Rooty-tooty point and shootys

[Büge]

[Friday]

okay

[KingRoyal]

What's gonna stop someone from just pointing the gun at the nurse and demanding they remove the vaccine???

[Büge]

[Friday]

Sigh. What the fuck is an assault weapon?

Do you mean an Assault Rifle? ARs? Okay, you do.

I wish lefties would learn actual gun terminology so they didn't look like fucking idiots to the people who own guns, further cementing in their minds that they are fucking idiots who don't know anything about guns.

I can't read that article because it's behind a paywall. AR-15s have been legal in Cali forever. So what are they unbanning? Full-auto ARs? Anyone who knows, feel free to chip in.

[Friday]

Also, don't worry. As soon as a black man picks up a fully auto AR and says "hello, I am holding a fully auto AR entirely legally" they will instantly be banned again.

[Mongrel]

Sigh. What the fuck is an assault weapon?

Do you mean an Assault Rifle? ARs? Okay, you do.

I wish lefties would learn actual gun terminology so they didn't look like fucking idiots to the people who own guns, further cementing in their minds that they are fucking idiots who don't know anything about guns.

I can't read that article because it's behind a paywall. AR-15s have been legal in Cali forever. So what are they unbanning? Full-auto ARs? Anyone who knows, feel free to chip in.

For me anyway, NYT's paywall can be defeated by just hitting stop on the reload/stop button as soon as the text appears.

The article blabbed about the AR-15 like it was some kind of bogeyman (so, implying it'll be for sale and isn't now without explicitly lying and saying just that), but it really didn't get into any other specifics about actual firearms, aside from this quote from a gun nut group rep:

Alan M. Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation, another group that was involved in the lawsuit, said in a statement that the judge’s ruling had “shredded California gun control laws regarding modern semiautomatic rifles.”

Which could just be a moronic statement by an idiot who's being useful to NYT clickbait right now.

As you say, semi-automatic rifles produced on the Assault Rifle pattern are pretty much legal everywhere in the US (and can made to be fully-automatic pretty trivially... and mass shooters don't exactly give two shits if that's illegal or no).

So I would have to guess that either the judge is actually correct in that a nonsense law is being struck down (which seems odd given the State AG seems to think this is real bad?) or yes, it means fully automatic weapons (which is also odd because wouldn't the article mention that specifically?).

Also, don't worry. As soon as a black man picks up a fully auto AR and says "hello, I am holding a fully auto AR entirely legally" they will instantly be banned again.

Zombie Reagan will be hitting the stumps for another go as Governor just as soon as the GOP digs him up again! Hey, if Jerry Brown can do it...

[Grath]

Sigh. What the fuck is an assault weapon?

Do you mean an Assault Rifle? ARs? Okay, you do.

I wish lefties would learn actual gun terminology so they didn't look like fucking idiots to the people who own guns, further cementing in their minds that they are fucking idiots who don't know anything about guns.

I can't read that article because it's behind a paywall. AR-15s have been legal in Cali forever. So what are they unbanning? Full-auto ARs? Anyone who knows, feel free to chip in.

For me anyway, NYT's paywall can be defeated by just hitting stop on the reload/stop button as soon as the text appears.

The article blabbed about the AR-15 like it was some kind of bogeyman (so, implying it'll be for sale and isn't now without explicitly lying and saying just that), but it really didn't get into any other specifics about actual firearms, aside from this quote from a gun nut group rep:

Alan M. Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation, another group that was involved in the lawsuit, said in a statement that the judge’s ruling had “shredded California gun control laws regarding modern semiautomatic rifles.”

Which could just be a moronic statement by an idiot who's being useful to NYT clickbait right now.

As you say, semi-automatic rifles produced on the Assault Rifle pattern are pretty much legal everywhere in the US (and can made to be fully-automatic pretty trivially... and mass shooters don't exactly give two shits if that's illegal or no).

