3567

I’ve thought about this a lot, and I think I’m now on the side of restricting ammo clip sizes. Say 5 or so rounds at a max. Lots of reports of these shootings mention the shooters being stopped when they were reloading. I dont’ think a restricted clip size is going to inconvenience a recreational shooter too much. Just something else to bitch about with your hobby, and if it saves lives, it’s well worth it.

I’ve never understood the adversity to this, and it does not curtail your freedom or the second amendment at all.

If I could, I would go back to single shot manually reloaded muskets, but we can’t. Clip size is the next best thing.

3568

You face the same problem as the AWB, though. There are likely a billion-plus regular capacity magazines in circulation, and they can be easily made by a 3D printer. If the mass shooters weren’t so comprehensively computer game nerds it might be a workable solution, but other than Jerrod Laughner (who was crazy enough that he probably couldn’t have baked a cake, much less figured out a CAD program) they have all shown considerable capacity to plan, collect, and execute their attacks.

3569

Oh, very true - I kind of touched on it with the whole “ban every gun” thing. People will find a way.

3570

And reloading isn’t normally an issue. The recent one it was a shotgun, so one shell at a time. Reloading an automatic takes maybe 2 seconds. And typically spree shooters bring dozens and dozens of magazines.

5 round mag would make every semi-auto ever made illegal. People aren’t going to stand for having their WW2-era 1911 become illegal. And things like .22s would just be silly. 9mm would be destroyed as an ammo type as would… well anything less than .45.
You’d see handguns chambered in massive rounds to try to balance the loss of firepower. So instead of 9mm rounds you’d likely be dealing with .50+ massive magnum rounds that wouldn’t really slow down a spree shooter as far as reloading.

And at the end of the day it wouldn’t really do anything other than annoy anyone who owns a gun or do nothing to them because they’d all be grandfathered in anyway.

Rifles… wouldn’t matter. A rifle magazine isn’t a complex mechanical device and so many would be grandfathered in that no one would notice (see the AWB for how that all worked).

3571

As far as I can see, that’s a call for upholding the law - that more controls are in fact required. Prosecuting people who sell to that sort of person as accessories to their crimes, etc, prosecuting people whose weapons are stolen and they don’t report it, etc. (No, no requirement to register many changes of ownership…you’ll just have to use last provable, etc.). That’s not MY view, that’s what the law seems to say!

Anyway - do you have a link on the 3d printer cartridge? Because it’d seem to need a high-end metal-etching one. Things like the “3d printed gun” are indeed dangerous…to the idiot who tries to fire them. And they’re less powerful than a high power slingshot.

3572

Hougan, all due respect, but did you just argue that if we ban large capacity magazines … People will make them on … 3-D printers? Holy cow. That’s an argument I’ve never heard, for sure.

3573

Not until the supply runs out, which might be decades. My point was that magazines are laughably easy to make compared to any other part of a firearm than maybe the stock. It’s a plastic box with a plastic molded follower and a spring, with a notch in the right position. I could make a working AR-15 magazine out of folded sheet metal and wood in my basement, no plastic needed. Granted I would have to wrap some steel wire around a block of wood to make the spring, which would be a solid 10 minute investment of time.

In the real world I would argue that the supply will never run out, AND the impact of high capacity magazines is low in the day-to-day grind of violence. They really only play in high-profile gang shootings and the occasional shooting spree, and even then we don’t see a significant correlation between deaths and magazines. If we’re talking about the real number generator, daily drug/gang/domestic violence, then magazine size seems almost contraindicated:

  1. Smith and Wesson .38 revolver
  2. Ruger 9 mm semiautomatic
  3. Lorcin Engineering .380 semiautomatic
  4. Raven Arms .25 semiautomatic
  5. Mossberg 12 gauge shotgun
  6. Smith and Wesson 9mm semiautomatic
  7. Smith and Wesson .357 revolver
  8. Bryco Arms 9mm semiautomatic
  9. Bryco Arms .380 semiautomatic
  10. Davis Industries .380 semiautomatic

That’s from 2000, I haven’t had much luck finding a newer list from the ATF.

http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,320383,00.html

Of that list, one of them I know has a capacity more than 5, the Ruger 9mm (variants of the P89 line) and perhaps the Bryco, I don’t know if they ever made a full sized pistol. The rest are 5 and 6 shot guns, and most of them are junk guns. Again, this seems like reverse trickle down theory, that if we ban all magazines that aren’t particularly being used in crime, we’ll somehow affect the ones that are.

3574

I think we’re talking about different things, then. No gun control measure will prevent the “drunk husband grabs the mossberg from under his bed and shoots his wife” scenario, and it’s probably impossible to stop gang-bangers from shooting each other. Stopping that would require a near total ban on firearms, which is completely implausible in this country.

