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I don't think we can conclude that at all. Firearms advocates have loudly and coherently pointed out just how nonsensical this all is to anyone who'd listen. It
by makomk 7y ago
I don't think we can conclude that at all. Firearms advocates have loudly and coherently pointed out just how nonsensical this all is to anyone who'd listen. It's your country's gun control activists who think these rules make sense. They're the ones who grab pictures of scary-looking black .22LR bolt-action rifles and write tweets about how terrible it is that 18 year olds can buy them, then get their media pals to smear their opponents for mocking this. They're the ones who contrast those scary guns with the old-fashioned wooden rifles their relatives used to use for hunting. They're the ones who blame the repeal of that nonsensical assault weapon ban for mass shootings. They're the ones who outright take pride in their ignorance about guns, to the point that I'm not sure it's possible to be accepted as pro-gun-control if you actually care about whether what you're saying is accurate. American gun control laws are the way they are because of the American gun control movement.
- tptacek 7y agoYou're not really saying anything here. Is your point that we shouldn't regulate weapons based on their color or the material their stocks are made out of? I obviously agree with you. The subtext here is yet another Firearms Policy Canard, which is that anyone who thinks semi-automatic rifles should be regulated must solely be reacting to the color of the weapon, and clearly doesn't know that there are farmers that rely on them to clear out smallish animals or whatever. Sorry, I get that most people don't take any time to research these topics, but they're in fact not that complicated (these are devices that were designed to be broken down and reassembled in a jungle during monsoon rains by teenagers), and I'm not cowed.
- makomk 7y agoMy point is that we shouldn't regulate weapons based on anything the US gun control movement ever says. Not because guns are too hard for anyone but gun nuts to understand, but because the whole shebang is built on a foundation of willful, weaponised ignorance. I don't think it's possible to patch up those policy demands and make them sensible either. The whole case for why rifle regulation is more important than handgun regulation and should be stricter than it - one of the key pillars of the current US gun control movement - relies heavily on the imaginary distinction between good hunting rifles and evil human-hunting rifles. Without that distinction, it's hard to justify the position that those guns should be banned or tightly restricted but not the handguns used by the armed guards protecting all the Hollywood celebrities cheering on gun control as anything but urban-vs-rural cultural warfare. Handguns cause a huge amount of death and misery in the US right now compared to rifles. (Of course, there's also some constitutional issues with taking those away... but that's another problem entirely.)
- tptacek 7y agoI don't think it's reasonable to base public policy on a caricature of one faction. Issues are resolvable on their merits. You can find noisy factions on every issue saying stupid things; we can't freeze up as a result, generating a sort of inadvertent heckler's veto. But actually none of this matters on HN. The interesting question HN is what the policy should be, not what the dumbest people in America advocating for that policy are saying. We're not actually going to impact gun policy at all here, so we might as well free ourselves to discuss it rationally.
- dsr_ 7y agoIf we were discussing it rationally, we would have to acknowledge that the firearms industry loves bans on features and accessories, because they get to increase sales through replacements, new innovations and fear. Announce a ban on pink magazines to take effect at the beginning of next year, and sales of pink magazines will rise; American Rifleman will run articles comparing the effectiveness of various color choices; Guns and Ammo will have a feature on 20 pink magazines you should buy before the ban; and sales of colored tape will rise in two different ways: pink tape will be applied to drab magazines -- "less than 35% coverage, so it's legal!" -- and black tape will be applied to pink magazines -- "More than 80% coverage when inserted, so it's legal, but when we finally defeat the irrational ban, you can take it right off!"