5 ms·

Which 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

• tptacek 6y ago
  I 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.
  • jki275 6y ago
    The point is that you can ban things all day long, and it doesn't actually have any effect on the people who are going to break the law. It affects me, because I strictly follow the laws even though I believe they both violate the Constitution and my natural rights, because a society where laws are ignored is a society that cannot function -- but I digress and that's another discussion. Someone who is going to commit mass murder isn't going to sit down and think "well, they made my favorite weapon illegal, so I guess I just can't do it anymore". It simply doesn't work that way -- it's not difficult at all to find a way, just like the tokyo death cult and just like the dude who chopped up a nursing home with a samurai sword in a country where possession of both is illegal, and just like people regularly murder each other with knives and baseball bats in the UK. BTW, I try never to say the names of any of these people who commit mass murder. I really think a HUGE part of why people do this is because they want the attention the media gives mass murderers, and I think their names should be shut out of the history books. The crime bill was slightly reduced in impact from the overall ban the left wanted, but it banned possession and manufacture of any semiautomatic weapon that had a scary feature and limited magazine capacity to ten rounds as I recall. There's no data that even suggests it had any effect nor would have the overall ban they wanted. The only people who follow the law are by definition law abiding people. I don't think it's likely that there's some subset of people out there who just accidentally pick up an AR-15 because it happens to be around and go commit mass murder. We're not talking about crimes of passion here, we're talking about sociopaths who are generally above average IQ, quite capable of getting their hands on anything they want to get their hands on, whether it's legal or not. A person willing to murder a school isn't going to be stopped by some minor difficulty in obtaining the exact brand of weapon they want. Another point - manufacturing fully automatic weapons is a remarkably easy task. There are people who have made a functional AK-47 out of a shovel. The Sten gun plans have been publicly available for 50+ years, and that's one of the simplest weapons there is to build. Banning an AR-15 doesn't make hundreds of years of knowledge in machining vanish. You don't even need a mill to make a Sten, but if you have a mill that costs a couple of thousand dollars you can pretty much make any weapon you want in your garage. Spend a few more dollars and you can just plug a thumb drive into the CNC controller and push a button and have a computer make it for you, very little skill required. A gun ban would likely be just as effective as the cannabis ban has been. It would put thousands of law abiding citizens in jail for a made up crime, and it would probably accomplish exactly nothing in terms of public safety. And it would be mostly ignored by the citizenry. There are 300+ million black rifles in the hands of the public, how do you propose to take them away? There's another issue, most of this gun ban talk comes from people who live in cities, and really don't understand why semi automatic rifles exist. If you've never needed to hunt coyotes that were destroying livestock or kill varmints that are digging up your pasture and destroying livestock, or defend your life in a situation where the nearest county sheriff is a hundred miles away and you probably can't even reach him by radio until the end of the day if you're lucky (there are some really nasty people that live on the fringes of society where there's nobody to bother them too much), you can't really appreciate why it pisses us off to hear city folk talking about how they need to take our guns away because they're scary and because criminals exist. There will always be criminals. If you made all guns vanish today, they'd use bombs. If you made all bombs vanish today, they'll just use swords. When you're banning sticks like the UK one has to wonder where the ridiculousness ends. VA is literally trying to ban pieces of metal that look like they could be turned into a gun right now. And just for the record, if you ban long guns with detachable magazines you're banning this: https://ruger.com/products/1022Carbine/specSheets/1103.html https://ruger.com/products/1022Carbine/specSheets/1103.html One of the most common target rifles, one of the most common rifles used for varmint control in flyover country...