claim that while we have many more distracted drivers around than 20 years ago, that cell phones are just a tool and if drivers want to distract themselves then they will find a way to do it. That the increase in distracted drivers is totally unconnected to the rise in cell phones. It's just plain obvious to everyone that putting distracting devices in everyone's cars has made it more likely for people to use those devices to distract themselves. It is no different with gun proliferation.
stanman wrote: There's an easy autofix for cell phone driving and that would be for the phone companies to disable texting and calls anytime the system detects a phone moving more than 5mph, but if you dare make that suggestion people will absolutely lose their minds cause 'mah rights to texting can't be infringed! feth anybody else that's on the road with me.
No, it's because there can be more people in the car than just the driver.
But if we can prevent a handful of deaths then clearly the rest of the population should have to be treated like criminals in order to protect against the few who can't seem to abide by the laws already in place.
When it comes to the cry for stricter gun regulations and even bans what it translates into is that there's millions of of lawful, non-criminals who use their guns in perfectly a safe and responsible manner, but they should suffer restrictions because some single d-bag out of millions decides to be a criminal and do something terrible. It's a "think of the children" response that's not grounded in actual numbers. If people really want to save lives as much as they claim they do, they'd be willing to accept something as simple as waiting a few minutes to get that next text. Somehow people made it through a hundred years of driving without needing access to a phone in the car, they'd wait until the next stop and pull over if they needed to make a call. Seems like perfectly sensible situation to disable phones during transit, but protectin' mah rights! will always supersede safety concerns of what happens to others. The sad part about human nature is that we are completely self centered and only care about the things that personally impact our individual life, what happens to anybody else is their problem. I want my guns unrestricted, if anybody dies oh well. I want my phone unrestricted, if anyone dies oh well. I gotta read that YOLO & winky face text cause it's that important.
Are you comparing texting to shooting in the ridiculous hope to make a concise point? Because, you know, one is an insturment made to kill - that most people use to feel cool and more protected and shoot at paper targets once in a while, and the other is not.
cuda1179 wrote: with 60% of all rapes occurring during such crimes.
Yeah, this is a stat that gets passed around by companies selling all kinds of personal security stuff, from guns to cameras to private patrols. In case you couldn't guess, stats passed around by companies that need you to be afraid to buy their products are rarely a very reliable source of crime statistics. And shockingly enough, this particular claim just happens to be one of the sillier efforts. It's actually a doubling down on bs, because it relies on both myths around home invasion, and myths around rape. In around 2/3 of rapes the attacker is known to the victim, and in most cases there's no overt physical force used at all, pressure and implied threat is used. That's a sad and sobering reality and is important for peopel to understand for us to make real steps in preventing rape.
.
Actually, what I did was misquote a Government statistic. The correct statistic is that 60% of FORCED rape occurs in home invasions.
stanman wrote: But if we can prevent a handful of deaths then clearly the rest of the population should have to be treated like criminals in order to protect against the few who can't seem to abide by the laws already in place.
Yeah I get the analogy. And I agree that the analogy works pretty well as an argument against anyone who says that any and all limitations on guns must be applied to ensure safety. But against an argument for limited restrictions that balance the rights of gun owners against the safety of the population the argument fails.
And you didn't comment on my point that everyone is able to acknowledge that increasing the number of phones in circulation has increased their negative use in distracting drivers and therefore increase the number of accidents, and yet somehow it's still debated that increasing the supply of guns might not have an effect on the number of homicides and suicides. I take it you agree with the point, both that gun proliferation increases gun homicides and suicides, and that it's weird that so many people pretend this isn't true.
cuda1179 wrote: Actually, what I did was misquote a Government statistic. The correct statistic is that 60% of FORCED rape occurs in home invasions.
And that additional word changes everything. And given there's already been one error, can we get a source for the corrected version?
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stanman wrote: By definition isn't all rape forced? I don't think I've ever heard somebody say they were willingly raped?
Forced rape means using direct physical force to hold the victim down. It's what most people think of when they think of rape, but it's actually very small share of the total. The vast majority involve implied force, or heavy social pressure, or taking advantage of someone who is not capable of consent.
Grey Templar wrote: Generals or politicians who get a substantial portion of the armed forces on their side can install themselves as dictator without the population being fully on-board, though they generally at least have to have the general population be at least not bothered enough to object immediately.
First of all, that isn't very plausible in the US since we have a military that recruits from a broad range of the general population. It's incredibly unlikely that we'd have such a divergence of opinion between the military and the rest of the country that the military could launch a coup and install a dictator without the rest of the population supporting the move. Second, apathy from the general population means death to the resistance. If the average person doesn't really care that there's a dictator in power then they aren't going to risk their own life to give aid and concealment to the resistance. They're going to be good citizens and report any terrorists to the police.
