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Anti firearms activists are quite fond of claiming they are not trying to take away anyones hunting firearms, and they LOVE that whole "sporting purpose" premise. And they operate under the assumption that hunting is the only "sporting purpose" for firearms. They also completely discount home/self defense as a purpose for owning a firearm touting how 911 will always be there. Barring instant police response, they advocate we just "give the criminals what they want" and thus we wont be harmed. Uh huh. And if what that criminal wants is violent rape and/or murder?
I just can't wrap my head around telling a woman to just give a violent rapist "what they want." What sort of a mind could even conceive of that? My lady was attacked by a violent would be rapist. She successfully defended herself but was still injured and irrepairably harmed emotionally. Had she just submitted as these rodent people advocate, she would have been killed, after enduring what amounts to horrible, sadistic torture.
I often wonder if these anti 2A groups are headed up by violent criminals. They certainly seem to desire to make the lives of the latter much easier.
"Anti firearms activists are quite fond of claiming they are not trying to take away anyones hunting firearms,"
"From Georgia to California, Democratic legislators have introduced bills to ban all semi-automatic rifles or even all semi-automatics, period. In the New York Times this month, Thomas Friedman called for “bans on the manufacture and sale of all semi-automatic and other military-style guns.” The city council of Lexington, Mass., is seeking to “ban the ownership of semi-automatic or fully automatic weapons able to hold ammunition clips containing more than ten rounds.”
That said, even a numbers guy has to recognize that theoretically at least, banning something means the goal is to rid us of that item being banned. If there were no weapons out there able to help terrorists commit acts of terrorism that kill so many so quickly, the ban of those types of weapons would serve to better prevent such acts of terrorism.
But banning modern semi-automatic sporting rifles violates the 2nd Amendment rights of millions of law abiding Americans in the name of making a terrorist select a different tool for their evil deeds. The Boston Marathon guys used pressure cookers, the UNC guy used a vehicle (the preferred weapon of European terrorism at this point), McVeigh used a rental truck and a whole lot of liquid fuel and fertilizer, and ISIS/al Qaeda still prefer the good old "vest 'o' explosives." The only thing you can ban that prevents a motivated sociopath from doing bad things is freedom itself. Nobody can move about freely, nobody can go from point A to B without being physically searched, everyone is monitored 24/7 no matter where they are, etc. You need to go full dystopian to create an effective anti-terrorist environment in a land mass and population as large and diverse as the United States, and even then, evil will find a way. Evil is chaotic, it is entropy, the breakdown of order. You cannot stop entropy, just ask the laws of thermodynamics.
So emotion drives the infringing upon the rights of hundreds of millions of people to create an illusion that you can get around the inherent entropy inside of human nature, while laughably arguing we still have any sort of a free society? And this is a solution?
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Originally Posted by LearnMe
That's not an emotional argument, but of course it is an argument very difficult to argue from a pragmatic or realistic standpoint, because such a ban can hardly succeed when so many such weapons are already out there, not to mention the other forms of terrorism always available to terrorists...
Of course it's emotional. It certainly isn't logical. Your professed goal is to save lives, damn what rights need to abridged. Well, NY_refugee87 has already listed a whole lot of other rights you could suspend/violate/remove and save orders of magnitude more lives than banning semi-automatic sporting rifles. Start with cars and alcohol, if we are banning things on the "if it saves just one life" premise. FFS, you need to ban ladders and swimming pools ahead of semi-automatic sporting rifles, because each kills way more than AR/AKs do every year.
There's no convincing logical argument for this violation of natural rights writ large, so we go with emotional rhetoric, appeal to sympathy/emotion fallacies, and strawman arguments borne of an almost total ignorance of firearms and ammunition to ban something that is so rare the FBI doesn't even track it because, in their words, it is statistically insignificant. You want to feel better that "we did SOMETHING, anything" even though it is largely meaningless where the national body count from anything outside natural causes is concerned. It will make you feel better, Q.E.D. Done.
Quote:
Originally Posted by LearnMe
My biggest struggle -- call it emotional if you like -- is that I was raised and made a career much reliant on not giving up even in the face of difficult challenges and obstacles. I've dealt with people who throw their hands up in the air in the face of such challenges all my life. They are common and commonly part of the problem, but I am also grounded in reality, so when a problem like terrorism persists and nothing really seems possible to stop it, frustration surely does begin to set in. That's better than complacency I suspect, but who knows...
Well, if your kampf is ending terrorism in the US, then instead of banning tools, you should be fighting against the real problem - human evil. Dare I say, good knight, that is the windmill at which you should tilt, because guns, fire, explosives, pressure cookers et al are just tools. Take a carpenter's saw and hammer away, they can still build things. You have to get rid of the craftsman, not the tool. Struggle on, good sir, but fighting against an inanimate object, tens of millions of which sit peacefully in tens of millions of homes as we speak, does not stop evil. Curing evil in the human heart...there's your goal. You figure out how to do that, let us all know.
FBI stats 248 deaths when a modern sporting rifle AR or AK platform has been used vs all of the other statistics in homicide, is not just cause nor reason enough to carry out further banning, restricting access to, via violating the 2nd amendment.
