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Member (Idle past 4176 days) Posts: 990 From: Burlington, NC, USA Joined: |
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Author | Topic: Gun Control | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
crashfrog Member (Idle past 1498 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
All the home-owned tanks and rocket launchers you & your neighbors have in your backyards cannot protect you from a government that owns the Hydrogen Bomb. But a government that won't use the hydrogen bomb is indistinguishable from one that doesn't have one.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1498 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined:
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The populance is not trained at defending themselves with deadly weapons. Says who? The vast majority of firearms owners train and practice with their firearms, recognizing that untrained use of a weapon is as much a danger to themselves as to other. I've had that training and I don't even own a gun. But rather than recognize that as responsible gun ownership, I suspect you view that practice as militaristic, further evidence that they're a "neighbor with an arsenal", some kind of "gun nut." It's a nice trick for having it both ways: when people don't get the training to use guns, that proves that guns are dangerous. When people do, that proves they're just the kind of soldier wanna-be's who are the most dangerous.
Just said a figure. Could be your wife or girlfriend...or boyfriend? Then I'd better make sure who they are and why they're there. And if I think it's my wife but it's actually a murderer, having the gun is going to make that mistake a lot less risky for me.
My friend has two trained pitbulls in his home, and no guns. Go in his house expecting "physical safety". I'll be sure to bring a pair of ketamine steaks.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1498 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
But in reality all the grate american supper power had problems with was cleaning up the mess after the war you know the guys in caves who still wanted to fight the actual war was won very rapidly. Sure. But fighting a state to surrender isn't at all the same thing as pacifying a people.
And i just cant picture you Americans wanting to fight that way. Our country was born that way.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1498 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined:
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But, yet, disarming did not make those nations safer:
quote: http://www.wmsa.net/pubs/reason/reason_nov02_crime_in_uk.htm That's from 2002. The UK's gun ban had an almost immediate effect on gun homicides, it's true: But that effect was to increase the number of UK's citizens killed by firearms. On the other hand, in the US where the assault weapons ban has expired: The notion that the US is experiencing some kind of incredible murder rate just isn't true. Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1498 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined:
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The fact that most aren't police officers or former military (and only current former military.) I think you're overestimating how much training we're talking about. Believe it or not, police and military officers in training aren't studying gunplay 24-7. It's not actually that hard to use a firearm and the principles of its safe operation are not complicated. My wife holds the rank of Captain in the US Army, and her firearm training was two days out of two and a half months. We're actually thinking of getting a gun, just so she can practice - she's got zero gun background, so qualifying has been an issue for her. She needs a lot more practice than the Army is able to afford her.
But I do recognize and value proper gun ownership. Well, that's good. I'd rather promote norms of proper gun ownership, than have weapons be viewed as something that it is inherently illegitimate to own and therefore, like the UK, have their possession relegated only to criminals. Particularly since we can't have gun bans here due to the Second Amendment. You'll get no argument from me that owning a gun should come with a requirement that one be trained with it. I've already put forward a proposal for a magazine ban, which I believe doesn't infringe on Second Amendment rights. I think there's very reasonable gun control steps that could be, and need to be, taken. And I certainly find much fault with organizations like the NRA that do much to feed "gun-nut" paranoia and obstruct reasonable efforts to regulate gun ownership. I'm sorry if it feels like I've taken their side - that's unintentional, it's just nobody's staked out the NRA's position in these threads for me to argue with. I'm sure from where you are on the spectrum, it looks like I'm over on the NRA's side. But I'm not. As I said I don't even own a gun.
The point is civilians are not trained at, nor should they be allowed to, know when a situation warrents deadly force or not. Oni, there's no "training" for that. The training that police and military personnel get is how to shoot what you're aiming at, how to keep the gun clean, under what circumstances you can be armed etc. That's all the training my wife received that had to do with firearms. There's no point in the training where they say "ok, these are the guys you need to shoot; these are the guys who look like they need to be shot but shouldn't be." There's no training for that - you have to use your own inherent judgement. There's no training in the world that will tell you whether the unfamiliar shadow in your living room is your son or an armed robber - that's something you have to determine yourself in that situation.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1498 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
Well that's why I said I don't want an armed police force either, except for special units like SWAT or DEA. Military officers in training is not what I think you meant to write. Some college graduate in Officer training school is NOT someone I trust with a weapon either. So it's not just an armed citizenry you oppose, it's an armed police and an armed military. Except Marines. Those guys can have guns, but only while they're at work, I guess. I don't understand how that's supposed to work, Oni. There aren't enough Marines to go around to keep civil order.
Of course not, but the training and experience are what keeps you calm and in control during these situations. If a guy breaks into my house to rob and maybe kill me, and my only option is to wait for the Marines to show up (how do they even know to come?) in what possible sense am I "in control"? Even if I called the police, what use would that be except to put more unarmed people into harm's way?