So I would have to guess that either the judge is actually correct in that a nonsense law is being struck down (which seems odd given the State AG seems to think this is real bad?) or yes, it means fully automatic weapons (which is also odd because wouldn't the article mention that specifically?).

Also, don't worry. As soon as a black man picks up a fully auto AR and says "hello, I am holding a fully auto AR entirely legally" they will instantly be banned again.

Zombie Reagan will be hitting the stumps for another go as Governor just as soon as the GOP digs him up again! Hey, if Jerry Brown can do it...

This is a California-legal non-"Assault Weapon" AR-15. It's legal because you can't adjust the length of the stock without tools and padding (so if you're tall and have a short friend, or vice versa, it's gonna be uncomfortable for your friend to use without a lengthy process), there's a dumb fin on the grip that changes none of the lethality, and California's less strict than New York so you can still have a muzzle brake that reduces the recoil. Assault weapon bans are meaningless because the wealthy WASP assholes find a workaround by the time the law's actually been passed, and it's all security theater.

Full auto is federally banned from new sale since the Gun Control Act of 1986, some states have been experimenting with "if someone legally manufactures the thing that's federally banned in our state, we're legalizing it, and the feds can't say shit because it's not in interstate commerce" but I don't believe even the craziest states have been doing that with machine guns.

[Mongrel]

This is a California-legal non-"Assault Weapon" AR-15.

Man, it's an incredibly trivial thing, but are American manufacturers even capable of making guns that aren't totally butt-ugly?

Though that's actually less awful than the common M16-clone version of the AR-15. Whoever designed the M16 should be clubbed to death with one if he's still alive.

[Brantly B.]

It looks like a gun. What do you want your weapon to look like, a hash pipe?

[JD]

The problem with these "assault weapon" bans is that it's not like there's a specific class of "assault weapon" firearms that's used for mass shooting, and another that's only used for self-defence.

Several years ago, in another part of the Internet, a former regular returned after three years - not entirely unusual, but we learned that he'd been in prison. The short of it is that he was moving house and driving cross-country with his legally purchased, legally owned firearms, which were also legal at his destination. Unfortunately, the firearms' magazines were three bullets over the maximum capacity of one of the states he drove through. Threatened with twenty years in federal jail, he plea bargained down to three years in county jail.

Per-state bans on magazines above a certain capacity are touted as a solution for mass shootings, but it seems like whenever you hear about it in the news, shooter gets around it by bringing two or three guns and ten magazines of ammunition. The theory is that some hero will tackle him while he's reloading, but that's a lot to expect.

There's also this specific fear of the AR-15 and AR-15 derivatives. Canada has banned it, for example, but you can still buy similar firearms in Canada with the same properties and capability. It seems to me that if the purpose of the second amendment is to allow for the private ownership of firearms as part of a "well-regulated militia", it would be beneficial for the citizens to be trained with the same class of weapons, using the same ammunition for supply line reasons, having good reliability, widespread availablity of replacement parts and so on. Banning one specific firearm because people are afraid of it will just make criminals of many otherwise law-abiding citizens, while failing to really address the causes of mass shooting.

The argument might be made that if the general populace had better firearms training and confidence, it would increase the likelihood that a mass shooter would be taken out quickly by an armed member of the public, rather than waiting for police to arrive. Self-defence is, supposedly, the rationale for allowing private citizens to carry firearms, after all. Then again, I've heard of situations where the police show up to a reported shooting, only to find a bunch of citizens walking around with guns out, and it becomes a problem to work out which of those was the shooter.

[nosimpleway]

It happens all the time* that you get a gun nut in the process of molting because he was at one of those mass shooting events, and he couldn't tell who was shooting, or what to do about it, even though he could have shot back. He was just as panicked and scared for his life as anyone else. Having his gun didn't actually help.

It further happens all the time that when he relates these feelings to his gun nut buddies who weren't there, they call him a pussy and start ranting about how they would have known what to do and would have been the hero who prevented so-many deaths, blah blah blah.

So it's not even that the police get confused over who's the shooter and who's not. It's that the "good guy with the gun" can't tell who's the shooter and who's not.

