October 1, 2016

You have been advocating banning people's rifles all up and down this thread,

while studiously ignoring the fact that you're talking about banning guns that even Canada and most of Europe don't ban.

If you mean you haven't advocated banning *all* rifles, true. Just like the Volstead Act didn't ban *all* alcoholic beverages. But you are asking to ban a majority of rifles, e.g. detachable-mag semiautos, even though they account for less than 250 murders a year out of 13,500+.

Plus, since detachable-magazine pump-actions and lever-actions can deliver comparable rates of aimed fire to a semiauto, your putative semiauto ban would be pretty useless if you didn't also ban detachable-mag levers and pumps, too. Here's one detachable-magazine rifle that would be completely exempt from your proposed ban:







Pump-action, 5.56x45mm or 7.62x51mm, STANAG magazines, folding stock since it has no buffer tube.

The Australian gun-control lobby got pump shotguns banned for exactly that reason (rate of fire), and started going after lever-action shotguns hard last year. Australians can still own pump rifles like the Troy PAR on an ordinary Class B certificate, though, and the prohibitionists are very unhappy about it.

September 30, 2016

That you consider rifle ownership to be comparable to human trafficking and child porn...

pretty much explains where you are coming from on the whole ban-rifles thing. And again, most developed nations don't view rifles that way.

One of the founders of the modern gun-control lobby had something to say about rifle restrictions, back when rifles killed more than twice as many people annually as they do now:

&quot O)ur organization, Handgun Control, Inc. does not propose further controls on rifles and shotguns. Rifles and shotguns are not the problem; they are not concealable."

--Nelson T. "Pete" Shields, head of what is now the Brady Campaign 1978-1989 (Guns Don't Die--People Do, Priam Press, 1981, pp. 47-48).

I think a more relevant comparison is probably alcohol, even though alcohol kills 250 times as many people annually as rifles do. The initial attempt at prohibition, the resulting civil disobedience and political backlash, and the shift away from prohibition toward a "responsible use with enforcement to deter misuse" model is instructive for those who do actually care about reducing harm from violence.

September 30, 2016

Most Western nations DON'T ban detachable-magazine semiautos...

It happened in Australia and in most of the rest of developed nations.

Most Western nations" don't ban detachable-magazine semiautos, a fact that you appear to have overlooked. Semiauto rifles with detachable magazines are popular among sport shooters in Canada, most European nations, New Zealand, etc. etc., as well as in the strictest gun-control jurisdictions in the USA (NYC, MA, CA, NJ). The UK and Australia are extreme outliers, and even the UK allows semiauto shotguns of unlimited capacity, including detachable-magazine Kalashnikovs.

http://www.guncity.com/firearms/all-firearms/centrefire/semi-auto/223-rem (New Zealand)

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1172&pid=189580 (Germany, Denmark, Sweden, France, Norway, Hungary, etc...)

http://www.rusmilitary.com/html/firearms_saiga12.htm (United Kingdom)

http://calibremag.ca/colt-canada-worth-the-wait/ (Canada)

Canadians can even own a couple detachable-magazine semiautos that Americans cannot, such as the Norinco T97, and the civilian Tavor was in Canadian homes long before Tavors were imported into the United States. The amount of background checking and red tape to own guns varies from country to country, but few Western nations ban the rifles you are trying to outlaw.

We won't win tomorrow and maybe not in my lifetime--I only have 20 or so years left--but we will win.

I am a Gen-X'er (40's now!); most "assault weapon" enthusiasts are a lot younger than you are. The Baby Boomers preferred bolt-actions and the occasional wooden-stocked M1A, but my generation and younger are the primary aficionados of more modern, smaller-caliber designs, and AR ownership definitely skews younger than bolt gun or M1A/Mini-14 ownership. And guess what kinds of target guns millenials most gravitate to. Even Bloomberg himself hasn't gone out on the limb you are standing on; he made no moves to try to ban detachable-magazine semiautos while mayor of NYC, nor has he since. Rifle bans were a gamble by Josh Sugarmann and the VPC to try to build momentum for new handgun restrictions, and that gamble backfired spectacularly and is still doing so.

As far as ownership numbers, states that actually license ownership and hence actually count lawful owners (IL, MA) show that gun ownership in those states has substantially *increased*. Most polls also show an upswing in the number of gun owners nationwide, making U Chicago's non-anonymous General Social Survey quite the outlier. NFA licensure and carry licensure are also up sharply since the 1990s and early 2000s, even as gun crime has fallen by half.