The population can also change their mind over time. It might have seemed a good idea to elect Mr Despot president for life at first, but things aren't as cool as you thought they would be.
If the US gets to the point of electing a president for life it's a safe bet that democracy has already failed and the revolution is not going to happen. It's just so far from reality that thinking about it is pointless.
Rigged elections are also a thing.
They are, but rigged elections alone don't get to the point where violent revolution is morally justified. If an extremist party wins a rigged election and gives the order to start shipping people off to the death camps the rest of the country is going to say "WTF, no" and refuse to comply. The only way the people elected in a rigged election are going to have any power is if they don't diverge too far from mainstream positions and retain a large degree of support. IOW, a rigged election can turn a 49/51 loss for a republican or democrat into a 51/49 win. It can't give a literal Nazi with 0.00000001% of the legitimate vote a win that anyone is going to respect.
Plus in the US anyway barely half of eligible voters actually vote anyway, so it's quite possible for someone to get elected without support from even a majority of the actual population.
This is only true because we aren't at the point where violent revolution is morally justified. People can afford to be apathetic and stay home because they don't feel that either party is that awful. But if you have a party that is trying to do things that would justify a violent revolution one of two things is almost certainly going to be true: either people are going to get out and vote against the clear evil, or the evil party is going to have widespread support cheering them on.
sebster wrote: No-one on earth would claim that while we have many more distracted drivers around than 20 years ago, that cell phones are just a tool and if drivers want to distract themselves then they will find a way to do it. That the increase in distracted drivers is totally unconnected to the rise in cell phones. It's just plain obvious to everyone that putting distracting devices in everyone's cars has made it more likely for people to use those devices to distract themselves. It is no different with gun proliferation.
Actually I argue all the time that drivers who are incapable of discerning when it is or isn't safe to use a mobile phone are just bad drivers. Have you never been in a car with a driver who manages to distract themselves without using a phone? I've been in the car with people who have almost had a smash because they were fiddling with the colours on their radio, one guy who managed to distract himself talking to me sitting next to him and almost swerved in to a truck and don't get me started on mothers reaching back to tend to their kids while driving (I've actually seen the aftermath of one of those accidents, luckily no one was hurt). And do you have any statistics to say drivers are more distracted today than they were 20 years ago? It sounds like a statistic that would be impossible to record.
I've long been a proponent of better driver training and education over demonising the phone for our poor skills and poor discernment. Melbourne drivers feel like they're zombies driving on autopilot these days.
Anyway, that's a completely off topic tangent to the point of this thread. That's why I hate analogies, I end up arguing the analogy instead of the point
stanman wrote: But if we can prevent a handful of deaths then clearly the rest of the population should have to be treated like criminals in order to protect against the few who can't seem to abide by the laws already in place.
Yeah I get the analogy. And I agree that the analogy works pretty well as an argument against anyone who says that any and all limitations on guns must be applied to ensure safety. But against an argument for limited restrictions that balance the rights of gun owners against the safety of the population the argument fails.
And you didn't comment on my point that everyone is able to acknowledge that increasing the number of phones in circulation has increased their negative use in distracting drivers and therefore increase the number of accidents, and yet somehow it's still debated that increasing the supply of guns might not have an effect on the number of homicides and suicides. I take it you agree with the point, both that gun proliferation increases gun homicides and suicides, and that it's weird that so many people pretend this isn't true.
Every year there's more guns and more people, so numerically more people even if the actual percentage rate stays the same or declines simply because the population keeps getting bigger and bigger. There's instances where the crime or murder rate per every 1000 people could be dropping, but over time the actual count of instances goes up because the population is exploding so it's not something that can be broken down simply.
If you have a 100 gun murders one year then ten years later you have 180 on the surface that looks like it's increased significantly but if the population doubled in that time it's actually a decrease. I think that more people and more guns can potentially create more opportunity for violence but it's not linear, there's a lot of very complex factors that go influence things much more heavily, what type of drug and crime culture, economic depression all of these things can really impact how much violence occurs. Well off rich communities may not to experience a lot of gun violence because they don't have the same social pressures as a greatly depressed urban area riddled with drugs and hopelessness. I think that if you limit guns it may reduce the total instances of gun specific deaths but I think those will just tend to shift into other forms of fatalities like stabbings, or blunt force. People always find ways to kill each other regardless of if they have guns or not and from what I've read places that get rid of gun see a spike in other forms of violence that replaces it and even grows to eclipses the prior gun violence. The only significant impact seems to be on frequency of the of mass shootings, but the overall violence level is still very much present.
