I don't know what the history here is, and don't really have the time to do much of a search, but I'm not sure whether you're interpreting that sentence the way it was meant. What he is suggesting is "Common Gun A looks like an assault weapon, Common Gun B does not look like it's an assault weapon, but they're functionally the same" was an intentional byproduct of an industry strategy, akin to saying "I can't sell hamburgers? Fine. I'll sell a beef patty, with a bun as a side item." He is suggesting that once they were no longer allowed to manufacture assault weapons that looked like assault weapons, the industry essentially make tricky use of the bill's language to make assault weapons that did not look like assault weapons. I have a hunch this is historically incorrect and that this cosmetic differentiation predates the ban, but does anyone have any citations either way?
...which means they're going after looks. Otherwise they'd be trying to specifically ban all military caliber semi-autos like .223, .30-06, .308, 9mm, and so on. Which would be even more retarded.
No, it doesn't. The implication is that the legislators unintentionally left a "cosmetics" loophole in the bill that the manufacturers exploited. I'm not sanctioning the argument (like I said, I suspect he's wrong as a matter of historical record), but I think it's important to understand the actual argument being made. He is suggesting that, prior to the assault weapon ban being passed, these instances of the same functional gun coming in both "assault weapon form" and "non-assault weapon form" did not, for the most part, exist. They came in the former, and the latter was mostly invented or implemented at a later point in time as an attempt to evade the spirit of the law. If I told you couldn't sell hamburgers, and you responded by merely selling all the components but not technically selling hamburgers, could use accuse me of "merely legislating beef patty cosmetics"? No, the proper diagnosis would be that my order wasn't carefully crafted enough, and you got the better of me. A proper response would be for me to go back and rewrite my hamburger edict.
It's been a while, but if I remember correctly I believe they gave me a gun flyer regarding safety similar to what you get when you get a flu shot. They also would not let me answer the question, they made sure the kids did. I switched doctors when we moved and they don't ask, so I just assumed it was on an office-by-office basis.
Not really an unintentional loophole from what i understand, the whole 1994 ban was based ON cosmetic features wasn't it? Which is why so many people on this board and gun owners in general thought it was a stupid and ineffective law. If those are the defining features of an 'Assault Weapon' and they are all cosmetic features, of course manufacturers were just going to remove said features and continue on business as usual... and if the legislators couldnt see that when they drafted it, they are/were fucking retarded.
Agreed. It seems like this story requires Congress having very dim foresight (admittedly, not a novel assumption). I suspect that this might actually be the industry's fault. It would not surprise if they heavily supported/influenced this definition and convinced/hoodwinked a few key legislators that they would totally do the job. "Sure, Mr. Senator, if you took out these features, we would totally be hampered from selling assault weapons! But it wouldn't affect grandpappy's hunting rifle!" But it sounds like what he means by strengthen is not merely add more features but attempt to eliminate the cosmetic divide.
That's because 'assault weapon' is just a media buzzword with no useful correlation to a class of firearm. Worst case scenario is that we end up with bill containing a "I'll know it when I see it" definition similar to the definitions for things like obscenity. I enjoyed the fact that Obama used the children who sent him letters in his announcement. It's a great metaphor for the whole thing, scared children demanding that the government just do something.
Yes, the 1994 AWB was indeed that fucking stupid of a law. There was no "cosmetics loophole" for manufacturers, just pointless critieria for defining an "assault rifle." There's examples of semi-automatic rifles that had virtually the same function and capability of those "assault rifles" and were manfactured before the ban (example Marlin Camp Carbine) and during (Cold Match Target, Springfield M1A) yet remained legal. There's more examples out there too. Remember, Dianne Feinstein said she personally looked at photos of guns in 1993. That is some serious research.
