2687

Devolved? I’m sure you’ll come back with a reasoned statement eventually. Or not.

2688

The online ammo specialty places are about the last place you should be looking to buy from at this point. They’ve pretty much all jacked their prices, some more ridiculouslly (Cheaper Than Dirt thinks even cheap brands of 9mm are worth $1/round or more) than others. Meanwhile, the large retail chains and online retailers that sell much more than just ammo have decided to take the long view and sell at MSRP, more or less. So Cabela’s, Walmart, Midway.com, Brownells.com, etc., are going to have the best prices when they have stock. The downside is that those places get cleaned out fast because there is still a big reseller market on places like GunBroker.com.

2689

AIM Surplus is notable for having kept their prices more or less the same, too—steel-case 7.62x39 was $4.75/20 twelve months ago, and it’s only $5.25/20 now. It’s also not out of my way like Wal-mart is. :P

2690

Desperation sets in:

I have to think such brazen imagery will do far more to turn off the hip crowd that to rally the troops.

2691

WTF is that even supposed to mean?

2692

Looks like false flag propaganda for sure!

2693

It’s like some strange appeal to the religious left I guess? That is all I can come up with. Still doesn’t really explain the random NRA at the top… or… really any of it. WTF. This is going to bug me for days.

2694

I find this fixation on the weapons that aren’t the problem strange. Is it just that assault rifles are scary looking?

2695

That’s a big part of it, but the argument usually made is that assault rifles have features that make them easier to use as spree weapons. Folding stocks, large capacity magazines, etc.

2696

Demonizing gun owners is great if you live in the North East - in the rest of America, not so much.

It’s a purely emotional argument, the number of these killings is decreasing - not increasing. And the deaths are in no way limited by magazine capacity or the ability of the shooter to conceal his weapon.

2697

I grew up in a very liberal family. My parents believed in gun-control, they hated welfare reform, hell - my father worked for Clinton. I know where critics of our gun policy are coming from, I used to believe it myself, but it’s all puff. It’s all about making us feel good, and giving us the illusion of control. We need a Daniel Patrick Moynihan, someone with the courage to be honest. Someone with the courage to attack hard problems. Someone with the courage to follow the data.

2698

To be clear, its not a position I’m taking. As a gun owner I’m well aware of how ill informed an argument it is. Rather I was just trying to answer the question Gus posed.

Serious gun control requires a focus on handguns since they are what is used in the vast majority of gun violence acts. Which is why expanded background checks makes a lot more sense to me then PR moves like Feinstein’s flawed AWB proposal.

2699

The problem is that there if very little data to follow. Essentially, the feds don’t collect much because the Republicans have followed the NRA lead in limiting funding into what is really going on. The irony is that it actually helps both sides. They both exagerrate and nobody makes decisions based on much actual data. It’s purely emotional and political, which is why public support for stricter gun control kicks in after major events and then relatively quickly drops off even though day to day violence still remains. We’ve become somewhat immune to caring about that when it doesn’t impact us directly.

2700

Getting legislation passed that would seriously restrict people’s access to handguns is politically absolutely impossible, rather than merely extremely difficult, as in the case of rifles. It’s an instance of the drunk man looking for his keys under the lamppost because “that’s where the light is”.

2701

Why do journalists even bother using specific terms, such as numbers, when discussing guns?

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2013/04/the-boston-shooters.html

Well, for one thing, the brothers would probably have killed a lot more than three people at the marathon. AR-15s can fire up to forty-five rounds a minute, and at close range they can tear apart a human body. If the Tsarnaevs had started firing near the finish line, they might easily have killed dozens of spectators and runners before fleeing or being shot by the police.

Well past 100 rounds per minute, and “close range” apparently anywhere out to 600 yards or so. It’s a bullet, not a baseball, it doesn’t run out of gas after a hundred feet. I also like the specific plea to legislate emotionally, rather than rationally:

The proposed ban on assault weapons would surely have gotten the support of more than forty senators, too, and the proposal to ban multi-round magazines would also have gained more support—that’s if the gun lobby hadn’t managed to postpone the votes until emotions had cooled, which it would certainly have tried to do.

2702

Banning “multi-round magazines”?

So…just banning magazines in general then?

2703

I don’t disagree with the main point of the article, which is that we treat gun violence differently than terrorism. That said, there are numerous flaws in the scenario, as well as some of the logic.

As I pointed out the other day, numerically speaking, terrorism, especially homegrown terrorism, is a minor threat to public safety and public health. It pales in comparison to gun violence.

Could not the same argument be made about assault rifles being “numerically speaking” a minor threat to public safety? Handguns are by far what is used in violence involving guns.

2704

Sure, and alcohol is by far a greater contributor to gun violence than gun ownership is, as well as killing ten times as many people annually, all of which pales in comparison to tobacco use. If guns were perfectly bad then there would be an argument for getting rid of them, or even if they were relatively much worse per item than they are. As it stands they’re another thing we have in America where we both use it and abuse it.

The big difference in the gun debate is that you have a sharp delineation between users and abusers, with abusers being concentrated in cities and users being concentrated elsewhere. Since the cities publish the media, you get a 20-to-1 cry of “ban all guns!” because they don’t think or know or understand that firearms enjoy widespread legal and peaceful use; it’s outside of their experience so it must not exist. Ask them to save thousands of children a year (many, many more than are killed by guns) and tens of thousands of adults each year by banning or heavily regulating alcohol consumption, something that they do in their own lives, and the discussion is completely different. In fact, you’ll hear the same arguments from the drinkers as you do from the shooters, “Why should I give up this thing that brings me pleasure that I use responsibly? I’m not the problem yet you want to make blanket legislation to address outliers.”

2705

Those quotes were really cute. Great way to end the week, thanks.

2706

This seems unlikely. What do you mean?