4 ms·

The slippery slope/edge case arguments. These things seem to be so complex in America. They're not. Can you loan a rifle to a buddy for a hunting weekend? Yes,

by beachy 4y ago

The slippery slope/edge case arguments. These things seem to be so complex in America. They're not. Can you loan a rifle to a buddy for a hunting weekend? Yes, as long as your buddy has his gun licence. Otherwise a hard no, as there's no proof your buddy has a damn clue about gun safety. And of course you, a licenced gun owner, can supervise your buddy while he shoots if he doesn't have a licence. Same for teaching your kids to shoot safely. Can that hunting rifle be an AR-15? No. Military assault rifles are not needed for hunting. You can use a bolt action rifle, or even a low powered semi-auto, .22. If you have special requirements - like hunting feral hogs from a helicopter - then you can apply for a special class of licence that allows you to possess said weapons, and use them for said purpose. Are there red flag rules? Obviously! Why would you let a disturbed individual have a lethal weapon? Can people still have their guns? Yes! But they must be stored in a secure gun safe, and some weapons (e.g pistols/concealable weapons), due to the risks they present, must be treated separately. You certainly can't carry your gun on your shoulder into the supermarket. And so it goes. The solutions to America's gun problem are obvious - from the outside.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
The complexity isn't that it's hard to write out a set of gun regulations. The complexity is that many Americans support only a subset of the measures you're describing. So when universal background checks (for example) come up for a vote, a lot of people who support them in principle raise concerns that they'll be seen as a backdoor for creating a gun licensing program, and thus they get a lot less popular support than you'd expect from polling data.
- beachy 4y ago
  Why would you not require a licence to own and operate a lethal weapon?
  - DuskStar 4y ago
    Because trusting the government to have the power to determine who gets to defend themselves means that African Americans in the post-civil-war south, and Jews in 1930s Germany, don't get to defend themselves. People keep saying that the US is on the verge of being a fascist white supremacist state - why do you want to give that state the right to choose who gets guns? Edit: and in more immediately practical consequences, because gun-hostile governments have a history of publicly leaking the list of people who own guns.
    - ithkuil 4y ago
      Moat countries require a license to drive cars. A white supremacist nation can certainly use that as excuse to take away the livelihood from certain classes of people. Is this a reason for not enforcing the need to have a driving license? (You do have driving licenses in the US right? I'm often surprised about the amount of things that seem universal and that are not a thing in the united states')
      - DuskStar 4y ago
        You do not in fact need a driver's license to purchase/own/operate a motor vehicle in the USA - only to use public roads. (And that's just talking about "by law" - "in practice" people drive with no license or with a suspended license far too often here)
  - SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
    Don't ask me! I think we should. My point is just that, from what I can tell, the problems with gun regulation in America have a lot more to do with what the public is willing to support than some kind of complication or corruption making it hard to pass laws the public wants.
  - Scalestein 4y ago
    The argument is usually that a license mechanism involves a registry and that the government having a list of every gun owner will lead to them taking citizens guns away or otherwise further restrictions.
DuskStar 4y ago
But you just completely ignored what I wrote, which was that a policy's name may be viewed differently than that policy's implementation. And then you said there's no objections to red flag laws! Did you even read my comment? But calling an AR-15 a "military assault rifle" is probably enough evidence that you don't know what you're talking about, anyways. ('Assault Rifle' is a term of art and the vast vast majority of AR-15s do not qualify - the legal ones that do qualify have literally never been used in violent crimes in the US, because they are worth tens of thousands of dollars and machine guns (a superset of assault rifles) have had universal background checks since the 1920s)
- skissane 4y ago
  > ('Assault Rifle' is a term of art It is, but it actually has two different meanings. There is what you mean by it (the traditional military definition) and then there is “assault rifle”=“rifle which was legally classified as an assault weapon under the 1994-2004 US Federal Assault Weapons Ban”-a civilian AR-15 is (generally) not an “assault rifle” in the first sense, but it is in the second. Now, you can argue the second is an abuse of language - but once a usage becomes supported by US federal law (even if since expired), that becomes an ipso facto legitimate definition, and it would be better to acknowledge people who use that definition as doing so than lecture them that they don’t know what they are talking about (maybe they don’t, but when you don’t acknowledge the different definition of the term which they are actually using, it doesn’t make you sound like you do either)
  - DuskStar 4y ago
    The second one is an "Assault Weapon", not Rifle. This is why it was called the Assault Weapons Ban. See [0], "a United States federal law which included a prohibition on the manufacture for civilian use of certain semi-automatic firearms that were defined as assault weapons". "The Act prohibited the manufacture, transfer, or possession of "semiautomatic assault weapons," as defined by the Act." 0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Assault_Weapons_Ban https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Assault_Weapons_Ban
    - 4y ago
random-human 4y ago
>> Can that hunting rifle be an AR-15? No. Military assault rifles are not needed for hunting. You can use a bolt action rifle, or even a low powered semi-auto, .22. I very much agree with with the paragraph before this one. However. This one is why many people just stop listening. The one's you are trying to persuade are gun owners, and this reads as though you did a quick google search for hunting guns and maybe shot a gun once at a range. (not saying thats how it is) I'll try to unpack this. The statement is conflating looks, cartridge action/mechanism (bolt-action), semi-auto describes the bullet firing mechanism (the gun only fires one round per trigger pull - fully auto will continue to fire as long as the trigger is depressed), and caliber (.22) which is different from cartridge (ex .22LR) Military assault rifles != AR-15 (I believe many people are confusing what a gun looks like and what it actually does) > The U.S. Army defines assault rifles as "short, compact, selective-fire weapons that fire a cartridge intermediate in power between submachine gun and rifle cartridges." [1] Bolt-action describes a large range of guns. To be honest, I have always wanted a military sniper rifle, just don't have a use for it, except to maybe look pretty on the wall and target practice. Something like [2] The .22. I love this gun. It is one of the best guns to learn on. It was the gun I learn to load, shoot, dismantle and clean when I was 4 y/o. It's extremely user friendly. I really hope you don't think a .22 should be used for hunting anything other than rabbits or the like. Anyone that shoots a .22 knows it wont leave big holes, but that you can still kill larger things - if you want to be cruel. The .22 is notorious for bouncing and ricocheting, including off bone and tearing up and shattering the insides. .22s are also easier to fire than larger calibers with a heavier recoil that greatly diminishes accuracy. An untrained shooter with be able to handle a .22 far more accurately, with a greater rate of fire, than the types of "AR-15" guns you are thinking of. People are scared of large bullet-holes and think AR-15s look like it will leave large holes, so let's ban them. I think many people that actually shoot guns would pick being shot with a gun that quickly blows a large hole through them and it ends there - than by a .22 that will most likely not exit. Instead, it will ricochet shattering bones with the shards ripping through other organs as they slowly, painfully bleed to death from the inside, leaving surgeons helpless to fix that many problems in time. For completeness, by saying you are okay with a low powered semi-auto .22 (such as a .22 Long Rifle), that is approving of: American-80 submachine gun [3] Colt M4 .22LR [4] There are many more AR-15 style gun in .22 caliber [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assault_rifle#Definition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assault_rifle#Definition [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remington_MSR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remington_MSR [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American-180 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American-180 [4] https://waltherarmsusa.com/walther-colt-m4-ops-22lr-carbine-rifle/ https://waltherarmsusa.com/walther-colt-m4-ops-22lr-carbine-...

