Gun Ban vs Gun Ownership Poll (border, high school, concealed carry, Illinois)
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...THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A SEMI AUTOMATIC CARBINE ASSAULT RIFLE!!! It's a myth to convince simple minds that irrational ignorance of the Constitution makes sense!...
Actually, this is correct.
In 1961, Eugene M. Stoner designed the (semi-automatic) AR-15 because Vietnamese officers could not carry the larger M-1 Garand and BAR rifles the Americans used at the time. The Pentagon saw how well they worked and ordered a thousand for their Special Forces. Two years later (in 1963), the Pentagon adopted the AR-15 as the standard issue weapon for the US Army.
In 1966, the Pentagon ordered the AR-15 be modified to include fully automatic fire and re-designated that fully automatic weapon as the "M-16 Assault Rifle."
So the US government determined in 1966 that the definitional feature of the rifle that makes it an "assault" anything is its ability to fire in fully automatic mode. Very specifically, the AR-15 - which is what most people today refer to as the typical 'assault rifle' - was specifically not identified as such until after it had been modified to fire in full auto mode.
Source: Anne Jacobson, The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top Secret Military Research Agency (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2015) p. 124-25.
As noted earlier in this thread, there are some people who pay lots of dollars for lots of licenses and background checks so that they can own guns that fire in full auto. God bless them if they are wealthy enough to afford that expensive a hobby (I sure can't).
But the average John Doe gun owner, the ones California politicians love to deign as threats to society because the own a scary looking firearm, don't actually have assault weapons - as defined by the government itself.
Why are you answering a question with a question. It seems like a simple question to me. And obviously you know what they are since you say they are used in less than 5% of gun murders.
It may seem like a simple question to you because you don't know what you're talking about.
Your determination to not understand how they operate is remarkable, not to mention you likely don't even own one.
Do you have statistics using countries as well? I know that Singapore for instance has very tough laws and very little crime. I do not know statistics across countries and am wondering how effective tough laws work in real life. However I think that Sweden also is relatively safe and they do not have tough laws.
It's hard to find an apples to apples comparison between countries. Most are far too different for a valid comparison. The closest we probably have is Australia, a country that just about banned guns after a mass shooting in 1996. Since then, there have been a few mass shootings anyway, and gun violence is trending down.
The pro gun law types stop there, and claim Australia is a victory for gun restrictions. What they don't address are all the other types of violence that have increased, filling the void. The net result is the overall murders have remained flat.
Gun laws and bans didn't make Australia any safer. It just changed how people get murdered.
...This is always a solution that comes up. I compare it to shoving things under your bed when mom tells you to clean your room. The problem is still there, just out of the way. Which isn't a solution in my mind.
You start off by saying we should focus on the offended, but the solution does not address the offenders actions. US prisons are garbage. This isn't really up for debate any more. Despite leading the world in many areas, our criminal justice system is surprisingly archaic. The best examples of this I can provide is our recidivism rate and high prison population.
These are not good things. Recidivism speaks for itself, and some think that having more people in prison means less crime on the streets, but in order for someone to go to prison, crime has to happen on the streets, and since most crimes are non violent, they are unlikely to be in their for more than a decade, and with our high recidivism means that the crime still shows up on the streets.
The problem is that prisons don't do **** to adjust behavior. They ignore psychology and science, as we Americans love to do, apparently, which is appalling, and abandon any of our apparent Christian values for beliefs that call for 'bad' people to suffer.
Meanwhile, Norway has a max prison sentence of 20 years, a heavy focus on rehabilitation, and also one of the lowest recidivism rates in the world. This is usually dismissed with 'cultural differences,' which (1) is not an argument, and (2) means American culture is inferior and needs to change. If our culture means having a results based criminal justice system is impossible, then the culture has to change. I do not consider longer prison sentences to be a proper solution that a society that values human life can support.
Can't speak to Norway; I've never been there, never studied it and don't know anyone from there. Sorry.
With respect to the ineffectiveness of the US prison system to rehabilitate anyone, you echo widely held sentiments. More specifically, the argument is that our 'corrections' system has simply become a warehouse for offenders. In my opinion, there is some truth to that.
But this thread is about guns, and whether lawful owners should be forced to give theirs up because bad guys use them as tools to commit violence. My position is that it is the offender who is at fault, not the gun. So lawful owners should not be forced to give up their guns because merely bad guys offend with them.
If you study gun trafficking, you see the same thing over and over again - bad guys commit not one gun crime, but dozens. For each such offender you take out of society, you prevent all of the subsequent crimes that offender would have committed.
This was proven by the incarceration rates for crack cocaine versus cocaine hydrochloride from 1985 to 2010 or so, where we saw a direct and significant decrease in all forms of crime because bad guys who committed all sorts of crimes were separated from society after being caught with crack. (The reverse is also true; now that we've removed those additional sentences, crime is rising at an alarming rate.)
