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All small arms are "weapons of war". Clubs and sticks are "weapons of war" in certain societies, and people kill other people with them all over the world. In
by jki275 6y ago
All small arms are "weapons of war". Clubs and sticks are "weapons of war" in certain societies, and people kill other people with them all over the world. In some places they do so quite effectively.
That's really the fact of it.
The UK and Japan have banned pocket knives. I couldn't legally possess a Leatherman the entire six years I spent in Japan. We had metal detectors at the brow of the ships to ensure no one LEFT the ships with their every day tools they carried to do their jobs, because they would be arrested and thrown in a hole for carrying them off the ship (yes, this literally happened. 10+ days in a Japanese hole waiting on a charging decision for a junior LT on a ship there because he had a pocket knife in his backpack). The UK is now attempting to ban clubs. The logical extension of this "ban weapons of war" desire is to literally ban sticks. Everything has to be banned in order to have a perfectly "safe" society. But then people will kill each other with their fists. It's the human condition, unfortunately, and attempting to address a meatspace problem with technology bans has never proven to be effective in all of history.
Targeting semi automatic rifles with detachable or "high capacity" (another meaningless term) magazines, isn't a useful thing to do. It doesn't make any difference, won't make any difference, and can't make any difference. They were banned from 1994-2004, and that led to literally almost fifteen years of destruction of that political party and made those banned weapons the most popular weapon that has ever been designed. Again -- it's the human condition.
The reason gun rights advocates are so set against this is that every time there's a "discussion" it's designed to make something we own illegal. We can talk about it all day, but that at the end is always the goal of gun control advocates. They don't want to talk, they want to make us criminals.
- tptacek 6y agoI don't think the facts bear that timeline out, but I'm certain we're just talking about different things. From the top of the thread: my concern is about mass casualty shooting events, particularly the kind in which the shooter can stand off first-responder police forces (or, in the most horrible cases, get a clear line of fire on a crowd of people from a fortified position). I don't think an assault weapons ban is going to do anything about routine gun crime. But it doesn't have to. (I also think "bans" are dumb).
- jki275 6y agoWhich timeline? 1994-2004? They banned a bunch of scary looking guns to save the children for ten years. It wasn't successful. That was my entire point with that -- if I got a detail wrong I'm happy to be corrected. The mass casualty shooting events aren't going to be affected by the technology solution. In Japan just a couple of years ago a guy walked into a home for disabled people with a sword and killed ten or so of them as I recall. Swords are banned in Japan, along with knives and guns. In the Tokyo subway not too long ago a death cult released a bunch of poison gas and killed a bunch of people. Again, guns, swords, knives are all banned. We're not talking only certain types of guns are banned, Japan doesn't fuck around -- they banned EVERYTHING. Even pocket knives. Didn't stop people who wanted to kill people from killing people. Columbine -- they messed up their explosives (fortunately!), but that was the plan on how they were going to hold off first responders and kill a bunch more people. Same thing in the Atlanta bombing as I recall. Information is out there, it's not hard. You can buy the ingredients to make common explosives at Walmart. You can kill a lot of people with a Remington 700 if you want to. Another AWB (or regulation, or talking about it) isn't going to affect crime in any way. If we want to fix the problem in the US, we ought to be looking at what happened to cause people to think that murdering people was ok. Pieces of metal didn't do that, something went wrong in our culture that did that. BTW sorry this is like a day after the conversation, every time I type more than two replies in a thread I get rate limited and can't post anymore. This site drives me nuts.
- tptacek 6y agoI agree that the original FAWB was performative and ineffective. But it happened that way because interest groups lobbied the original proposals, which were far more coherent, down to an ineffective, face-saving stump. I don't accept the FAWB as a serious reference point in gun policy; it isn't. The right discussion to have is about regulating all detachable-magazine semi-automatic long guns. I'm not sure where Aum Shinrikyu gets you in a discussion like this, because I'm confident our polity agrees roundly that random people can't possess Sarin. You can kill a lot of people with all sorts of weapons. But tactical rifles and Sarin gas are examples of weapons that allow ordinary people to kill outsized numbers of victims while standing off first responders that would otherwise be able to cut spree killings short, and those kinds of killings would be the target of a new assault weapon ban.