* - ha ha "all the time" because this is the USA and we're having mass shooting events "all the time" ha ha ha it's a funny turn of phrase huh

[Friday]

All actual discussion of effective gun control begins and ends with handguns.







The continuing fixation by the media and politicians on mass shootings and ARs is absolutely understandable, as they are very scary and very high profile.

I do not advocate not talking about ARs and Mass Shootings.

However, if I snapped my fingers and all ARs and all Mass Shootings ended forever in the United States, it would hardly put a dent into firearm homicides, and it wouldn't effect firearm suicides at all.

[Grath]

lPer-state bans on magazines above a certain capacity are touted as a solution for mass shootings, but it seems like whenever you hear about it in the news, shooter gets around it by bringing two or three guns and ten magazines of ammunition. The theory is that some hero will tackle him while he's reloading, but that's a lot to expect.

Columbine. One shooter had an Assault Weapon named explicitly as banned in the federal Assault Weapon Ban (1994-2004), with high capacity magazines. The other had a newer gun designed to work around the Assault Weapon Ban by not having Scary Mostly Aesthetic Choices and a bunch of legal-under-AWB 10 round magazines. The guy with the Not An Assault Weapon and smaller magazines fired more rounds than the guy with drum mags and scary aesthetics.

[Mongrel]

I feel like, at this point, the US has effectively lost the fight for truly meaningful gun control (apart from the continued ban on actual machine guns, which is probably not all that much in the grand scheme of things, but isn't nothing either). Guns are ubiquitous, easy to obtain, strongly protected by law, and heavily fetishized.

Theoretically, what should be done in this case is to take the L and move on to addressing the root causes of the high level of violence in US society (currently expressed most commonly as gun violence) - alienation, despair, fear, misinformation. The problem of course is that these are nebulous things which are even more difficult to tackle and requires all sorts of filthy communist stuff like health care and social assistance, as well as a government (and relevant authorities as a whole class, including experts like doctors, engineers, scientists) which was actually more or less trustworthy.

But I don't have to tell you the US already experiencing a bit of a crisis with those... so fuck me, I wouldn't even know where to begin. If you can't even get an effective gun ban going, how are you supposed to address those?

[Mongrel]

Man, those wiki charts are over ten years old. Damn. I expect they haven't changed much, but you'd think they could at least get some more current data?

I assume the US rates would show as slowly getting worse up to 2019. After that, well, we're working on getting back to "normal" no doubt.

[nosimpleway]

Meaningful gun control, my dude it was almost a decade ago that someone walked into an elementary school and shot nearly two dozen six-year-olds. We've done fuck all about it. We as a nation decided we're just cool with that kind of thing happening once in a while.

[Friday]

yeah it was even white kids and nobody cared

you know it's baked into our cultural zeitgeist when it kills the white kids and nothing happens

[Mongrel]

Well yeah, that's what I am saying. The guns aren't going away. At this point normalization and stricter enforcement of responsible ownership would possibly be more effective (I wouldn't go so far as to say "better").

Then again, from a legal point of view, that path probably means going back to trying to get in legislation to force meatier background checks and establishing genuine sales tracing, and those have been fought just as hard as outright gun control, plus that requires all or most states to cooperate with that agenda otherwise it just falls apart (as is already the case where people just go to gun shows in permissive states and buy or trade whatever the fuck they like with pretty much no restrictions - or records).

Anyway, easy access to guns isn't the whole story of a society so full of enraged and detached (or, unhinged, if you prefer) mass murderers that they're just accepted as commonplace. Because they are.

At least the Russians and Finns and Eastern Bloc folk just want to drink themselves to death in abject despair (those suicide rates are grossly underreported for those countries, incidentally, as many deaths from chronic alcoholism are recorded by the immediate cause of death) rather than find a way to take as many people with them as possible.

A cheery subject, I know.

[mharr]

Maybe humans will always believe in their gut that every murder directly boosts your status in the afterlife.