You could reduce the mass shootings like Europe but then people move onto other forms of mass killing like bombings, gas attacks, or running people over with cars and even then mass shooting do still happen but they are just less frequent. People wanting to commit mass carnage won't ever be removed from society, so it'll continue in one form or anther. I think that part of why we see shootings in the US more frequently isn't so much much that it's any more or less violent than a bombing but it has to do with the psyche of the attacker in that they want to see the effect of their rage unfold even if it's for a short duration. A lot of the mass shootings seem to be a way of working out their pent up rage and by being the hand and mind directing the shots they gain a sense of control that they wouldn't feel the same manner if they were leaving a bomb or chemical behind. The choice of picking targets probably grants a sense of power as it's a directed focus. As much as they want to act out their rage they also want to be in a state of control that they've been missing in other areas in their lives.
If somebody points gun at you it's personal and directed only at you and just a tiny flick of the finger takes a life which is a highly symbolic gesture of a godlike being smashing lessers without effort, with an explosive it's indiscriminate and treats the bomber on the same level as everyone around them and doesn't appeal to the ego quite the same way.
AllSeeingSkink wrote: Actually I argue all the time that drivers who are incapable of discerning when it is or isn't safe to use a mobile phone are just bad drivers. Have you never been in a car with a driver who manages to distract themselves without using a phone? I've been in the car with people who have almost had a smash because they were fiddling with the colours on their radio, one guy who managed to distract himself talking to me sitting next to him and almost swerved in to a truck and don't get me started on mothers reaching back to tend to their kids while driving (I've actually seen the aftermath of one of those accidents, luckily no one was hurt).
Yeah, people have always been able to distract themselves. But putting a device in the car that increases people's temptation to distract themselves is going to make it more likely for each individual to distract themselves.
Anyway, I guess you answered the question. At least one person is willing to argue that putting distracting devices in a car doesn't increase the amount of distracted drivers
And do you have any statistics to say drivers are more distracted today than they were 20 years ago? It sounds like a statistic that would be impossible to record.
I think it's pretty self-evident, it's certainly something a lot of people observe. I agree that there's probably nothing out there to prove it, but for the purpose of an analogy I doubt we need that much evidence.
Melbourne drivers feel like they're zombies driving on autopilot these days.
Spend a week in Perth. You'll return home with a new found appreciation for Melbourne drivers.
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von Hohenstein wrote: How do you get so many people get killed in vehicles?
Your roads are super wide and you have a speed limit?
I can't speak for America exactly, but a lot of it is about distance. Having more rural land means transport dollars are stretched further, which means more low quality roads in less populated parts of the country. And when you get accidents in those low populated areas they are much more likely to be fatal because emergency services are 30 minute helicopter rides away instead of 3 minute ambulance rides.
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stanman wrote: Every year there's more guns and more people, so numerically more people even if the actual percentage rate stays the same or declines simply because the population keeps getting bigger and bigger. There's instances where the crime or murder rate per every 1000 people could be dropping, but over time the actual count of instances goes up because the population is exploding so it's not something that can be broken down simply.
We measure stuff on per capita levels so this isn't a concern.
Well off rich communities may not to experience a lot of gun violence because they don't have the same social pressures as a greatly depressed urban area riddled with drugs and hopelessness.
This is a huge factor, alongside education, that has driven the global decline in murder, I think.
I think that if you limit guns it may reduce the total instances of gun specific deaths but I think those will just tend to shift into other forms of fatalities like stabbings, or blunt force.
The problem with this theory is that compared to other developed nations, the US doesn't just have a higher rate of gun murder, the US also has a higher rate of murder overall. And not just a little higher, four or five times the rate of other developed countries.
For your theory to be correct, it would mean that Americans are just an angrier, more homicidal people, and that each new wave of immigrants that's come the US has stepped off the boat with that inherent murderous compulsion inside them. That guns are just a coincidental aside to this amazing national story of an America that has all the wealth and education that's helped to massively reduce murder everywhere else in the world, but not in America where the people are just inherently murderous.
The alternative theory is that Americans are across the whole the same as other developed countries. Similar levels of violent crime (except murder), similar levels of drug use, similar levels of property crime. But people everywhere, the US and overseas, they are susceptible to being in situations where they might have a moment of murderous rage. Having one of these moments is heavily dependent on education, drug use, and other such factors. But thing is, when one of those moments happens, well then it really doesn't help to have a gun within easy reach. This doesn't mean every gun owner is dangerous, because they simply aren't. We're talking about a tiny fraction of a fraction. Nor are gun owners more murderous than anyone else. But I am saying that people make decisions in the spur of the moment, most killings are not pre-meditated, and in that moment, having a device that can kill with a pull of a trigger makes the situation that much more likely to get someone killed.
You could reduce the mass shootings like Europe but then people move onto other forms of mass killing like bombings, gas attacks, or running people over with cars and even then mass shooting do still happen but they are just less frequent.
It seems like you aren't talking about murder in general, but pre-meditated spree killings. Those are a very small portion of overall murders. Though the US still has a massively outsized share of those as well.