by beachy 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

SpicyLemonZest 4y ago

The complexity isn't that it's hard to write out a set of gun regulations. The complexity is that many Americans support only a subset of the measures you're describing. So when universal background checks (for example) come up for a vote, a lot of people who support them in principle raise concerns that they'll be seen as a backdoor for creating a gun licensing program, and thus they get a lot less popular support than you'd expect from polling data.

beachy 4y ago
Why would you not require a licence to own and operate a lethal weapon?
- DuskStar 4y ago
  Because trusting the government to have the power to determine who gets to defend themselves means that African Americans in the post-civil-war south, and Jews in 1930s Germany, don't get to defend themselves. People keep saying that the US is on the verge of being a fascist white supremacist state - why do you want to give that state the right to choose who gets guns? Edit: and in more immediately practical consequences, because gun-hostile governments have a history of publicly leaking the list of people who own guns.
  - ithkuil 4y ago
    Moat countries require a license to drive cars. A white supremacist nation can certainly use that as excuse to take away the livelihood from certain classes of people. Is this a reason for not enforcing the need to have a driving license? (You do have driving licenses in the US right? I'm often surprised about the amount of things that seem universal and that are not a thing in the united states')
    - DuskStar 4y ago
      You do not in fact need a driver's license to purchase/own/operate a motor vehicle in the USA - only to use public roads. (And that's just talking about "by law" - "in practice" people drive with no license or with a suspended license far too often here)
- SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
  Don't ask me! I think we should. My point is just that, from what I can tell, the problems with gun regulation in America have a lot more to do with what the public is willing to support than some kind of complication or corruption making it hard to pass laws the public wants.
- Scalestein 4y ago
  The argument is usually that a license mechanism involves a registry and that the government having a list of every gun owner will lead to them taking citizens guns away or otherwise further restrictions.