The rifle-ban efforts in this country in this country are primarily driven by a few wealthy Baby Boomers, and has dramatically less popular support now than even 20 years ago, thanks in large part to *precisely* the same damn-the-facts irrationality we are currently discussing. The gun confiscation movement in 2016 is sustained primarily by the gigabucks of a certain authoritarian Wall Street kingpin and old-money corporate media, not the grassroots.

I do not hold all cc holders in disregard, just the 95% (my estimate based on personal observation) that are just paranoid, agoraphobic, racist and too foolish to know what they are doing.

And yet carry license holders are dramatically *less* likely to commit violent crimes than the unlicensed, and dramatically less likely to wrongfully shoot someone than police officers are (even though we outnumber police officers by something like 20 to 1). I think your characterization of us as "95% paranoid, agoraphobic, racist and too foolish to know what we are doing" pretty much validates my point, does it not?

We agree to disagree.

That's *precisely* what I'm advocating---the right to disagree with you, and live peaceably and responsibly by my own choices regarding gun ownership. I respect your choices and your beliefs; I simply ask to be free to live by my own rather than yours.

September 29, 2016

Thank you. We agree on something. That's a start.

it makes no sense to ban assault weapons by definition

Thank you. We agree on something. That's a start.

let's ban the function that makes them so lethal.

They're not "so lethal". Rifles account for fewer deaths than any other type of weapon in the United States, even though detachable-magazine semiautos are the most common rifles in U.S. homes, and by far the most common rifles used in the shooting sports.

No semi auto weapons with interchangeable magazines, period.

Haha, now you sound like the Catholics who demand a ban on all hormonal contraceptives. Run the numbers. That'd be one of the fastest ways I can think of for your movement to slide completely into irrelevance.

Not many members of your personal echo chamber may own semiautos, but that doesn't mean semiautos as a group aren't the most popular rifles on the market. I don't have the numbers handy, but I'd expect that two thirds or more of the civilian rifle market is semiauto---not just all the modern-looking centerfires and .22's, but the old-fashioned ones like the Mini-14, the 10/22, and all those Remingtons and Savages and Marlins. Not. Going. To. Happen.

Mini-14's aren't even banned in California, Massachusetts, or New York City, for Pete's sake. Mini-14's, AR-15's, 10/22's, and all manner of other detachable-mag semiautos are legal in Canada and most of Europe, and you think you're going to outlaw them in the United States?

Stop pussy footin round with hand grips and bayonet lugs. Just ban the things that make them more lethal than wheel guns

They're not "more lethal than wheel guns (sic)"; revolvers kill ten times more Americans annually than all rifles combined, not just those with detachable magazines. All told, semiauto rifles of any type account for maybe a third as many annual deaths as bicycles do (722 people died riding bicycles in the most recent year I have stats for). Once again, you're forgetting that all rifles combined account for less than 350 deaths/yr out of 13,500 or so, and semiautos are only a subset of that.

By discarding the silly handgrip-aesthetic rules (which even you admit are ludicrous) and going after all detachable-mag semiautos, all you've done is expand the number of people you want to threaten with prison for rifle ownership, from the ~25-30 million who own modern-looking rifles to the, what, 50-60+ million who own any detachable-magazine semiauto rifle?

But that doesn't matter, because you hate rifles and the people who own them, so you don't give a fuck about inconvenient facts like the FBI data on weapon misuse.

As to handguns, how many of your fellow citizens own handguns now---70, 80 million? You're not going to ban them, period. So you might think about focusing on getting them out of the hands of the few thousand urban criminals that commit 80% of U.S. murders (ever heard of Project Ceasefire?), rather than trying to take them away from the lawful and nonviolent. But of course, your posts make clear that you despise vetted carry license holders far more than you despise the felons who actually commit most homicides.

September 28, 2016

The prohibitionists have certainly tried.

But given that people with violent felony records commit 10-20 times more gun murders (almost exclusively with handguns) than people with clean records do, and there is widespread consensus that violent criminals shouldn't be allowed to commit mayhem with guns, maybe we should focus the interdiction efforts on the already-identified bad actors rather than trying to take away the rights of background-checked, squeaky-clean noncriminals, homeowners, sport shooters, etc., no?

I think the organized gun control lobby really doesn't give a crap about gun misuse, since it is primarily fighting to demonize and criminalize the people with clean records, jobs, training, often prior military/LE experience, government licensure, even security checks/clearances, etc., while giving violent criminals a free pass. How often do you guys demonize concealed-carry licensees or AR-15 owners/shooters, vs. violent felons?

The thing is, legislating rifle stock shape, or making it a felony as serious as rape for 60+ million people to possess the circa-half-billion magazines currently in their gun safes, or curtailing where vetted concealed-carry licensees can carry, isn't going to do a damn thing about the few tens of thousands of felons who actually commit the overwhelming majority of murders and gun-involved assaults in this country. But that isn't really the point, is it?