Spend a week in Perth. You'll return home with a new found appreciation for Melbourne drivers.
I spend 15month in Perth and never had any bad experience with the drivers there. Just "speeding" is extremly expensive down under. I had to pay 300$ for 119km/h on the highway. 300$!
von Hohenstein wrote: How do you get so many people get killed in vehicles?
Your roads are super wide and you have a speed limit?
In Germany people go 100mph on "tiny" roads and they have less than half as many death per million citicens.
In this case, stop the gun discussion and get proper driving training for everybody. That will save way more lives than than a ban on bump stocks.
I think a huge part of it is the lack of driver education that the average US driver gets. I don't know if this is still accurate or not but when my brother was stationed in Germany he said that it costs around 1,000 euros to take your driving test, it was pretty difficult and you were limited on how often you could retest if you failed. Given the cost people take it very seriously. Here in the the fee is something like $25 which is only charged if you get the actual license and I don't think there's any restriction on how often you can retest so people can fail repeatedly into they manage to blunder their way through it. Most kids get their license at 16 where I've heard that in other countries you often need to be an adult and there is something to be said for better maturity levels at 18-20. My grandparents never even had formal classes, back then you just bought a car and figured it on the fly which is something my grandfather proudly brought up many times.
We also have a lot of people from other countries and not to place unfair share of blame on foreigners but every country has different driving practices and styles when it's all mixed on one place it makes for a giant mess. There's a lot of people who can't read road signs in English which can cause issues, heck based on things I've seen happen on the road I think there's a lot of supposed native English speakers that I don't think can read those signs either.
The US also has some pretty relaxed standards on cars, so long as it still rolls you can drive it. It doesn't mater if it's being held together with bailing wire and duct tape, or has both a front and back bumper made from a railroad tie bolted to the frame (which I've actually seen while driving through rural IN) There's sometimes stuff on our roads that's basically ready to fail mechanically and turn into a rolling death trap. A lot of other countries are far more strict on vehicle inspection.
So wouldn't it be far more helpful to spend the energy, wasted on gun discussions, on a discussion "how to improve the skill of the average driver"? You know as long as more people get killed by cars than by guns you could save more lives if you take action here.
von Hohenstein wrote: I spend 15month in Perth and never had any bad experience with the drivers there. Just "speeding" is extremly expensive down under. I had to pay 300$ for 119km/h on the highway. 300$!
It's more now. And if you do it on a long weekend the fine is doubled!
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von Hohenstein wrote: So wouldn't it be far more helpful to spend the energy, wasted on gun discussions, on a discussion "how to improve the skill of the average driver"? You know as long as more people get killed by cars than by guns you could save more lives if you take action here.
They're not mutually exclusive, and the reason that you don't see improvements in driver training are entirely unrelated to the energy put in to debating gun control.
It will, hopefully, make people realise that all the talk about how they'll totally be badass resistance fighters if they come for our guns is just a bit of fantasy roleplay.
They would be so useless as a "tyranical goverment throwers" not even funny.
Maybe idea was good when rifle was pinacle of weapons. Not these days. It's outdated idea that bunch of civilians with rifle could throw out goverment that has army with it.
And even having gun doesn't make you soldier. Not even training shooting accurately makes you a soldier. Civilian with gun, even if he spends 10 hours a day on a shooting range, is still going to be outclassed as a soldier. Even if goverment would play it "fair" and limit itself to ONLY infantry with rifles civilians would still loose. And you think tyranical goverment is going to limit options to just soldiers?
Real way to deal with tyranical goverment is for army to not obey. They are the ones that can ACTUALLY throw down tyranical goverment and the support they can get.
Kinda odd saying rifles in the hands of civilians are useless, when a single guy with civilian grade arms just ambushed and murdered 50 people. What he did was absolutely deplorable but it shows what can be done with planning and not needing military grade weapons.
He murdered a bunch of people without a care in the world at a big party with no security or defence. Not massively common events held by people who are aware that insurgents are actively trying to kill them.
why worry about distracted drivers though, they kill less people than people with guns
I'm waaaay more worried about someone running me the feth over with a car than I am about getting shot, and I'm a gunless person living in a red state with super lenient gun laws.
I'm curious about these numbers - I'd have thought the number of car deaths would have outstripped firearms deaths by a much more significant distance. How does vehicle ownership per capita stack up against gun ownership per capita?
The problem with this theory is that compared to other developed nations, the US doesn't just have a higher rate of gun murder, the US also has a higher rate of murder overall. And not just a little higher, four or five times the rate of other developed countries.
For your theory to be correct, it would mean that Americans are just an angrier, more homicidal people, and that each new wave of immigrants that's come the US has stepped off the boat with that inherent murderous compulsion inside them. That guns are just a coincidental aside to this amazing national story of an America that has all the wealth and education that's helped to massively reduce murder everywhere else in the world, but not in America where the people are just inherently murderous.
