First Gun Confiscation Killing...

[oxmixmudd]

Yes the hunting rifle does have the same capability as the AR-15. I don't know where you are getting that I am backing off. I was comparing the AR-15 to the M-16 not the rifle. You could make the rifle fully automatic in exactly the same way, Jim. Just because you can illegally modify a semo-automatic into a fully automatic doesn't mean it is legal to do so. Nor does it give you an excuse to ban them.


as it is with any semi-automatic.



The whole purpose of the 2nd amendment is for military use of firearms by citizens. It wasn't written for sport shooting or hunting. It was specifically written for militia use by civilians. So banning military style weapons is exactly what the 2nd was written to protect. This whole idea of allowing hunting guns but not military style guns is completely wrong.

And again, the MISUSE of these guns is by a VERY small segment of the population. They just happen to get a lot of news coverage. Googling, I see there are roughly 5 to 10 million AR15s owned in the USA. How many have been used in mass shootings over the last decade? maybe 10? so 1 in a million owners of AR15s have used them to commit mass shootings. Why is that a reason to ban them? IF one in a million owners of vans decided to run down a crowd of people is that a reason to ban all vans? And that has happened several times now in europe and the USA.

Sparko - the potential power of the guns in the wrong hands is part of the problem. And the resistance to taking action to try to reduce the probability of such powerful weapons being in the wrong hands is part of the problem.

When the 2nd amendment was written, such powerful and accurate weapons simply didn't exist. So we need to adapt to the new realities. The framers of the constitution had an idea about how to reduce the likelihood of a successful invasion. But that idea was not framed in the modern world. And it has long been recognized that the 2nd amendment is NOT in fact license to own military grade hardware. We (the general public) can't own fully functional f16's, we can't own rocket lauchers and the ammo for them, we can't own weaponized drones or smart missles or live grenades, we can't own 2000 pound bombs or a plane designed to deliver them and so on. We can own guns. And even those guns present a real problem to the overall safety of the public because of their mutl-shot capability, their power and accuracy, and the lack of sufficiently powerful filters on their ownership, and perhaps also the general breakdown of publically accepted moral codes that could act as a brake on overtly destructive behavior.



Jim

[Littlejoe]

Interesting response. What I see in it reminds me so much of the kinds of debate tactics that were used by the cigarette industry to stop or delay efforts to expose the dangers of smoking, the kinds of debate tactics that were used by the auto industry to delay implementation of air bags in automobiles, the same sorts of debate tactics that were used to try to delay or slow down implementation of requirements to filter industry smokestacks, or to put things like catalytic converters on cars, or to try to reduce the effects of Freon on the ozone layer. ALL of which we have benefited significantly from.

Many of the ideas for laws come out of trying to plug loopholes that allowed a person to get a gun that should not have. They didn't come out of a vacuum. Do I have a list of them all - which case sparked the idea and what it would be expected to accomplish? No. However here are a two examples of shootings that likely would have been prevented if existing laws where better enforced or more widely applied:

Source: vox

In 2007, Virginia Tech student Seung-Hui Cho shot and killed 32 people and himself at his college campus. Cho was not supposed to be able to buy a gun due to a history of mental illness. But the correct records were never sent to the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS).

© Copyright Original Source

Source: vox

We now know how Devin Kelley, who was previously convicted of domestic abuse while he was in the Air Force, was able to purchase guns and on Sunday kill 26 churchgoers in Sutherland Springs, Texas. After Kelley was court-martialed, sentenced to 12-months confinement, and received a bad-conduct discharge, the Air Force failed to enter his record in the National Criminal Information Center database — even though Pentagon guidelines require the Air Force to do so.

© Copyright Original Source

Even with the existing laws, millions have been refused the right to purchase guns due to felony convictions of mental illness. So how do we assess what shootings have been avoided by the systems that are in place, even if they may currently not be as effective as they could be? Why are gun lobbyists and enthusiasts not pushing to get these laws and loopholes fixed so that we can see how effective the existing laws can be?

A washington post article here has a good bit of the available information on the effect of gun laws. One thing it notes that when we are talking about gun fatalities, mass shootings are a small part of the picture. Many of the proposed laws target gun violence other than mass shootings. However, the data shows that large magazine rifles and assault rifles increase the carnage at such events due to their increased power and the reduced time lost to reload. They show that the use of assault weapons in crime decreased during the ban and have been on the increase since the ban.