September 27, 2016

The FBI just released the murder stats for 2015.

I posted these stats in GD since the report came out today, but I think it'd be a good topic for more extensive discussion here.

The link (FBI): Murder, by State, Types of Weapons, 2015

[font face="courier new"]Total murders...................... 13,455
Handguns............................ 6,447 (47.9%)
Firearms (type unknown)............. 2,648 (19.7%)
Clubs, rope, fire, etc.............. 1,671 (12.4%)
Knives and other cutting weapons.... 1,544 (11.5%)
Hands, fists, feet.................... 624 (4.6%)
Shotguns.............................. 269 (2.0%)
Rifles................................ 252 (1.9%) [/font]

Total murders were up in a few large cities, with Chicago accounting for a good portion of the increase, per news reports. The rate in most of the nation was more or less unchanged. That link breaks it down by state and type of weapon, but you can download it in Excel and sum the columns. The above stats include the U.S. Virgin Islands and Guam.

Looking only at murders committed using firearms, handguns accounted for 92.52%, shotguns 3.86%, and rifles (including "assault weapons&quot 3.62%. If you extrapolate "Firearm - Type Unknown" by those percentages and re-run the totals, the stats would be as follows:

[font face="courier new"]Total murders...................... 13,455
Handguns............................ 8,897 (66.1%)
Clubs, rope, fire, etc.............. 1,671 (12.4%)
Knives and other cutting weapons.... 1,544 (11.5%)
Hands, fists, feet.................... 624 (4.6%)
Shotguns.............................. 371 (2.8%)
Rifles................................ 348 (2.6%) [/font]

I didn't mention this in the GD post, but I think this shows the falsehood of the ZOMG RIFLEZ ARE WMDS!!!!! scaremongering (homicide was up, but rifle murder is still at historic lows), and also points out the utter futility of trying to address homicide by legislating the shape of rifle handgrips (which doesn't affect lethality in the slightest). All but 8 states had either 0 rifle murders or were in the single digits.

September 27, 2016

The FBI just released the murder stats for 2015.

Murder, by State, Types of Weapons, 2015 (FBI)

[font face="courier new"]Total murders...................... 13,455
Handguns............................ 6,447 (47.9%)
Firearms (type unknown)............. 2,648 (19.7%)
Clubs, rope, fire, etc.............. 1,671 (12.4%)
Knives and other cutting weapons.... 1,544 (11.5%)
Hands, fists, feet.................... 624 (4.6%)
Shotguns.............................. 269 (2.0%)
Rifles................................ 252 (1.9%) [/font]

Total murders were up in a few large cities, with Chicago accounting for a good portion of the increase, per news reports. The rate in most of the nation was more or less unchanged. That link breaks it down by state and type of weapon, but you can download it in Excel and sum the columns. The above stats include the U.S. Virgin Islands and Guam.

Looking only at murders committed using firearms, handguns accounted for 92.52%, shotguns 3.86%, and rifles (including "assault weapons&quot 3.62%. If you extrapolate "Firearm - Type Unknown" by those percentages and re-run the totals, the stats would be as follows:

[font face="courier new"]Total murders...................... 13,455
Handguns............................ 8,897 (66.1%)
Clubs, rope, fire, etc.............. 1,671 (12.4%)
Knives and other cutting weapons.... 1,544 (11.5%)
Hands, fists, feet.................... 624 (4.6%)
Shotguns.............................. 371 (2.8%)
Rifles................................ 348 (2.6%) [/font]

September 27, 2016

Some data on which bullets hit the most people was just released today...

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2015/crime-in-the-u.s.-2015/tables/table-20

Rifle rounds were once again responsible for the fewest deaths in 2015: 252 by rifle (including "assault weapons&quot , 269 by shotgun, 6447 by handgun.

September 22, 2016

It's not a question of pacifism vs. fear,

but of pacifism vs. having the option of self-defense. I do not buckle my seat belt or have a fire extinguisher in my kitchen because I am scared of car accidents or terrified of fire, but rather because I see those steps as reasonable and prudent countermeasures against the unlikely but possible occurrence of same.

I assume you have taken other methods of securing your home (e.g. locks, lighting, sensors, etc. since you do describe it as secure), and I would certainly assume that you did not take those measures because you are scared, but because you view them as reasonable and prudent measures.

September 18, 2016

Chicago has long had one of the lowest rates of legal gun ownership in the United States.

What it does have is about 1,400 criminals (according to the Chicago PD) in a few neighborhoods who have no regard for human life, even the lives of children, and who callously kill over a word or a glance, and a police department that is overworked and stretched thin by decades of incompetent management and politicization, IMO.