DuskStar 4y ago

But you just completely ignored what I wrote, which was that a policy's name may be viewed differently than that policy's implementation. And then you said there's no objections to red flag laws! Did you even read my comment? But calling an AR-15 a "military assault rifle" is probably enough evidence that you don't know what you're talking about, anyways. ('Assault Rifle' is a term of art and the vast vast majority of AR-15s do not qualify - the legal ones that do qualify have literally never been used in violent crimes in the US, because they are worth tens of thousands of dollars and machine guns (a superset of assault rifles) have had universal background checks since the 1920s)

skissane 4y ago
> ('Assault Rifle' is a term of art It is, but it actually has two different meanings. There is what you mean by it (the traditional military definition) and then there is “assault rifle”=“rifle which was legally classified as an assault weapon under the 1994-2004 US Federal Assault Weapons Ban”-a civilian AR-15 is (generally) not an “assault rifle” in the first sense, but it is in the second. Now, you can argue the second is an abuse of language - but once a usage becomes supported by US federal law (even if since expired), that becomes an ipso facto legitimate definition, and it would be better to acknowledge people who use that definition as doing so than lecture them that they don’t know what they are talking about (maybe they don’t, but when you don’t acknowledge the different definition of the term which they are actually using, it doesn’t make you sound like you do either)
- DuskStar 4y ago
  The second one is an "Assault Weapon", not Rifle. This is why it was called the Assault Weapons Ban. See [0], "a United States federal law which included a prohibition on the manufacture for civilian use of certain semi-automatic firearms that were defined as assault weapons". "The Act prohibited the manufacture, transfer, or possession of "semiautomatic assault weapons," as defined by the Act." 0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Assault_Weapons_Ban https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Assault_Weapons_Ban
  - 4y ago

random-human 4y ago

>> Can that hunting rifle be an AR-15? No. Military assault rifles are not needed for hunting. You can use a bolt action rifle, or even a low powered semi-auto, .22. I very much agree with with the paragraph before this one. However. This one is why many people just stop listening. The one's you are trying to persuade are gun owners, and this reads as though you did a quick google search for hunting guns and maybe shot a gun once at a range. (not saying thats how it is) I'll try to unpack this. The statement is conflating looks, cartridge action/mechanism (bolt-action), semi-auto describes the bullet firing mechanism (the gun only fires one round per trigger pull - fully auto will continue to fire as long as the trigger is depressed), and caliber (.22) which is different from cartridge (ex .22LR) Military assault rifles != AR-15 (I believe many people are confusing what a gun looks like and what it actually does) > The U.S. Army defines assault rifles as "short, compact, selective-fire weapons that fire a cartridge intermediate in power between submachine gun and rifle cartridges." [1] Bolt-action describes a large range of guns. To be honest, I have always wanted a military sniper rifle, just don't have a use for it, except to maybe look pretty on the wall and target practice. Something like [2] The .22. I love this gun. It is one of the best guns to learn on. It was the gun I learn to load, shoot, dismantle and clean when I was 4 y/o. It's extremely user friendly. I really hope you don't think a .22 should be used for hunting anything other than rabbits or the like. Anyone that shoots a .22 knows it wont leave big holes, but that you can still kill larger things - if you want to be cruel. The .22 is notorious for bouncing and ricocheting, including off bone and tearing up and shattering the insides. .22s are also easier to fire than larger calibers with a heavier recoil that greatly diminishes accuracy. An untrained shooter with be able to handle a .22 far more accurately, with a greater rate of fire, than the types of "AR-15" guns you are thinking of. People are scared of large bullet-holes and think AR-15s look like it will leave large holes, so let's ban them. I think many people that actually shoot guns would pick being shot with a gun that quickly blows a large hole through them and it ends there - than by a .22 that will most likely not exit. Instead, it will ricochet shattering bones with the shards ripping through other organs as they slowly, painfully bleed to death from the inside, leaving surgeons helpless to fix that many problems in time. For completeness, by saying you are okay with a low powered semi-auto .22 (such as a .22 Long Rifle), that is approving of: American-80 submachine gun [3] Colt M4 .22LR [4] There are many more AR-15 style gun in .22 caliber [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assault_rifle#Definition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assault_rifle#Definition [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remington_MSR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remington_MSR [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American-180 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American-180 [4] https://waltherarmsusa.com/walther-colt-m4-ops-22lr-carbine-rifle/ https://waltherarmsusa.com/walther-colt-m4-ops-22lr-carbine-...