In specific, the Las Vegas shooter actually exposes several of the sorts of loopholes that need to be closed. This man bought a large number of guns in a short period of time, but he bought rifles rather than handguns. The purchase of a large number of pistols in a short period of time requires notification of the authorities, but the purchase of a large number rifles does not. And we all know how it highlighted the concept of a bump stock and produced calls for them to be banned.

The point here is that instead of working to help make gun ownership safer over all and allowing events like the Las Vegas shooting or other events help us to taylor our responses to help reduce the possibility of recurrence, gun organizations put up the same kind of 'there is nothing we can do about it anyway' opposition that is characterizing many of the posts in this thread and in the end prevent us from making intelligent, evidence based responses to these events.


Jim

ETA: An interesting graphic from the WP article below. Note the rather dramatic year over year increase in mass shootings.

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Well Jim, I could just as easily responded with ...your responses remind me so much of the don't eat eggs, they will kill you, or the Oh dear, 2016 will be a massive recession, or the "Peak Oil" false alarms. If you want to accuse me of dubious tactics then you are proving that you DON'T want a reasoned discussion, you want everyone to just do what ever you say.

You don't have to list all the ideas, list one or two and we can discuss.

For the record, I'm not an NRA member, I don't belong to the Texas State equivalent of it the TSRA. I don't belong to any gun or shooting clubs, I own a modest amount of guns and ammo. I'm not a prepper, nor a "gun nut". I am a life long hunter and shooter. I've been hunting and shooting over 40 years. I don't own any semi-auto rifles, but do have 2 Semi-Auto pistols and a 1972 Remington 1100 semi-auto 12 gauge. I am a certified Conceal Carry license holder and a pretty good shot. What I saw from your post was a lot of fluff without any substance. Someone parroting ideas they have read without thinking them through. I'm trying to see if there's something I missed. If that sort of discussion is beyond you then, we're done here and I'll dismiss you as another uninformed person seeking to throw any mud at the wall in hopes it does something.

To your cite that the Virginia Tech student shooting could have been prevented, I agree....BUT, doing so would have violated his right to privacy in regards to his health AKA HIPAA. Those laws have to be changed to allow it. The resistance to changing those isn't coming from the Pro Gun crowd AFAIK...it's coming from Patients, hospitals and Physicians with a dog in the fight. Also, adding Mental illness to the Federal data base means it very well may show up on a background search for employment. Now you have people denied jobs because of it's inclusion. I think it needs to happen...though the way to do it fairly seems fraught with issues.

[Sparko]

Military weapons in the 1700's were basically muskets. That's obviously what the framers had in mind. Your not living in the 1700"s Sparko, and the framers had no idea nuclear weapons would exist. Use your common sense for a change.

Well then you better stop using your phone or computer because when they wrote the 1st amendment we only had printed words and in-person speeches.

They wrote the amendment because it was the civilians with guns who defeated the British army. The purpose of the 2nd amendment is clearly to defend the USA and people to defend themselves using whatever arms are available to them. We've had this discussion before on tweb. The founding fathers knew about weapons greater than muskets even back then. There were cannons and some crude machine guns around. Yet they didn't put any restrictions in the 2nd amendment did they? Why not say "personal firearms used for hunting turkeys" or something like that in there then?

Stop being such a complete dumbass.

[Littlejoe]

If I missed little Joes politeness, I apologize to him and to you. You are correct I should not have characterized his response as a tactic. In the end I see it as the sort of pushback I described, but it was wrong to attach a nefarious intentionality to it.

Jim

Apology accepted.

Sadly, apparently everyone including you seems to think that "push back" is always a bad thing. In problem solving, giving potential side effects to a given action or policy change is normally seen as looking at the WHOLE problem and not quick fixing it to make some people happy. I see a lot of quick fixing ideas that seem to have issues or flaws and when brought up, get the old, yeah, you don't want to do anything to fix the problem...no, I want to do the least intrusive, least flawed, and most effective thing(s). When long time Law enforcement officers tell me that criminal shooters don't rely on gun shows and gun stores to procur weapons, and think that a waiting period would have minimal effect, I tend to listen to the professionals as a default. Would a 3 day waiting period affect ME? I don't think it would...but I'm not the problem. Figuring out how to get illegal weapons off the street and keeping truly disturbed people from acquiring weapons is the greatest challenge...but would be the most effective solutions. I've yet to see anyone clearly define how we could accomplish that without a full ban on guns.

Balls in your court Jim.

