Examples?
Maybe people have more freedom and can’t fathom how to handle a lot of it?
Back in our stone age past, there were supportive tribal groups but also the realities of day to day life didn’t leave people to sit and ponder things beyond their control?
Tribalism has shifted into something we didn’t evolve for?
As an aside, I wouldn’t want to damage myself with pills or whatever, and have to deal with how life is crimped afterwards in addition to what was bothering me.
Which is where reason comes in but most people are too weak intellectually to overcome their feelings.
I don’t expect it to be passed anytime soon. Plenty of chances to do so long before any impeachment talk happened. And with the last President even. We’ll just continue to do nothing and hope for the best. Not the strategy I would take but hey at least we can say we’re free to have high powered weapons in everyone’s hands. Take that countries that don’t have this stuff happen like we do!
Sure our kids may die at school, movies, concerts, whatever. But at least we can go to massive expos and jack off with fellow patriots at that weapon that can hold tons of ammo and fire really fast.
Republicans don’t want gun legislation passed. They have had years out of power and in power to do so. Which is fine but I’m not buying the “oh they would have but impeachment talk” part.
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The 5.56 NATO and the 7.62x39 most commonly used in “assault weapons” are medium range, and rather anemic as far as battle rifles go. Calling them ‘high powered’ is a bit odd.
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[quote=“H_factor, post:1358, topic:239320”]
Republicans don’t want gun legislation passed
[/quote]
It’s almost like both parties know 100 million Americans don’t want to be disarmed. It’s almost like they respected the will of their constituents. It’s almost functioning like a republic.
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I’m not sure where you got this or if I responded to the wrong thing. I don’t think strong arguments exist for people having quantities of weapons that can hold a ton of ammo and shoot rapidly. You don’t need them for hunting and you don’t need them for personal protection. The less of them in circulation the better. The last thing we need to do is make more of them.
But I’m not talking about taking guns that people own away. And universal background checks have been polling around 90% for a long time now. So the will of the people isn’t even attempting to be acted on.
And as we continue to do nothing we will get the same results. I don’t pretend to have any answers but I do think that’s correct.
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The American people seem to be pretty receptive to certain types of gun legislation.
AI thought we were discussing mass shootings?
You know what the Freaknomics guys said was partially a factor in this? Legalized abortion leading to less kids in difficult circumstances. Been a while since I’ve read that though it was an interesting theory. Think they caught some flack over that one obviously.
I don’t think they highlighted violent crime though.
Could this Lott guy be correct?
Weapons like you describe are already illegal for civilians to own. This is the GAU-8 Avenger (edited to include a better picture).
It fires a 30mm round, shown below next to a 5.56mm, which is the most common AR-15 chambering. The GAU-8 has a magazine capacity of 1,150 rounds and can fire at a rate of over 4,000 rounds per minute. The Avenger is the type of weapon you describe.
Most AR-15’s are semi-automatic, magazine fed carbines or rifles. The basic design has been around for over a hundred and twenty years. The round itself is on the low end of the power spectrum. There are very few common rifle or carbine rounds that are lower-power. Typical magazine capacity ranges from 5 to 100, but 30 is most common. It is absolutely suitable for hunting and it is a versatile self-defense platform suitable for most shooters. I wouldn’t choose it for large game, but it can get the job done humanely on targets up to small deer sized.
The ideas proposed in your poll, aside from leading to perhaps the greatest unrest the country has seen since 1865, would not be followed by the people doing the violent acts any more than they are today. If I imagine a world where semi-automatic weapons were somehow uninvented and the idea of putting a spring inside a box is somehow out-of-reach for normal people to make their own magazines, then these ideas start to sound good.
As it stands, I think they’re over a century too late.
WHOA!
I said…“Oh my hell…who can carry that thing except maybe a Terminator”!
Then I saw that it’s an anti-tank weapon mounted mostly on A-10s!
(DAMN that thing is both awesome and scary…and I think your point was made, @twojarslave ).
You’ve actually got that one backwards. The A-10 is what’s mounted on the gun. It’s the only airplane in our inventory where we designed a gun, then built a plane to aim it.
It also literally meets @H_factor’s description of holding a ton of ammo. I used it for a sense of perspective. When it comes to regulating firearms, the devil is in the details.
