August 6, 2016

6mm Remington "worked OK" (in your words) at U Texas. 9mm "worked OK" (again your words) at VT.

.223 Remington is the least powerful of all common centerfire rifle cartridges, and is average as far as velocity goes. Making it out to be a mega-super-ultra-death-cartridge that causes more serious wounds than .243/.270/.30-06 with comparable bullets is ludicrous. And since you want to outlaw semiauto 9mm carbines too, and 7.62x39mm, and .243/7mm-08/.308, and even .22LR, if they have protruding handgrips, it's all obfuscation. I suspect that there are exactly zero rifle cartridges you are OK with if they are chambered in a modern-looking semiauto with a detachable magazine.

FWIW, H.R.1022 a few years ago would have also banned the M1 Garand, as I recall, and the Feinstein AWB banned the Beretta BM59 (M1 Garand in a modern stock) by name. There are also a few hundred thousand Garands sitting in warehouses overseas that gun prohibitionists have blocked the importation of for civilian sale. So the gun control lobby isn't OK with those, either.

August 5, 2016

155gr .30-06 is still trading velocity for long range and penetration. Try 110gr.

Most full-power rifle loads are optimized for range and deep penetration. But step down to even a 110-grain bullet, and .30-06 is pushing it at 3400-3500 ft/sec, if you want to compare apples to apples. Remington also used to make a 55gr .30-06 load above 4000 ft/sec (Remington Accelerator), but I think they've been discontinued.

.30-06, .270, or .243 with fragile loads will produce far more severe wounds than a .223 with varmint rounds at equivalent range, because the full-power rounds stomp the lowish-powered .223 in terms of both velocity and energy.

August 5, 2016

Dihydrogen monoxide hand-waving...

"re the term 'assault rifle': howsoever it evolved, somewhen it has become a political term used today to mainly define rifles with a high muzzle velocity which often have an automatic rifle equivalent in the military {AR15 to M16, AK47, 74}"

Ummm, no. The prohibitionists use the term "assault weapon" to include moderately-high-velocity rounds like .223 Remington, lowish-velocity rifle rounds like 7.62x39mm (civilian AK-47 lookalikes, SKS), and even carbines that fire very-low-velocity rounds like 9mm, .45 ACP, or even .22LR.

The definining characteristic of an "assault weapon" is looks (mainly the shape and styling of the stock), not muzzle velocity or mode of operation. A semiauto .30-06 or a semiauto 9mm with a protruding handgrip is an "assault weapon", whereas a Ruger Mini-14 (semiauto .223 Remington) or Mini Thirty (semiauto 7.62x39mm) are ostensibly not.

"which can often be converted back from civilian semi-auto to full automatic by use of a conversion kit or sometimes a simple tool such as a file (not that many assault rifle owners do this, it would be counter productive, just that the capability exists). "

Baloney. Title 1 civilian "assault weapons" are as hard to convert to full auto as Title 1 civilian non-"assault weapons" like the Mini-14, the 10/22, etc.; any gun that can be converted to full auto by filing the sear is already a machinegun under Federal law, even if not actually converted.

A skilled machinist well equipped with blueprints, machine tools, and time can manufacture parts to convert any smallish-caliber civilian repeating rifle to full auto, but such parts are themselves machineguns under Federal law, and even attempting to create such parts will land you 10 years in Federal prison.

August 5, 2016

She didn't ban "assault rifles". She banned rifles that *aren't* assault weapons

under Massachusetts law, in that they are neither banned by name, nor are *copies* or *duplicates* of guns banned by name, nor meet the features-list criteria used to define an "assault weapon". Instead, she unilaterally redefined "copies or duplicates of" to mean "somewhat similar to" or "shares a couple of parts with", contrary to 18 years of precedent, and turning hundreds of thousands of Massachusetts residents into criminals overnight.