[rogue06]

Military weapons in the 1700's were basically muskets. That's obviously what the framers had in mind. Your not living in the 1700"s Sparko, and the framers had no idea nuclear weapons would exist. Use your common sense for a change.

As I've repeatedly noted in previous threads the Founding Fathers also had no conception of TV, radio, telephones or the internet but nobody would seriously argue that they shouldn't be covered by the First Amendment.

And they didn't conceive of houses built with modern building materials complete with indoor toilets, electricity, air conditioning and central heating but nobody would seriously maintain that such structures aren't covered by the Fourth Amendment's provision against unlawful searches.

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The whole they only had muskets back then nonsense has repeatedly been beaten into a fine pink mist several times so please do try to keep up. Rifles had been around for a hundred years or so before the 2A was penned. In fact during the Revolutionary War the Continental Congress authorized the establishment of ten companies of riflemen.

Furthermore, there was an assortment of repeating and/or high capacity firearms available in 1787 (when the Constitution was written) and even well before that. Sparko posted a list of some:

btw, muskets were not the only weapons available at the time the second amendment was written.

Behold the the assault rifles of the time,

the 16-shot wheel-lock: An oval-bore .67-caliber rifle designed to fire 16 stacked charges of powder and ball in a rapid “Roman candle” fashion. The rifle operated through the use of two wheel locks and one matchlock mounted on the gun.


Circa 1650 – The Kalthoff Repeating Flintlock: As Mike Blessing explains, the Kalthoff Repeating Flintlock came into production in the 1650s, seeing combat in the Siege of Copenhagen in 1659 and later during the Scanian War of 1675 to 1679 -- 132 and 116 years, respectively, before the Second Amendment was ratified in 1791. While manufacturing and repair costs kept the Kalthoff out of mass production, it represents the reality that “high capacity” firearms are not a contemporary concept, as some models of the Kalthoff boasted magazines of up to 30 rounds – the same number of rounds in a true standard-capacity AR-15 magazine of today.


Circa 1750 – The Cookson Volitional Repeating Flintlock: A lever-action breech-loading repeater, is one of many similar designs to make an appearance on the world stage beginning in the 17th century. The revolutionary mechanism at the heart of the Cookson repeater dates from 1680 and was originally known in Europe as the Lorenzoni System, named for Italian gunsmith Michele Lorenzoni of Florence. Long arms utilizing this system were produced in other European nations and in the United States until about 1849. The Cookson rifle dates from 1750 and features a two-chamber horizontally mounted rotating drum. After firing the rifle, the cycling process could be repeated until the two magazines, with their seven-shot capacities, were empty. Although other breech loading rifles were introduced in later years, the Cookson-type long arms were unique in their ability to fire multiple shots without reloading.


1777 – The Belton Repeating Flintlock: Philadelphian Joseph Belton’s repeating flintlock design reportedly boasted a 16-to-20 shot capacity, using the superposed load mechanism. Sources indicate there was correspondence between the inventor and the Continental Congress in 1777, as the he had reportedly been commissioned by the Congress to build 100 of his repeaters for the U.S. military, with the order being dismissed solely for cost purposes. This discussion presents strong evidence that the founding fathers were perfectly able to conceive of “high capacity” repeating firearms.


1782-1804 – The Nock Volley Gun: The close quarters of Naval warfare demanded a powerful, yet compact firearm that could provide abundant firepower. The Nock Volley gun fired seven shots all at once from seven clustered bores. This powerful rifle was issued nine years before the dawn on the Second Amendment.

https://www.nrablog.com/articles/201...t-musket-myth/

At least one of them existed nearly 140 years prior to the Constitution. Moreover that list is hardly exhaustive and some were around before the dates given (the earliest Cookson repeating flintlock rifle dates to 1690 for instance).

There was the 32mm Puckle gun patented in 1718 by James Puckle over 7 decades before the Second Amendment. It was a flintlock revolver that was the first firearm to be designated a "machine gun."

There was the high capacity Girandoni air rifle invented in 1779 which had a magazine holding twenty .46 caliber projectiles with an effective range of 150 yards similar to the range of a musket. Lewis and Clark took them on their journey and praised them as being their most effective tool on their cross continental trek.

There was the Kalthoff repeater which was used in the Siege of Copenhagen (1659) during the Second Northern War and remained unmatched in its fire rate until the mid-19th century being capable of firing every couple of seconds. Oops. That's on Sparko's list

There was also the a 40-Bore Flintlock 8-shot repeating magazine Pistol manufactured in the first half of the 1790s but used a system invented around 1660.