The alternative theory is that Americans are across the whole the same as other developed countries. Similar levels of violent crime (except murder), similar levels of drug use, similar levels of property crime. But people everywhere, the US and overseas, they are susceptible to being in situations where they might have a moment of murderous rage. Having one of these moments is heavily dependent on education, drug use, and other such factors. But thing is, when one of those moments happens, well then it really doesn't help to have a gun within easy reach. This doesn't mean every gun owner is dangerous, because they simply aren't. We're talking about a tiny fraction of a fraction. Nor are gun owners more murderous than anyone else. But I am saying that people make decisions in the spur of the moment, most killings are not pre-meditated, and in that moment, having a device that can kill with a pull of a trigger makes the situation that much more likely to get someone killed.
Part of it could be cultural differences, if I could pin point things exactly I'd write a best selling book and make a fortune in criminal profiling. I know that there's a stereotype that Americans are lazy Homer Simpson types, but US workers put in a very significant amount of time at work and commuting which places them under a huge amount of stress that other countries may not experience in the same manner. We have a tremendously high work output but are constantly being told by management that it's not enough and to work longer and push harder, people can only endure so much before they start to break and unfortunately when some people snap it can be a very violent affair.
Americans have always prized themselves on their individuality and "cowboy" independent spirit which is in a lot of conflict in the modern industrial workforce that just wants a factory or office drone and tries to grind away any sense of self worth out of the worker. Material wealth is seen as the measure of success in the US and far too many people are digging themselves into soul crushing debt to have that big house, fancy car and other toys so they can keep up with their neighbors. It seems like people in other countries are more grounded and find a way to balance those things much more practically than what we are doing which I think creates a sense of satisfaction or positive outlets that we don't really allow ourselves in the US. I think that so many Americans are caught up in the consumerism culture that they've lost touch with their ability to enjoy the basics of life or interactions with other people. People are losing the ability to communicate on a personal human level and feeling more isolated which is constantly adding to the underlying stress. I see articles mentioning similar issues of work related stress occurring in Japan and people cracking although their reaction and outlet are often different because of different family expectations or cultural norms.
I think that they really need to try studying the impact of guns in spur of the moment violence and crimes a bit better and really take a good look at all the factors like poverty, economic stress, and mental depression and see how those fit in as well. I think even pro-gun people agree that finding solutions to reducing violence is good, the million dollar question is how is it best achieved? Unfortunately there's no easy answers and there's an incredible range of varying view points to try and work through in order for people to find common ground.
The problem with this theory is that compared to other developed nations, the US doesn't just have a higher rate of gun murder, the US also has a higher rate of murder overall. And not just a little higher, four or five times the rate of other developed countries.
For your theory to be correct, it would mean that Americans are just an angrier, more homicidal people, and that each new wave of immigrants that's come the US has stepped off the boat with that inherent murderous compulsion inside them. That guns are just a coincidental aside to this amazing national story of an America that has all the wealth and education that's helped to massively reduce murder everywhere else in the world, but not in America where the people are just inherently murderous.
The alternative theory is that Americans are across the whole the same as other developed countries. Similar levels of violent crime (except murder), similar levels of drug use, similar levels of property crime. But people everywhere, the US and overseas, they are susceptible to being in situations where they might have a moment of murderous rage. Having one of these moments is heavily dependent on education, drug use, and other such factors. But thing is, when one of those moments happens, well then it really doesn't help to have a gun within easy reach. This doesn't mean every gun owner is dangerous, because they simply aren't. We're talking about a tiny fraction of a fraction. Nor are gun owners more murderous than anyone else. But I am saying that people make decisions in the spur of the moment, most killings are not pre-meditated, and in that moment, having a device that can kill with a pull of a trigger makes the situation that much more likely to get someone killed.
Part of it could be cultural differences, if I could pin point things exactly I'd write a best selling book and make a fortune in criminal profiling. I know that there's a stereotype that Americans are lazy Homer Simpson types, but US workers put in a very significant amount of time at work and commuting which places them under a huge amount of stress that other countries may not experience in the same manner. We have a tremendously high work output but are constantly being told by management that it's not enough and to work longer and push harder, people can only endure so much before they start to break and unfortunately when some people snap it can be a very violent affair.
Given how poor medical cover is, the paltry leave that's general accepted, and the low levels of workers' rights in the US compared to other wealthy nations, there's certainly an argument for higher levels of stress, but it's very pop-psychology. I'm sure there's an abundance of research on relative stress levels experienced internationally to consult. Off the top of my head - and I only deal with this kind of stuff when it's tangentially related to anthropological studies - it's usually Japan and wealthier strata in China that get cited as the highly-stressed populations. Usually correlates with suicide rather than murder, I think.