“Ban AR-15’s and AK-47’s” is not a coherent policy, which is why Beto isn’t really contributing to the discussion in any meaningful way. There are many other guns that do exactly the same thing. Here’s a Springfield M1-A. If you showed this picture to most people, they’d call it a hunting rifle.
They’d be right, if someone chose to hunt with it. Functionally, it is the same type of weapon as an AR-15, a magazine-fed semi-automatic rifle. It has the same rate of fire but a much longer range with a much larger round that delivers far more kinetic energy to the target.
The only coherent policy position that would outlaw the sale and possession of AR-15’s and AK-47’s would, in fact, be a ban on all semi-automatic weapons or perhaps rifles. You have to regulate weapons on their features, and once you start doing that you end up banning the majority of the guns people own today, which are semi-autos.
It also seems silly to believe that a semi-auto rifle ban is the end-game, as it is actually a much stronger argument to ban semi auto pistols and even pistols of all types, as those are the type of guns most frequently used in unlawful shootings.
The magazine ban is perhaps the silliest of them all. There’s hundreds of millions, probably billions in circulation just in the US. And it’s a box with a spring inside of it. This is not a high hurdle for someone to clear who is intent on destruction with a magazine-fed weapon of any capacity.
I think these polls do not give an accurate view of how people really think about guns. Terms like “assault weapon” are imprecise, and I think you would get a much lower level of support if you asked for support of a mandatory buyback of semi-automatic rifles AND included the fact that these are the most common type of rifle owned today. That’s an important fact to consider, and I think many are unaware of it.
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Thanks, @twojarslave!
I am WAY out of my league in terms of weapons discussions (some would say in terms of a lot of things, right @pfury?)
As kind of a “outsider”, though…I think discussions of bans gets us nowhere. Owning weapons is something people are very passionate about, which means they will do anything to protect that right.
As an “insider”, I agree. I think our national-level gun laws are pretty close to where they should be. I’m on board with stronger background checks, better information quality and not opposed to making them mandatory at gun shows, but I don’t think it is practical to require them for all private sales. Not unless a registration scheme is implemented, which is a whole other can of worms.
It’s also worth considering the economic benefit. I’ll be generous and pretend that an “assault weapon” ban somehow eliminated all 374 deaths involving a rifle that took place in 2016.
Surely, that would be a great outcome. Unrealistic, but great. What did we have to do to get there?
In 2016 the gun industry’s economic output was measured at $51 billion. I’m not sure how much of that would be “assault weapons”, but let’s be conservative and say it was $10 billion, or 1/5 the total.
Are we ready to legislate a $10 billion industry out of existence? There’s roughly 300,000 people who work in the gun industry. Let’s stick with the 1/5th estimation for “assault weapons”, so that’s 60,000 jobs legislated out of existence.
That matters. That’s real, and there are human impacts to such a policy.
Is 60,000 people put out-of-work a good trade for 374 people who are not shot to death (by a rifle, at least) in a year?
The recreational value is also real, but I suppose all of the gun nuts will just have to find another activity to take interest in, bond with friends and family over, and spend their time and money on.
Now we get to an even juicier question, which is how many rights do we give up in order to enforce this new law? How many REALLY bad outcomes are we ready to live with, for a best case outcome of a couple hundred lives possibly saved each year?
DANG!
Home Depot and Lowe’s better get on banning those hammer’s, right @twojarslave?
(Hell…656 were reported killed by ass-whuppin’ alone!)
They are in other countries, which is why I always look cautiously towards places where the ideas that are being advanced here are firmly in-place. This covers a lot of policies not in the scope of this thread.
Knife crime in the UK is a perfect example of this. They are much further along this line of thinking than we are, and are now attempting to regulate the oldest tool in existence. Edged weapons pre-date human evolution, yet people somehow believe in the ability of government to stop them from being used unlawfully.
It’s absurd, and not improving outcomes in any way you can measure.
Edit: If you scroll up I put a better picture of the Avenger in my earlier post, to better illustrate what a high-powered weapon with a large magazine capacity and a fast rate of fire looks like.
That could be. I’ve also seen an article on a study done on people with severe mental illness going from mental hospital custody, to being released on the streets (coincides with the crime wave that caused the war on drugs) to now being in criminal custody back off the streets. Terrible human tragedy, but hey the crime rate is back down.