benEzra
benEzra's JournalIs that sarcasm/Poe, or are you serious?
Because gun ranges are not only legal everywhere in the United States, but also legal in Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and every nation in Europe.
I suppose "the entire planet except for Japan and a couple other nations" counts as "some places", making that statement technically true, but it doesn't capture the scope of it.
It's not people like you who are pushing to enact crap like the NY SAFE Act.
It's mostly urban elites who don't know a semiauto from a machinegun, or a .223 from a .45-70, and who either aren't aware of the issue's nuances or don't care.
How about stop trying to ban the most popular guns/magazines? That is a huge turnoff where I live.
Such ban proposals have been one of the biggest albatrosses around the party's neck in the last couple of decades in rural and semi-rural areas, including my neck of the woods in eastern NC.
For what it's worth, a pro-gun Dem (Roy Cooper) just won the governorship here, winning a majority of the *same voters* that rejected Clinton. There were a lot of issues in play, but the ill-advised ultimatums to gun owners early in the primary were repeated over and over and over here throughout the general campaign and hurt HRC here, just as they did elsewhere.
And FYI, if you advocate banning modern-looking rifle handgrips, and magazines over 10 rounds, you are (perhaps unintentionally) advocating for "banning people's guns", since such bans are aimed squarely at the most popular guns in U.S. homes. Most gun owners don't hunt, so the issue is primarily not about deer rifles.
On the contrary, there is really no other basis for harassing a cohort
who commit violent crimes at less than 1/5th the rate of the population at large and 1/2 the rate of police officers. Especially given the gun control lobby's ostensible support for licensure and training.
By reflexively attacking licensed concealed carry, gun control advocates demonstrate that they are much more concerned with criminalizing gun possession by the trained, vetted, and nonviolent than they are about addressing misuse by the criminal or irresponsible.
What's *daft* is the gun control lobby's obsession with criminalizing the least misused guns and harassing the most thoroughly vetted owners, IMHO.
Actually, all surveys but the non-anonymous GSS have shown steady ownership or recent increase.
Pretty much the *only* survey reporting a long-term decline has been the General Social Survey conducted by the University of Chicago, which is expressly non-anonymous, conducted via in-person interviews, funded by gun control advocates (Joyce), and run by a gun control advocate. Ownership rates assessed by Pew, Gallup, and others in anonymous surveys are much higher, and actual hard data (e.g. firearms possession licenses, in states that require them like IL and MA) show increases, not decreases.
Boston Globe - Gun licenses on the Rise in Massachusetts
Illinois FOID License Holders Up 33% 2009-2013
FWIW, the FOID numbers have kept rising; I believe the number of active Illinois FOID cards as of 12/15/2015 was 1,942,008, which would be a 54% increase in FOID cards since 2009, if I have that number right. And since FOID cards correlate 1:1 with on-the-books legal ownership in IL, a 33% (or 54%) increase in valid FOID's is a commensurate increase in licensed ownership---in the GSS's own backyard.
I'll point out that these are both heavily Dem, deep-blue states, but the same trends are at work in other blue states, as well as purple swing states and red states, whether you look at all the available proxies for ownership or at anonymous self-reported ownership.
As of 9/2016, a Pew Research Center poll put the number at 44% admitting to a gun in the house, 51% saying no gun, and 5% refusing to answer the question. A 1/2016 CNN poll put the numbers about the same, with 40% saying yes and 9% refusing to answer.
Carry licensure, which isn't correlated 1:1 with ownership but is still loosely correlated, has more than doubled since 2007 and IIRC roughly quadrupled since 1999.
WSJ - Permits Soar to Allow More Concealed Guns
Here in eastern NC, my local shooting range is now jam-packed every time I go there, when it used to be fairly sparse years ago, and I have a lot of coworkers and friends who bought their first gun within the last few years, including a longtime coworker who bought his first two months ago.
It is an article of faith among gun control advocates that the GSS is the only reliable measure of gun ownership, but if you look the totality of the metrics, including hard license data, overall ownership trends do not appear to be moving in the prohibitionists' favor. And it is incontrovertible that the styles of guns people have been buying in the last 25 years are not favorable to gun control advocates' handgrip-shape and magazine-capacity crusades, either. As I mentioned upthread, the market has been moving strongly away from larger calibers and straight stocks, toward the modern-looking centerfire .22's and double-stack 9mm's that the gun control lobby wishes to ban or severely restrict.
Perhaps it is hard to see from within the cloistered DC/NY/CA bubble, but Bloomberg et al are trying to outlaw guns and magazines that are legal in Canada and much of Europe, the banning of which would be considered a serious violation of the social contract across much of the United States. If your bans have gotten only 5% to 10% compliance among owners in New York and Connecticut, just how well do you expect those bans to play in NC, WV, Texas, Ohio, Tennessee, Florida, or Michigan? It is hard to express just how repellent the NY SAFE Act and similar crap is in states with a strong culture of lawful ownership.