Thargrim wrote: I think so long as someone is out there with a will and desire to hurt others they will find a way. Whether this person has guns or not. You can mitigate the access to things they can use to harm others. But at the end of the day this person is going to hurt people. And a person like that is not going to care about obeying any laws either.
This is ultimately the crux of it. Limiting the means a person has to cause harm is ultimately not a solution. You need to focus on why they want to cause harm in the first place, focusing on the tools they used is wasted effort.
It vastly limits the damage done, though.
But you're right; gun ownership isn't the distinguishing factor in gun crime in the US, because gun ownership doesn't cause the same issues elsewhere. Looking into mental health support, attitudes and other factors would probably make more difference.
Jadenim wrote: In practical terms, yes you might need a lot of ammunition when practicing at a range, but does it all need to be kept at home? Would there not be room for bonded stores at ranges and gun clubs, where people could keep their extra ammunition?
We've had these suggestions pop up here when anti-gun people try to lobby for tighter guns laws (even if guns aren't much of a problem here). Ammo and guns should be kept locked up at the range or club because of some twisted logic where honest legal gun owners are the most dangerous people around, I guess. Then sensible gun owners point out that the bigger ranges are usually situated somewhat out of the way to reduce noise pollution, meaning inconvenience for the user if he's going hunting and great convenience for criminals that want to steal guns. Competent burglars work fast so you can't leave the storage unguarded - the response to a burglar alarm from a place out of the city where security or police usually hang out isn't going to be fast enough to intercept a criminal, only pick up the pieces. So there would have to be a 24-hour presence there and who's going to pay for that?
Thargrim wrote: I think so long as someone is out there with a will and desire to hurt others they will find a way. Whether this person has guns or not. You can mitigate the access to things they can use to harm others. But at the end of the day this person is going to hurt people. And a person like that is not going to care about obeying any laws either.
This is ultimately the crux of it. Limiting the means a person has to cause harm is ultimately not a solution. You need to focus on why they want to cause harm in the first place, focusing on the tools they used is wasted effort.
It vastly limits the damage done, though.
But you're right; gun ownership isn't the distinguishing factor in gun crime in the US, because gun ownership doesn't cause the same issues elsewhere. Looking into mental health support, attitudes and other factors would probably make more difference.
The casualties in Las Vegas were decreased by the actions of the shooter. He killed 50 people and wounded hundreds in the span of 10 minutes and then killed himself when hotel security showed up on his floor. LVPD didn't enter his room for over an hour after the shooting started. If he doesn't kill himself he could have kept on shooting people for another 60 minutes until SWAT breached his room and took him out. The US is a big place, response times aren't fast because whether it's police or a mobilized military in some kind of domestic Red Dawn fantasy there's no way to have enough forces on the ground to ensure peace and compliance.
I want to comment on the mental health issues in the US more when I'm not stuck using my iPhone.
treslibras wrote:Are you comparing texting to shooting in the ridiculous hope to make a concise point? Because, you know, one is an insturment made to kill - that most people use to feel cool and more protected and shoot at paper targets once in a while, and the other is not.
Both are technological tools that, if misused, can cause death and/or serious bodily injury. As someone who has seen the brains of some kid smeared on the highway, or charred corpses in a burnt out car more times than I've cared to, which were found to be the results of cell phone usage while driving, this tired, old argument holds no water to me.
sebster wrote:
Yeah, this is a stat that gets passed around by companies selling all kinds of personal security stuff, from guns to cameras to private patrols. In case you couldn't guess, stats passed around by companies that need you to be afraid to buy their products are rarely a very reliable source of crime statistics. And shockingly enough, this particular claim just happens to be one of the sillier efforts. It's actually a doubling down on bs, because it relies on both myths around home invasion, and myths around rape. In around 2/3 of rapes the attacker is known to the victim, and in most cases there's no overt physical force used at all, pressure and implied threat is used. That's a sad and sobering reality and is important for peopel to understand for us to make real steps in preventing rape.
It's a stat that comes from U.S. government crime statistics and the research of think tanks. Most reputable security and self defense experts, at least those with a background in law enforcement, will tell you that career criminals are creatures of opportunity. While a group of teens and/or dope addicts conducting a smash n'grab, or a contracted pro after a rare coin collection, are not a very high threat to the residents of dwelling, the common burglar is a serious threat. With the common burglar, what starts out as a burglary can devolve into a sexual assault, kidnapping, or (more often) a murder.
The threat is double that in a violent armed home invasion, which happens more frequently than some will acknowledge. Especially with the drug and gang problem we have in this country.
But there's stuff like the above, playing on the silly old myth that rape mostly strangers breaking in to your house to hold you down while you scream and fight.
It might be a "myth" in Straya, brah. In the United States, those of us who are informed understand that it can happen, and it has happened in the past.