It's that very ignorance and arrogance that makes you think you can do it, untill you fuck up and shoot the wrong/innocent person. But Marines kill innocent people all the time. There goes your "training", I guess.
Them I trust. You, your wife or the avergae civilian I do not. Who cares? My rights under the Second Amendment aren't subject to your "trust". I appreciate that you have a radically different vision for our society, but as I said, the Second Amendment is a pretty serious obstacle to you being able to disarm the civilian population.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1498 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
So why the differentiation between automatic machine guns and semi-automatic machine guns. It's a common misconception, I guess, that the military fights wars by spraying a million bullets all over the place with no regard for accuracy. This is the misconception that causes you to think that "according to your reasoning everyone citizen in the country should be able to strap on an uzi or carry around an M-16".
And a fully automatic machine gun or sawed off shotguns is even one step better. Well, I guess you should write a letter to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and tell them that they're fighting wars all wrong, and that we should be sending our boys and girls shotguns and hacksaws instead of M4's (which, incidentally, has replaced the M16 nearly universally in the Army, and has no fully-automatic firing mode.)
There are already restrictions on the 2nd ammendment which do not allow the average citizen to own military or military-like weaponry. That's inaccurate, and again, the Second Amendment isn't a protection of your right to hunt or shoot trap, it's a protection of your right to pose a credible threat to an invading military or a despotic government. Or as Ice-T puts it:
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1498 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined:
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I DO support armed SWAT, or special units that are trained. What about places that don't have SWAT, Oni? You know - most of the country? You seem to have this notion, maybe from movies or something, that SWAT is always waiting in the wings to deal with the really hairy situations. But what about the towns and even cities that don't have SWAT? Do you think Aurora, CO has its own SWAT team? Don't you think those guys have to come in from Denver? How does that help me when I'm frantically calling 911 because there's a potentially armed intruder in my home?
You're an idiot dude. No, Oni. I'm just someone who can think things through. You don't seem to be.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1498 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
However, your statement does not answer the question of why we should differentiate between fully automatic and semi-automatic weapons in the 2nd Ammendment. Because there's a public safety interest in doing so, and merely differentiating between different types of weapons does not infringe the Second Amendment. Why would it?
The shotgun is use to clear rooms and small spaces at close ranges. I never said that it wasn't. In all honesty, DA, I don't see why you even bothered to post. What do you think you actually contradicted me about?
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1498 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined:
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I believe in the right to bear arms but am concerned about how much and what type of 'arms' we need to bear. That's fair, and I have the same concern - I'm not reflexively "pro-gun", I'm pro-"constitutional rights" - but the role of our government is not to determine what type of arms we need; it's to determine what the minimum level of regulation of arms is necessary to serve the public interest without infringing constitutional rights. If the government put itself in the position of saying "well, how many printing presses does the American public actually need? How many newspapers, max, do there even need to be? How many reporters should they be allowed to have?" I think everybody would recognize the terrible precedent of allowing the government to circumscribe the maximum permissible rights of the people, instead of the way it's supposed to work, where the people circumscribe the maximum permissible encroachment of the government on universal rights. Everybody would understand that even if the government wasn't controlling the content of those presses, simply the act of construing the freedom of the press as something that the government gets to draw a limit around is an incredibly dangerous infringement on our First Amendment rights. The Second Amendment is no less important than the first. Thanks for serving in the Navy, DA, but have a little faith that we, the American people, can handle the rights and freedoms that you defended for us.
Should they be able to carry a concealed sub-machine gun in a movie theater or the like. Why should I be concerned if someone is carrying a concealed submachine gun in a movie theater if they have no intent to use it? If they intend to use it there, that's already against the law. How is the public safety served by restricting the rights of gun owners who won't ever commit mass murder with their firearms?
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1498 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined:
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So the question is should we or should we not restrict semi-automatic weapons in any way. I am kind of wavering on this issue. Frankly, I don't see that the continuum of guns ranges all that much in danger or deadliness. Even the meager .22 LR is a widely-known go-to caliber for Mafia hitmen (they say) since the round, if it penetrates the skull, typically bounces around within the cranium instead of exiting, resulting in a nearly-certain fatal injury. There's not any sort of gun that it's "safe" to be shot with, with the possible exception of: But aside from the triple-candy gun, I just don't see an obvious disparity where we say this gun is fine for widespread ownership, but this other gun is out of bounds. If you can own a gun, if you've met the requirements for legal gun ownership, then I can't see that it matters which guns or what kind of guns you can own. The potential to kill of all firearms is comparable - if a gun (loaded or not) is pointed at any part of someone's body, you should always assume that the likely outcome of firing that gun is a death. (That's why responsible gun owners don't point guns at things they don't intend to kill.) Now, that said, I'm totally down with magazine restrictions. I don't see that an AR-15 loaded with only seven rounds at a time is more dangerous than any other weapon loaded with only seven rounds at a time. I can't see a personal defense, hunting, or target-shooting scenario where you need to fire more than seven rounds, unless it's your profession to be in protracted gun shootouts. I'm completely down with mandatory ballistics fingerprints and firing-pin microengraving, even though those haven't actually demonstrated any usefulness in solving gun crimes. In my ideal world, the government would have a record of every single instance where a round was fired from your weapon, where it was fired, and where that round ended up.