We've covered this before. "Armor-piercing" bullets are defined as those handgun rounds designed to penetrate body armor, i.e. "bulletproof vests." With perhaps a few exceptions, all center-fire rifle rounds will penetrate body armor. Armor piercing handgun rounds are banned in the U.S., have been for a while, and the law was written with the backing of the NRA. Unless someone can link to a story of an officer getting shot with a hangun round that penetrated his body armor, can we drop this discussion? It is a non-issue. Here are some interesting links though: http://www.theboxotruth.com/docs/bot24.htm http://www.theboxotruth.com/docs/bot29.htm http://www.theboxotruth.com/docs/bot16.htm It's not that they left an unintentional cosmetics loophole in the bill, that was the entire basis of the ban. The different versions actually did exist before the ban. It was possible to buy rifles with or without each of the banned features, i.e., with a pistol grip but without a bayonet lug, with a flash hider but without a pistol grip, etc. Congress just picked a few of the scary looking features and dictated that if a weapon had two or more of them, they should be prohibited. The idea that they included things like a bayonet lug and a grenade launcher in the list shows the incredible lack of understanding Congress had of weapons. The correct analogy would be Congress banning unhealthy hamburgers, and defining "unhealthy" as containing two or more of either cheese, bacon, pickles, or whipped cream. Pickles don't make the hamburger less healthy, just like the bayonnet lug doesn't make the rifle more lethal. Approximately the same number of people put whipped cream on their hamburgers as buy grenade launchers for their AR-15's. You are correct though that nothing would stop someone from buying those parts separately and adding them later. Not how it happened. I was a member of the NRA in 1994 when the assault weapons ban was passed and I remember the discussion well. The NRA and the manufacturers fought wholeheartedly against the entire ban because they thought it was silly and ineffective. There was no compromise that they thougt they could work around. It was purely the ineptitude of Congress and the overall uselessness of the law that brought about that situation. This is exactly the type of law we get when Congress looks through a book of guns and picks out the ones that "look dangerous." Seriously, that's how they came up with the list of named weapons that would be banned.
I have armor-piercing bullets for my 50 caliber machine gun. (Not really. I just put that on a sign on my front lawn. Y'know, as a deterrent.)
Speaking of which... remember how the New York Journal published all the names of registered hangun owners in a few counties? link: <a class="postlink" href="http://www.lohud.com/article/20121224/NEWS04/312240045/The-gun-owner-next-door-What-you-don-t-know-about-weapons-your-neighborhood?nclick_check=1" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.lohud.com/article/20121224/N ... ck_check=1</a> This is priceless:
Saw this last night as well and of course, these anti-gun people are all full of shit. They hate guns but don't want to remove the ambiguity. Shocking.
Isn't publishing a list of gun owners the same thing as publishing a list of all the people who don't own guns? It is only handguns so people could have other firearms in their house, but still. I think its bullshit that they would do that, but it was pretty short-sighted on their part because they effectively pointing out to anyone who wants to know who doesn't own a handgun in those areas.
Who says government regulation stifles innovation? [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=9CVvMZKTCW8#![/youtube]
Wall of text here. Suck it up or maybe go read some other threads. I see no reason why accidental shootings in schools would significantly increase as a result of getting rid of gun free zones. I have a hunch that there are sufficient cases of some idiot bring a gun to show and tell, or, as was the case at my high school, a guy readying his pistol during a lockdown and accidentally shooting himself in the hand (see spoiler), that an increase in guns carried by responsible adults would not really contribute anything to the problem. Spoiler He was special ed, the school was locked down due to a separate issue where some gang-1-related girl was detained at a nearby transit station with a gun and a picture of a gang-2-related student. BTW, my school had a retired special operations guy as well as a retired Air Force officer on staff. Neither of them had guns, since they liked keeping their jobs and following the rules. Student in a special ed class managed to have a gun, but those two qualified individuals didn't. This happened in California, which as American gun laws go is either the strictest or in the top 5. Can you see perhaps why I think that "Gun Free Zones" and other such bullshit feel-good legislation is pointless? Focusing solely on mass shootings is what any proposed "Assault Weapons Ban" is based around, since they are so rarely used in any other kind of crime (rarely used in mass shootings