Further, "volley guns" which fire a number of shots, either simultaneously or in succession, date back to Medieval times when they were called "organ guns" or a "Ribauldequin." The Nock gun mentioned by Sparko is a type of volley gun. Another type is the "duck's foot" handgun (see below) designed for facing multiple hostile opponents charging in at you (it was a favorite of prison guards and sea captains facing a mutinous crew).

00000000000000ar0000.jpg
This 4 barreled .52 caliber flintlock pistol dates from c. 1780
With it's 2" long barrels it was made for concealability

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Talk about your "assault weapon" this 8-barreled flintlock
also sported a spiked butt and a barbed blade for use
after all the rounds have been fired.

[Jedidiah]

Thanks - I do appreciate that. Very much.

Jim

A lot of us do not particularly support Trump. Again, he was the least horrible choice.

[rogue06]

A lot of us do not particularly support Trump. Again, he was the least horrible choice.

Likewise a lot of us are only defending Trump because so many of the accusations are so over-the-top ridiculous.

[JimL]

Well then you better stop using your phone or computer because when they wrote the 1st amendment we only had printed words and in-person speeches.

They wrote the amendment because it was the civilians with guns who defeated the British army. The purpose of the 2nd amendment is clearly to defend the USA and people to defend themselves using whatever arms are available to them. We've had this discussion before on tweb. The founding fathers knew about weapons greater than muskets even back then. There were cannons and some crude machine guns around. Yet they didn't put any restrictions in the 2nd amendment did they? Why not say "personal firearms used for hunting turkeys" or something like that in there then?

Stop being such a complete dumbass.

Yes, they didn't have a standing military, citizens with muskets was it. So, if you believe that a citizen militia was the intended purpose of the amendment, then the purpose no longer exists. But the bigger point is that the amendment applied to the common weapons of the time, i.e. it applied to muskets, which are in no danger of being banned.

[Cerebrum123]

I lost all respect here with the Christians posting when it became clear I do not support Donald Trump. It has little to do with that comment.




I have heard that said before. I don't know if I believe it to be true, at the same time, I can understand how a bunch of people with guns would be a little less easy to take out than people without guns. It just depends on how far the invader is willing to go. Not much help against a nerve agent. Hard to hide from mustard gas. High tech killer drones carrying laser guided munitions? Seriously?

In the interests of honesty which is so rare on these pages, yes I can see how it could make things more difficult. And I am not against private gun ownership per se. I'm not scared of guns in that I'm a fairly good shot and enjoy shooting. I'm just not sure it could be considered a serious deterrent, and I'm not sure it's worth what we see in the inner cities and gangs, the mass shootings, cases of mistaken identity and accidental deaths due to improper handling or storage, the suicides and the domestic violence.

A gun is just too easy. Knives, bows and arrows, they are much messier, much more difficult to use and to learn to use. And we need to make sure they are not easily available to people we KNOW have a good chance of misusing them. My main complaint is the refusal to implement common sense laws due to the paranoid fear of incrementally losing the whole enchilada. It is just stupid and in my mind immoral to sit back and not only do nothing but to literally fight all efforts to do something because we anticipate some time in the future maybe someone will go too far.


Jim

That's not why you lost a lot of respect here. Your histrionics, and acting like Trump is the worst US politician ever did that.

ETA: Well, one among many reasons anyway.

[Cerebrum123]

You obviously have no interest in any sort of reasoned discussion. This is pointless, as it almost always is with you.

Jim

In that particular post she is more reasonable than you have been.

[lilpixieofterror]

Yes, they didn't have a standing military, citizens with muskets was it. So, if you believe that a citizen militia was the intended purpose of the amendment, then the purpose no longer exists. But the bigger point is that the amendment applied to the common weapons of the time, i.e. it applied to muskets, which are in no danger of being banned.

More of your nutty statements. Rogue already put this one to rest. How about you refute it instead of ignoring it? The US had a standing army in the founding Father’s Day and yet zero effort was made to remove the second amendment.

[lilpixieofterror]

In that particular post she is more reasonable than you have been.

I find it interesting that I was no more disrespectful than he or the men here are and yet I get attacked and they get a free pass. Sexism at work, I guess.