It just seemed to me that you were preaching to me about how I should contact the JCOS about how we are not using shotguns and other non-machine gun weaponry. Sawed-offs is what I was talking about, and that was just my cheeky way of saying that the US Armed Forces doesn't seem to have much use for cut-down Remingtons or whatever. That was the finding of the Supreme Court in US vs. Miller, and I think it upholds my interpretation of the Second Amendment - that it's about private citizens being able to muster into an orderly, effective militia if need be.
Sorry a little service envy as it seems everyone only equates the Army and Marines with small caliber weapons and forgets about the Navy I hear you. Of course, the SEAL's get a lot of press, don't they? SEAL Team 6, Bin Laden, those Somalian pirates a year back? That was a hell of a coordinated shot, wasn't it? Three pirates at, like, 400 yards or something, from the deck of one pitching ship into another? Damnedest shooting I ever heard about.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1498 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined:
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Therefore, public safety outweighs the neccessity for a person to carry a machine gun. Again the rights of one person do not outweigh the rights (the right to live) of anyone else. No, of course not, but having specified that the weapon is being carried by someone who doesn't intend to fire it, I don't see how the right to life of anyone else in the theater is being infringed. And if someone does intend to kill a theater full of people then the means by which he's chosen to do that is largely immaterial. I think what a lot of people want to do is chase down a rabbit hole where we equate capability with intent, but I think that's a mistake, and that's what leads us to the absurdity that even a completely naked human being has the capability to kill, by the use of nothing more than one's hands or feet, and therefore if capability is the same as intent, all human beings have the intent to kill at all times.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1498 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
I am not equating capability to intent. I didn't mean you, specifically. Sorry, I guess I could have been more clear.
What I am saying is there is a greater capacity (not intent) to do harm to more people with a machine gun than with a pistol in one incident. Is there? Stipulate that both weapons are loaded to the same capacity - you need at least one round per person you wish to harm - and I don't see that either weapon is much more dangerous than the other. Jared Lee Loughner killed six in Arizona with nothing but a Glock handgun - loaded with 33 rounds. They took him down as he reloaded, so forcing mass murderers to reload more often seems like a winning legal strategy. And I don't think the Second Amendment protects high-capacity magazines, as I've said. I don't see how seven rounds in a submachine gun is inherently more dangerous than seven rounds in a handgun. A "hundred rounds per minute" is a rate, not a capacity, and if your weapon holds only seven rounds by law, it's an entirely theoretical one. All of this is, again, mostly to agree with you.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1498 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
And if Jare Lee Loughner was shooting a fully automatic machine gun in a stadium. Loaded with 33 rounds? I don't see how he would have posed any more of a danger than with the Glock 19.
How much easier and faster would it be for him to take out say 50 people than it would for a manual firearm or even a semi-automatic before someone or a group of people could 'possibly' take him out so to speak. I don't see how even the most powerful automatic weapon would have allowed him to shoot 50 people with 33 rounds.
Only because there is an increased speed of successively firing rounds out of the chamber thus making it more difficult for someone to overcome that person. I don't follow your math on that. Shootings of this type, when they're stopped by intervention, usually stop when the shooter is vulnerable due to reloading, not mid-barrage. So the theoretical rate of fire of the weapon doesn't seem relevant. It's the length of the sustained barrage that seems to matter, and reducing rounds carried per magazine is a way to make sure those barrages are of a very minimum length.
When I said having a greater 'capacity', I meant a greater 'capacity' to hurt more people in one incident not the actual round capacity of the gun. Since it takes at least one round per person hurt, clearly "actual round capacity of the gun" is synonymous with the capacity to hurt more people.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1498 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
My point was that people might have reason for concern about the "armed overthrow of the government" justification for a right to bear arms. People, I guess, can amend the Constitution as they see fit, but until then the Second Amendment and its textual justification are the highest law of the land. There's no way to construe the Second Amendment as an amendment about owning guns for hunting and target shooting. The scope and purpose of the Amendment is completely explicit - "a well-regulated militia being necessary for the security of a free state." "Well-regulated" means "orderly", as in "organized and effective." I don't see how the Civil War changed that, since it was the side defending the US constitution and its amendments that won.
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