too, but Aurora and Sandy Hook have skewed that number higher recently). As an example of a weapons law having no real positive effect on the safety of the public but potentially hindering its use in self-defense, my girlfriend's recently been on her toes due to some attempted break-ins around her. Her family has lent her a shotgun. She's a few hairs over 5 feet. This shotgun barrel length seems to be somewhere in the 28-36 inch range (it seems to be configured as a fowling piece). With stock and action, that brings the gun up almost to her height. This is not a gun well-suited to defending her in a house. She would be far better served by that shotgun if its barrel could be maybe half that length. That's not legal in the USA without special stamps and paying the appropriate fees , and not legal in California unless you're in the movie business. When she called 911 after hearing someone try to break in, cops took about 10 minutes to get there. 10 minutes is enough time for a lot of things to go wrong. 10 minutes is a lot of time to defend yourself, especially when you have only three rounds on tap in a heavy, long-barreled pump-action shotgun. Historically, the USA tended to have a murder rate about 10 times that of the UK. For the US to currently be sitting at 4 times the murder rate of the UK, that's pretty fucking significant, in that either the USA has become nicer (probably the case) or the UK has become much, much more dangerous (despite the gun laws protecting them from gun-wielding criminals). Also, to clarify in regards to some of the "Oh, you Americans and your skewed 'freedom' for guns, but not homos" talk: I'm liberal, pro-choice, pro-equality, pro-gun. American gun laws are often rooted in race panic and ensuring white dominance. Special taxes, stamps, and exorbitant filing fees serve to effectively disarm or imprison the poor, while those who have the money or legal sense to establish a corporation can sidestep some of the legal requirements for owning some of the more abnormal weapons*. *I'd be for some training and permitting (and maybe storage) requirements, I just feel that mandatory requirements to exercise constitutional rights should be paid for by the state/the cost should be defrayed across all Americans, not just those currently exercising their rights (this is applicable to all Constitutional rights). MoreCowbell, you asked for a cited example of cosmetic differences in guns that are functionally the same, specifically one that predates the AWB. I present to you the Saiga line of rifles and shotguns. They are derived from the Kalashnikov rifles, and were first created to control the Kazakh saiga (antelope) population in the 1970s. The US passed their Assault Weapons Ban in 1994. A Saiga would be permissible, a Kalashnikov rifle would not be. The difference between a Saiga and an AK is that the Saiga can be chambered in the traditional AK rounds, 7.62 NATO, or several different kinds of shotgun rounds, the Saiga does not have a pistol grip, and the Saiga cannot have a bayonet affixed to it. The internal mechanics are exactly the same, except that Saigas are semi-automatic (just like almost all AKs or AK derivatives in the USA). Anyway, semi-automatic (and/or automatic) rifles capable of accepting more than 10 rounds in a magazine have been around since World War I in different forms. They varied greatly in cosmetic features. Compare a BAR (did not have features banned in the AWB) to a Reising Gun (had several, including pistol grips and a folding stock). Which one killed more Nazis and Japanese? Cosmetic features do not determine the lethality of the rifle.
Sandy Hook Truthers (and 9/11 Truthers) deserve a special place in Hell. Nothing has made me have more interest in owning a gun than listening to these fucking people speak. Maybe an assault weapon with a shit ton of ammunition. And I don't want to have to wait for it or go through a whole bunch of bullshit paper work either. And I want to be able to bring it with me wherever I go because I never know where I'm going to run into one of them and I want to be prepared. Wait a second. It's all coming together. The Sandy Hook Truther movement...is all just a ploy to get more people to be more passionate about gun rights.... WAKE THE FUCK UP SHEEPLE.
I've stayed out of this argument from the start, but here I go: Today I was thinking about all of these people who want to ban high capacity "assault" rifles because of the massacre in Connecticut. In reality, the gunman could probably have done the same amount of damage with an old-school Colt .45 six-shooter, or even a double-barreled shotgun; guns which are not under attack from legislators/politicians/busybodies. The guy did this to unarmed children, who most likely would never fight back. Hell, he could have gone into that school with a bow and arrow or a samurai sword and gotten the same body count (Ever seen "Kill Bill"? I know it's just a movie, but think about it.). The point I'm trying to make is don't jump onto the "assault weapons ban" bandwagon.
Re: Re: Friday Sober Thread: Tragedy in Connecticut Common sense and reason have no place in this discussion sir.