Whether we are proposing warehousing offenders or rehabilitating them is a topic for another thread, probably on another board. But the evidence is overwhelming - remove gun offenders from society and gun crimes rates in that society decrease. Then lawful gun owners can go on about their business.
You are focusing on the tool the offender uses, not the offender himself.
We are lucky to be living in 2016, where we can look back at the sentencing experiment from 1985 to 2010. When congress mandated tougher sentencing for crack cocaine, the US experienced an unprecedented drop in all types of crime. HUGE drop.
That experiment tells us that if you want to significantly reduce future weapons offending, mandate very tough sentences for all crimes involving guns. Straw purchasing, illegal possession, using a firearm to commit a felony - all of it. Make it 20 years minimum mandatory. Inside five years, you will see a marked reduction in gun crime. History does not lie.
Just sayin'....
" Inside five years"
In MD, I believe, they have a 5 year automatic sentence. Unfortunately, it id the FIRST thing pleas bargained away.
The problem with "enforce the laws on the book" option is every state/city has different laws.
What is legal in Nevada is exceptionally different than what is legal in California.
Right, we would have to figure out which laws work, and apply those to all 50 states. I think we would also have to repeal the laws that don't work. Give and take, that's common sense.
I'm glad you mentioned California and Nevada. The Brady Campaign rated California's gun laws as the best in the country, and Nevada laws are amongst the very worst. If strict gun laws worked, California would have the lowest gun crime rates in the country, and Nevada would have the highest. Yet if we look at the numbers, their crime rates are identical.
If you take this a step further and do the same exercise across all 50 states, the correlation between gun law strictness and safety is 0.
Not a "hatred" against Guns per se but that is a straw man's argument though.
What is the purpose of a "Military Assault Weapon" other than to kill?
How do you compare a Car that drives over 70 MPH or a TV or a Computer or a phone in which their capacity was to enhance communication or travel for Humanity?
You really can't be this silly.
Wait! You can! Will you be defending Nukes under the 2nd. Amendment as well?
"What is the purpose of a "Military Assault Weapon" other than to kill?"
It is positions like this that make it impossible to have a "rational" discussion on the issue and why when we here "common sense" the hair on the back of our necks raise up.
Think of it like this.
Both you and your wife drive and each of you have a car.
You see a beautiful fully restored 1964 GTO for sale. Should you be able to buy it?
What is the "purpose" of a GTO, other then to go VERY FAST? THAT is what they were made for and everybody knows going fast can cause accidents and kill people.
Looking at your "opinion" it could be said NO. What does anyone need an EXTRA car for? After all cars kill tens of thousands MORE people then "Military Assault Weapon"s do.
"What is the purpose of a "Military Assault Weapon" other than to kill?"
It is positions like this that make it impossible to have a "rational" discussion on the issue and why when we here "common sense" the hair on the back of our necks raise up.
Think of it like this.
Both you and your wife drive and each of you have a car.
You see a beautiful fully restored 1964 GTO for sale. Should you be able to buy it?
What is the "purpose" of a GTO, other then to go VERY FAST? THAT is what they were made for and everybody knows going fast can cause accidents and kill people.
Looking at your "opinion" it could be said NO. What does anyone need an EXTRA car for? After all cars kill tens of thousands MORE people then "Military Assault Weapon"s do.
Great points. Although I've noticed lots of people get up in a huff about "needing cars for transportation" or some such, losing the point of your analogy. I prefer comparing guns to alcohol. It shuts down these invalid "why do you need" or "guns were just designed to kill" questions.
They can't say we "need" alcohol, but those are no grounds to ban alcohol. It's a freedom granted to all of us of legal drinking age. Plus, we tried an alcohol ban already. Didn't turn out so well.
They can't say "alcohol was made to ___" either. Alcohol is made to be a neurotoxin, it is literally a brain poison.
I hope they mull that one over the next time they're discussing why Americans don't "need" military-style rifles while kicking back glass after glass of wine.
Right, we would have to figure out which laws work, and apply those to all 50 states. I think we would also have to repeal the laws that don't work. Give and take, that's common sense.
I'm glad you mentioned California and Nevada. The Brady Campaign rated California's gun laws as the best in the country, and Nevada laws are amongst the very worst. If strict gun laws worked, California would have the lowest gun crime rates in the country, and Nevada would have the highest. Yet if we look at the numbers, their crime rates are identical.
If you take this a step further and do the same exercise across all 50 states, the correlation between gun law strictness and safety is 0.
So you're saying California, New Jersey, New York, Maryland would all have adopt the same gun laws as Virginia, Louisiana, or Arizona?
So you're saying California, New Jersey, New York, Maryland would all have adopt the same gun laws as Virginia, Louisiana, or Arizona?
I'm saying we should figure out a way to find out which laws work, and use those across the board. We should also repeal the laws that don't. Whether they come from California or Arizona should be irrelevant.
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