248 deaths.
When the numbers say 50 60 70k then we can say we have a legitimate problem.
HIV and AIDS = biological weapon.
39k+ new cases of infection reported, and no banning or legislating to counter that? If 39k new cases are reported how many go unreported due to not getting tested for whatever reason? 39k new cases is cause for mandatory testing and quarantine to prevent transmission.
Got it. So you actually would like to have AK-47s, bazookas, and what not. In plenty of countries you can, ever considered moving?
The semi-automatic AK and it's fully automatic version fire the exact same projectile, same velocity, same ballistic energy at the same ranges, same everything. With semi-automatic fire, you can unload an entire magazine (30 round) with well aimed, controlled shots in about 20-25 seconds; you could unload faster and with less precise/controlled aiming and get that down to 10-12 seconds. With automatic fire, you will aim the first shot and none afterwards, and get rid of the entire magazine in about 3 seconds. So all automatic fire really gives you is a lower hit percentage, more reloading, and higher chance of fouling the weapon and/or damaging/warping the barrel.
A bazooka is a device that extends the range of a shaped charge out to an effective range of ~120 yards, and is primarily used for piercing armor and disabling mechanized armor units like APCs, small tanks, etc. As a mass killing, anti-personnel device, it would be woefully inadequate behind all sorts of weaponry, including semi-automatic rifle fire. Given it's primary purpose, and the low range and very low rate of fire, if you were concerned about piercing armor and disabling units, you'd be much better served with a perfectly legal .50 cal rifle and the 750gr ammo. With a proper scope (for that kind of weapon) and some skill, you can disable virtually anything a bazooka could, except instead of an effective range of 120 yards, you'd be effective to about 1500 yards, depending on your marksman skills and how well you zeroed and ranged that scope. And oh by the way, bolt action .50 cal rifles are perfectly legal.
So much of gun control and anti-gun sentiment relies on total ignorance. It's funny, scary and sad.
The semi-automatic AK and it's fully automatic version fire the exact same projectile, same velocity, same ballistic energy at the same ranges, same everything. With semi-automatic fire, you can unload an entire magazine (30 round) with well aimed, controlled shots in about 20-25 seconds; you could unload faster and with less precise/controlled aiming and get that down to 10-12 seconds. With automatic fire, you will aim the first shot and none afterwards, and get rid of the entire magazine in about 3 seconds. So all automatic fire really gives you is a lower hit percentage, more reloading, and higher chance of fouling the weapon and/or damaging/warping the barrel.
A bazooka is a device that extends the range of a shaped charge out to an effective range of ~120 yards, and is primarily used for piercing armor and disabling mechanized armor units like APCs, small tanks, etc. As a mass killing, anti-personnel device, it would be woefully inadequate behind all sorts of weaponry, including semi-automatic rifle fire. Given it's primary purpose, and the low range and very low rate of fire, if you were concerned about piercing armor and disabling units, you'd be much better served with a perfectly legal .50 cal rifle and the 750gr ammo. With a proper scope (for that kind of weapon) and some skill, you can disable virtually anything a bazooka could, except instead of an effective range of 120 yards, you'd be effective to about 1500 yards, depending on your marksman skills and how well you zeroed and ranged that scope. And oh by the way, bolt action .50 cal rifles are perfectly legal.
So much of gun control and anti-gun sentiment relies on total ignorance. It's funny, scary and sad.
First, no need for lecture, thank you.
Second, fine, I should have specified I meant auto, even though it was completely obvious
Third, yes, it is sad. It is sad to hear idiotic interpretations of 2nd amendment.
You're the one who threw in the "so you actually would like to have AK-47s, bazookas, and what not" strawman, I just felt like swatting it down.
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Originally Posted by serger
Second, fine, I should have specified I meant auto, even though it was completely obvious
I knew you meant full auto, and I was explaining why tactically, using an AK for automatic fire over semi-automatic is dumb. By adding maybe 20 seconds to the life of an entire magazine, you get far superior accuracy and less chance or wrecking the weapon. For that style of rifle, semi-automatic fire is more lethal.
Same for a bazooka. Sure, it can disable light/medium simple armor out to effective ranges of 120-150 yards, but a perfectly legal bolt action .50 cal rifle can do the same thing out to 1500 yards. Why wait for the armor to get that close when you disable at a mile away?
So you throw out the "zomg, fully automatic AK" and "roflzomg bazooka" like they are singularly scary, deadly weapons, and I explained how there are other weapons that are perfectly legal that accomplish the same tasks, just better and more accurately.
Quote:
Originally Posted by serger
Third, yes, it is sad. It is sad to hear idiotic interpretations of 2nd amendment.
Anything as clear, direct and devoid of condition, exception or nuance as the 2nd Amendment doesn't really need interpretation.
the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
No qualifiers, conditions, expiration dates, "what we meant was" footnotes, nothing. THE RIGHT...SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED. Pretty clear and concise, not much grey area there. It's why after 200+ years of one politician or another attempting to take the right away, it endures.
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