FWIW, there were warnings of the flaws in the current approach in Virginia's 2015 state senate races, which IIRC handed control of the Virginia legislature to the repubs:
Washington Post - Did gun control cost McAuliffe and Democrats the Virginia election?
Too bad no one inside the bubble was listening.
I didn't realize it was produced by the same people who did the Taken series. Geez.
"Guns are bad, unless I can make a bunch of money portraying their use by vigilantes and revenge killers, then the more the better." It's people like that that make me wish California wouldn't exempt VIPs and the entertainment industry from its rifle handgrip and magazine bans.
I liked the original Taken OK, except for the "wantonly torture your enemies and smile about it" part (!), and Taken 2 had its moments, but I didn't like Taken 2 well enough to watch Taken 3. Especially since any movie that starts by killing off Famke Janssen does not sound like one that would be entertaining to me; I'd rather go rewatch Tron. Or, heck, Wild Zero.
I noticed the ads my local NPR affiliate for this film completely suppressed the gun angle,
knowing that mentioning it would be a huge turn-off. Even most fence-sitters wouldn't be too interested in paying $40 to sit through two hours of preaching.
IIRC, the ad portrayed as a "high-powered lobbyist decides to buck the establishment" story, which it most certainly isn't.
A point that is applicable to any other parking garage in any other place.
As I've mentioned elsewhere, to get an NC license, I had to pass a Federal background check, state background check, FBI fingerprint check, mental health records check, take a class on self-defense law and tactics, and pass a shooting qualification on a range, live fire. For those of us who have passed that bar, there is no rational basis to say that it's OK to carry when transiting to/from a bus-station parking garage or a train-station parking garage, but not an airport parking garage, when picking up a friend late at night or whatever.
Your position comes down to "I despise gun owners and especially carry license holders, and I want to screw with them as much as possible." Pragmatically, one downside of that approach is that it makes gun owners oppose even common-ground positions like carry licensure (if you want to know why Vermont-style permitless carry is spreading across the country, look back at how you treat carry licensure). Expressing contempt for background checks, training, and licensure undermines any common ground you might otherwise try to achieve on background checks, training, and licensure, doesn't it?
The other downside is that "I hold you in contempt and I don't want your kind in my country" is a bummer of a campaign message when 15+ million voters have carry licenses, and as the Attorney General of Virginia found out the hard way last year, a whole heck of a lot of them are Democrats. And the thing is, that contempt-signaling doesn't gain you *anything* in terms of violence reduction; of the 13,500 murder victims in the United States annually, approximately 0 were shot between airport parking garages and terminals by holders of carry licenses.
Here in NC, there are between 550,000 and 600,000 holders of carry licenses, or three times Clinton's margin of loss in NC. Obviously carry licensure wasn't the issue driving the train here (there are also ca. 2 million "assault weapon" and over-10-round magazine owners here, and 4-5 million gun owners total, out of 10.5 million), and the Dem governor we just elected is a strong supporter of carry licensure, but the whole "Licensed Killers" meme is still asinine and counterproductive nationally. The demographics and political trends are both running strongly in the opposite direction.
Yup. And once the precedent were established, what other civil liberties...
would it soon apply to?
Should "known or suspected terrorists" be protected from searches and seizures? Should "known or suspected terrorists" be allowed to speak to crowds, march in groups, own newspapers, run websites? Should "known or suspected terrorists" work in government? The military? In law enforcement? Drive 80,000-lb gasoline tankers through populated areas? Work in schools, sports stadiums, or day cares?
Once you set the precedent that having your name added pro forma to a secret list automatically revokes your civil rights, then all those things are fair game. Which is one reason why the ACLU has strongly resisted summary revocation of civil liberties without due process, despite heavy pressure from Third Way types.
Change...
Change in ownership demographics is not favorable to gun control advocates, who primarily seek a return to straight-stocked rifles, larger calibers/lower capacity, less carry licensure, and a hunting-centric focus. Ownership has long been trending toward more modern stock styles, smaller calibers/higher capacity, more focus on defensive use, and a downward trend in hunting due to less opportunity.
Changes in the murder stats aren't trending in favor of gun control advocates either; homicide is down 50% since its peak in the early '90s, and rifle homicide is down 43% since the expiration of the much-hated Clinton handgrip and magazine restrictions in 2004. Less homicide equals less support for throwing your peaceable neighbors in prison because they own the wrong shaped rifle/shotgun handgrip or a non-reduced-capacity magazine.
Ban advocates are not just losing the population at large, they are losing registered Democrats, for exactly the reasons listed above.
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Gender: MaleHometown: Eastern North Carolina
Home country: United States
Current location: Eastern NC
Member since: Wed Dec 1, 2004, 04:09 PM
Number of posts: 12,148