Spoiler:
Attrition tactics are very effective against an overseas occupying power with whom you will eventually hit a time and dollar limit that they will not want to pay. But when its your own government those tactics have a much more limited value. An evil domestic government isn't going to give up because you ambushed some soldiers with IEDs and small arms.
You obviously have no understanding how insurgencies work. There is a reason why civil wars are the nastiest kind of conflicts.
"Now I have dismantled congress, executed the Supreme Court justices and burned the constitution, the USA is mine to rule with an iron fist! What's that, a series of ambushes on military convoys killed 100 soldiers over two weeks? I can't have that on my conscious. Call the whole evil empire off. Give them back their country. I'm just gonna raid Fort Knox and escape in a rocket to the moon."
And when convoys keep getting hit and troops (somebody's friends and loved ones) keep dying over time? When supplies keep flowing into an insurgency's coffers as a result? When the insurgents are operating on a cell system and can blend into the general population? When foreign powers start taking interest? When the public, who has no trust for you or your media organs, don't buy into your anti-insurgent propaganda? And when the body count from reprisals start turning your people against you (even dictatorships need the support of the population to be viable). When you start having tired and demoralized troops deserting in increasing numbers?
You probably need to do some reading on Cambodia. There's others, but that's a good place to start.
A country where Pol Pot and his thugs had a near-monopoly on the use of force, thanks to over a century of gun laws imposed by the overthrown monarchy and their French handlers. And Pol Pot, taking a page from Castro's playbook, played the "great liberator" and "man of the people", keeping his tyrannical side well concealed until this power was firmly cemented.
No, none of those militaries were held in check. In each case the US took control of every part of the country it wanted to control. What the insurgencies did was cede that land, and engage in small scale raids and ambushes, aiming to cause enough attrition that the US got tired of the time, money and lives paid.
And that is the aim of any insurgency worth it's salt: Attrition. You bleed the enemy dry with a thousand paper cuts.
If you cannot go anywhere without a serious risk of ambush or boobytraps, then you have no real control of the country itself. Like the Soviets before us, we may control the cities and military facilities. But the countryside is still the insurgent's playground.
And in Vietnam, U.S.and ARVN troops were not safe anywhere, except off-shore or in RVN airspace further south.
That's a great way of winning a war against a foreign occupier, but it's a hopeless strategy against a domestic government. A government has a price point where it will abandon some overseas geopolitical aim and bring its troops back home, but no such price point exists where it will give up trying to be a government inside its own borders.
An insurgency in your own backyard is the easiest one to win, especially in the United States and partly due to our Federalist system. The key is the general population. Without some degree of popular support, no government is going to win on the homefront. That's true in a foreign war. And it's doubly true in a civil war. If the home-brew insurgency has won the support among a large percentage of the domestic population, they have, for all intents and purposes, have won the war. The government forces will just be delaying in the inevitable. In the United States, we are taught a certain degree of mistrust for government from birth, even among big government leftists and statists. Combined with the cynicism and incompetence of our political class, a rebellion winning over hearts and minds isn't a stretch.
The military in this country is primarily loyal to the ideals behind the Constitution of the United States of America, and to what it stands for. Not specifically to the Federal Government or any of it's three branches. If a regime in D.C. were to get out of hand, they would lose the support of the rank and file among the U.S. Armed Forces.
Finally, an insurgency fighting against a hypothetical tyrannical regime in Washington would have the support of most of the State governments, who won't bend a knee, and will likely have the backing of the National Guard.
It wouldn't be that hard to carry out a rebellion against a tyrannical or overreaching dictatorship that exist on the national level.
It is rather telling that people who insist that they need guns in order to fight in case the government goes bad seem to have no concern about the extremely tight controls on explosives, which as you say would be the key weapon in any resistance.
Bombs, like guns, are just one tool of many in the insurgent's toolbox. However, over reliance on explosives can backfire. Depending on explosives alone is fine if you are a run of the mill terrorist. Not if you are fighting a civil war, which relies on popular support to have even a chance at pulling off your endgame. Start with the whole bomberman routine, and you will play right into the government's hands.
I'm curious about these numbers - I'd have thought the number of car deaths would have outstripped firearms deaths by a much more significant distance. How does vehicle ownership per capita stack up against gun ownership per capita?
the numbers are correct. there's not much difference between deaths currently. But notice the trends?
the per capita of cars continues to rise, yet deaths remain the same. more cars, less deaths, proof regulations save lives.
guns per capita remains about the same, yet the deaths are on the rise. Few people buying more guns.
it's only a matter of time before gun deaths passes vehicle deaths. will that finally be the time to talk about gun control?