Banning modern-looking rifles is particularly ludicrous because between 2007 and 2014, Massachusetts had 1,294 murders in the state. All rifles combined accounted for ]b]seven of them. That is fewer than one per year, on average, for all lever-action, bolt-action, pump-action, and autoloading rifles combined.

Tell me again how gun control fundamentalists "don't want to ban guns, just keep them out of the wrong hands." That's BS. Even the Brady Campaign is distancing themselves from this crap.

July 26, 2016

You were the one who proposed a ridiculous capacity limit

that would have no effect on gun deaths, but is especially ludicrous to float as a proposed solution to suicide.

I'll also point out that Japan has a higher murder + suicide rate than we do, if you want to use that metric. Prohibitionists don't give a shit about non-gun suicides, though.

FWIW, our suicide rate is *lower* than that of Canada, Germany, France, Iceland, Norway, and New Zealand.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/world/suiciderate.html

July 26, 2016

Less than 200 murders/year involve "assault weapons". Not 30,000.

Most of those 30,000 are suicides, which even a ridiculous 3- or 6-round magazine limit wouldn't touch, and which rarely involve rifles anyway.

Of gun homicides, most are with small, lowish-capacity pistols and revolvers, wielded by career criminals who can't legally so much as touch a gun, and who can't legally carry them. All rifles and all shotguns combined barely reach 500 murders annually.

July 16, 2016

Less than 200 deaths a year nationwide isn't low enough for the fundamentalists.

Assuming so-called "assault weapons" account for half or even 2/3 of the ~270 rifle murders annually in this country (a fair assumption given that they are by far the most popular civilian rifles in the United States), yet the fundamentalists want nationwide bans, and many want mass confiscation---from 20-50 million people, depending on how defined---over that ~200/yr.

To put that into perspective, ~720/yr are killed riding bicycles.

July 14, 2016

The civilian ones are basically a Glock made less concealable.

They're still non-automatic handguns firing pistol cartridges. They're not all that popular, in part because they have less capability than an ordinary-looking pistol shooting the same ammunition.

The restricted Title 2 automatic versions (the middle 3 in your pic) are a different story, but I doubt that was what was used here.

July 14, 2016

"Semantics" is the study of the meanings of words.

Definitions matter.

If the anti-abortion lobby introduces a bill to ban "late term abortions" and defines a late-term abortion as anything after 10 weeks' gestation, then pointing out the bait-and-switch does indeed deal in semantics. It is also true.

The gun control lobby isn't trying to ban 31-round magazines; they are trying to ban 11-round magazines, or even 8-round magazines (e.g. the NY SAFE Act as passed). Unfortunately for that approach, the very first Winchesters ever made (since 1866) had 15-round magazines, as did their predecessor, the Henry carbine of 1860-1861. That's why the compliance rate with New York's magazine and rifle-handgrip ban is estimated at 5%, and the compliance rate with Sunnyvale's magazine ban was zero; it's like setting the national speed limit on the Interstates to 35 mph.

A couple of years ago, I guesstimated the number of over-10-round magazines in U.S. homes at around a third of a billion, owned by around 50 million people. I don't know how many are sold a year, but it is probably in the many tens of millions, so that number may be half a billion now. You'd likely double that number if you want a 7-round limit. That would make the "war on magazines" much bigger than the "war on drugs".

As to the "saving lives" aspect, the head of Americans for Gun Safety a couple years ago stated that the most dangerous bullets in a magazine are the first 10, not numbers 11 and up. Rifles are used in only ~270 murders/year out of ~12,000; of those, magazine capacity is almost always irrelevant for offensive use if the shooter plans their tactics around reloads; the rate of aimed fire between a 10- or 15-round magazine and a 30-round magazine is not that different. Capacity matters a lot more for defensive use than offensive.

July 12, 2016

Yep, Saiga with aftermarket stock.

Here's the Saiga in its factory straight stock:



Which is not, I'll point out, an "assault weapon". No protruding handgrip, no "evil features", just a plain civilian semiauto rifle.