[lilpixieofterror]

Yes, they didn't have a standing military, citizens with muskets was it. So, if you believe that a citizen militia was the intended purpose of the amendment, then the purpose no longer exists. But the bigger point is that the amendment applied to the common weapons of the time, i.e. it applied to muskets, which are in no danger of being banned.

Yeah they did. The Army was established under President Washington, the Navy under President Adams, and the Marines under President Jefferson. Stop spreading easily refuted nonsense.

[lilpixieofterror]

Sparko - the potential power of the guns in the wrong hands is part of the problem. And the resistance to taking action to try to reduce the probability of such powerful weapons being in the wrong hands is part of the problem.

When the 2nd amendment was written, such powerful and accurate weapons simply didn't exist. So we need to adapt to the new realities. The framers of the constitution had an idea about how to reduce the likelihood of a successful invasion. But that idea was not framed in the modern world. And it has long been recognized that the 2nd amendment is NOT in fact license to own military grade hardware. We (the general public) can't own fully functional f16's, we can't own rocket lauchers and the ammo for them, we can't own weaponized drones or smart missles or live grenades, we can't own 2000 pound bombs or a plane designed to deliver them and so on. We can own guns. And even those guns present a real problem to the overall safety of the public because of their mutl-shot capability, their power and accuracy, and the lack of sufficiently powerful filters on their ownership, and perhaps also the general breakdown of publically accepted moral codes that could act as a brake on overtly destructive behavior.



Jim

Accurate rifles were used in the American Revolution. Seriously, stop... you’re embarrassing yourself.

BTW private people do own fighters. It’s the huge cost of owning and operating one that keeps most from ever owning one.

[oxmixmudd]

Well Jim, I could just as easily responded with ...your responses remind me so much of the don't eat eggs, they will kill you, or the Oh dear, 2016 will be a massive recession, or the "Peak Oil" false alarms. If you want to accuse me of dubious tactics then you are proving that you DON'T want a reasoned discussion, you want everyone to just do what ever you say.

You don't have to list all the ideas, list one or two and we can discuss.

But I did. (1) Laws and more importantly robust procedures to prevent people with mental illness from getting guns. (2) Red flagging multiple rifle purchases in a short period of time along with the existing laws to do the same for pistols.

I also have included links to articles on the issue that include far more robust lists, and you could pick from those if you don't like the two I've flagged.

For the record, I'm not an NRA member, I don't belong to the Texas State equivalent of it the TSRA. I don't belong to any gun or shooting clubs, I own a modest amount of guns and ammo. I'm not a prepper, nor a "gun nut". I am a life long hunter and shooter. I've been hunting and shooting over 40 years. I don't own any semi-auto rifles, but do have 2 Semi-Auto pistols and a 1972 Remington 1100 semi-auto 12 gauge. I am a certified Conceal Carry license holder and a pretty good shot. What I saw from your post was a lot of fluff without any substance. Someone parroting ideas they have read without thinking them through. I'm trying to see if there's something I missed. If that sort of discussion is beyond you then, we're done here and I'll dismiss you as another uninformed person seeking to throw any mud at the wall in hopes it does something.

I've given you plenty to discuss if you are interested in an actual discussion of specific laws and their pros or cons in terms of how much effect they could have on the problems we face with guns in the wrong hands.

To your cite that the Virginia Tech student shooting could have been prevented, I agree....BUT, doing so would have violated his right to privacy in regards to his health AKA HIPAA. Those laws have to be changed to allow it.

So change them. If a person has a deadly disease we can take away his rights and quarantine him. HIPAA does not (or should not) give a person the right to destroy people as a consequence of the disease they carry. People with significant seizure disorders that can't be controlled with medication can't get a drivers licence. Neither can people with significant visual impairment. A person with a mental illness that affects self-control, the perception of reality etc and a gun in their possession makes that mental illness a potentially deadly disease. Recognizing and codifying that should be all that is necessary to work around the HIPAA issues.

The resistance to changing those isn't coming from the Pro Gun crowd AFAIK...it's coming from Patients, hospitals and Physicians with a dog in the fight. Also, adding Mental illness to the Federal data base means it very well may show up on a background search for employment. Now you have people denied jobs because of it's inclusion. I think it needs to happen...though the way to do it fairly seems fraught with issues.

On THAT specific example you may well be right. The resistance to the necessary change may well be coming from other special interests. Why doesn't the NRA with their wide reach and deep pockets make that case and help us keep the guns out of the hands of people with mental illnesses that make gun ownership by them too great a risk to be allowed?


Jim