As America grapples with the fallout of yet another mass shooting—the massacre of at least 50 people at a music festival in Las Vegas—the long and bitter debate over gun control in America will inevitably be reopened. After Sandy Hook, Will Oremus highlighted the lessons of Australia’s strict gun laws and the resulting success in preventing subsequent mass shootings there. The post is reprinted below.
Will Oremus Will Oremus
Will Oremus is Slate’s senior technology writer. Email him at will.oremus@slate.com or follow him on Twitter.
On April 28, 1996, a gunman opened fire on tourists in a seaside resort in Port Arthur, Tasmania. By the time he was finished, he had killed 35 people and wounded 23 more. It was the worst mass murder in Australia’s history.
Twelve days later, Australia’s government did something remarkable. Led by newly elected conservative Prime Minister John Howard, it announced a bipartisan deal with state and local governments to enact sweeping gun-control measures. A decade and a half hence, the results of these policy changes are clear: They worked really, really well.
At the heart of the push was a massive buyback of more than 600,000 semi-automatic shotguns and rifles, or about one-fifth of all firearms in circulation in Australia. The country’s new gun laws prohibited private sales, required that all weapons be individually registered to their owners, and required that gun buyers present a “genuine reason” for needing each weapon at the time of the purchase. (Self-defense did not count.) In the wake of the tragedy, polls showed public support for these measures at upwards of 90 percent.
What happened next has been the subject of several academic studies. Violent crime and gun-related deaths did not come to an end in Australia, of course. But as the Washington Post’s Wonkblog pointed out in August, homicides by firearm plunged 59 percent between 1995 and 2006, with no corresponding increase in non-firearm-related homicides. The drop in suicides by gun was even steeper: 65 percent. Studies found a close correlation between the sharp declines and the gun buybacks. Robberies involving a firearm also dropped significantly. Meanwhile, home invasions did not increase, contrary to fears that firearm ownership is needed to deter such crimes. But here’s the most stunning statistic. In the decade before the Port Arthur massacre, there had been 11 mass shootings in the country. There hasn’t been a single one in Australia since.
There have been some contrarian studies about the decrease in gun violence in Australia, including a 2006 paper that argued the decline in gun-related homicides after Port Arthur was simply a continuation of trends already under way. But that paper’s methodology has been discredited, which is not surprising when you consider that its authors were affiliated with pro-gun groups. Other reports from gun advocates have similarly cherry-picked anecdotal evidence or presented outright fabrications in attempting to make the case that Australia’s more-restrictive laws didn’t work. Those are effectively refuted by findings from peer-reviewed papers, which note that the rate of decrease in gun-related deaths more than doubled following the gun buyback, and that states with the highest buyback rates showed the steepest declines. A 2011 Harvard summary of the research concluded that, at the time the laws were passed in 1996, “it would have been difficult to imagine more compelling future evidence of a beneficial effect.”
Whether the same policies would work as well in the United States—or whether similar legislation would have any chance of being passed here in the first place—is an open question. Howard, the conservative leader behind the Australian reforms, wrote an op-ed in an Australian paper after visiting the United States in the wake of the Aurora shootings. He came away convinced that America needed to change its gun laws, but lamented its lack of will to do so.
There is more to this than merely the lobbying strength of the National Rifle Association and the proximity of the November presidential election. It is hard to believe that their reaction would have been any different if the murders in Aurora had taken place immediately after the election of either Obama or Romney. So deeply embedded is the gun culture of the US, that millions of law-abiding, Americans truly believe that it is safer to own a gun, based on the chilling logic that because there are so many guns in circulation, one's own weapon is needed for self-protection. To put it another way, the situation is so far gone there can be no turning back.
That’s certainly how things looked after the Aurora shooting. But after Sandy Hook, with the nation shocked and groping for answers once again, I wonder if Americans are still so sure that we have nothing to learn from Australia’s example.
So yes, there is a proof that regulation makes the numbers of such terrible events suddenly drop : Australia. Sure, it's not the same scale as USA, but the numbers are still there. Actions can be taken. It's not easy, it takes time and it sure makes things difficult at first, but on long term, the facts are here; since 1996, no more mass murder event happened for 21 years in Australia, while before it was once per year. Also the numbers for suicide by gun weapon, murder by gun weapon and criminal acts with a gun weapon have significantly dropped since then.
And yes, it restricts the ways to own a gun, and in that way it restricts the freedom to own one. You can't just go to a shop and buy one, you have to follow a lot of rules. But well, that's what happens with a lot of others things in life. The real question is : is it worth it, for the lives that could be saved thanks to that in the future and for the loss of personnal liberties on long term ? It is the same for loss of personnal liberties when taking a flight, just to restrict the access for potential terrorists to crash a plane into towers. Was it worth it ?
The question is actually for you Americans to decide.
We seem to be well off the deep end with random other arguments and "fighting the government when they take over" fantasies, so we're done here. Well off topic
uh huh.