If the discussion is about mass shootings, though, I think the lethality of the firearm makes more of a difference. You can kill a whole lot of people with a revolver, a pump-action shotgun or even a knife, but it’s easier with a semi-automatic assault rifle. I’m not sure if magazine capacity itself is a real factor here, but in a general sense, the type of weapon matters.

It also begs the question of whether we should be focusing on mass shootings as something appropriate for legislation. As horrific as they are, even as they become more commonplace, they’re still incredibly rare events. In the grand scheme of things that kill us, they barely show up on the chart. But if we, as a country, decide we do want to control these, your counterpoint that ‘most violent murders would not be affected’ would remain true, but not really on-point.

3575

I’d argue that killing people with a shotgun is easier than just about anything else. Reloading can easily be done before anyone could really react in most situations and with a handgun as a back up that wouldn’t be an issue in most cases either.

Hell shotguns are used by mass shooters about as often as rifles, and pistols are by far and away the most common weapon. “Assault weapons” are actually a minority, even in spree shootings.

In Columbine, Newtown and VA Tech none of them used a rifle. It was almost exclusively pistols and pistol caliber weapons with a couple shot guns. Columbine had a TEC-9 and carbine, but neither are remotely assault rifles, both were 9mm weapons.
Guy in California: Pistol and SUV.

Assault weapons aren’t used in these things. Pistols are.

3576

With mass shooters, I don’t know that it would have much of an effect, either. We can look at one particular shooting and say that it would have had an effect, but when you look across the range of them, I think the cause/effect is the reverse. For instance, Aurora would have been less deadly with a pistol than a rifle with an extended magazine (and shotgun and pistols,) no argument. However, it could be just as likely that the shooter chose that situation precisely because that’s what he had. If he only had pistols and ten round magazines, he likely wouldn’t have chosen to put himself in close proximity to dozens of people in an enclosed room. Instead, he might have roamed a college campus like the Virginia Tech shooting, which was pistol-only, and still the deadliest shooting the US has seen.

I don’t post these contradictory things to express a particular position, I’m torn on a lot of this stuff too. I just feel like I have to point out that the assumptions under which the arguments take place are often incorrect. In order of deadliness, the mass shootings in the US, weapon-wise, aren’t the way people commonly think:

  1. Pistols
  2. Rifle
  3. Pistols
  4. Submachine gun/shotgun/pistols
  5. Bolt action rifle
  6. Pistols
  7. Pistol
  8. Pistols
  9. Carbine/Pistols
  10. Rifle

And so on. There’s a lever-action cowboy gun in there, in fact.

3577

You’re grossly over-estimating 3-d printers. The ones which could make a metal magazine (or rather, one which will in theory work) are …well, home-made ones can be done for $60k, but I doubt they’re that reliable. (They don’t generally work with the sort of plastics suitable for magazines, except in the even /more/ expensive ones…). Heck, even with machine tools, it’s not that easy.

And yes, an unpublished study from 2000 - and no, the data is not collated these days (at least outside intelligence agencies). Remember why?

3578

Two things: the vast majority, and I’m talking 95%, of magazines are made out of plastic. It’s probably a good idea to assume that I know more about the base details of such things.

Second, you’re trying to allude to the NRA lobbying efforts, but that only applied to the CDC, not the ATF. If you want to assert otherwise, you have the burden of proof.

3579

So you didn’t read what I said about plastics and are claiming the NRA strictly limit their lobbying by agency.

Yea, going to just leave it.

3580

So explain first why the current 3rd magazines, which work fine, are somehow impossible (ignoring of course that a metal magazine, a simple stamped piece of steel, costs less than a plastic one. Less than a serious cup of espresso for that matter). Second, provide some proof that my simple failure to find a newer model breakdown means the information isn’t there. I looked for five minutes and was stymied because I was on my gaming PC that doesn’t have software to read excel files. The NRA, for all of its faults, is a tenth of the boogeyman that you require it to be.

3581

First Chipotle, now Target…

As you’ve likely seen in the media, there has been a debate about whether guests in communities that permit “open carry” should be allowed to bring firearms into Target stores. Our approach has always been to follow local laws, and of course, we will continue to do so. But starting today we will also respectfully request that guests not bring firearms to Target – even in communities where it is permitted by law.

We’ve listened carefully to the nuances of this debate and respect the protected rights of everyone involved. In return, we are asking for help in fulfilling our goal to create an atmosphere that is safe and inviting for our guests and team members.

This is a complicated issue, but it boils down to a simple belief: Bringing firearms to Target creates an environment that is at odds with the family-friendly shopping and work experience we strive to create.

I love that the blog is called “A Bullseye View.”

3582

Man they’re making so much headway with this “movement”.

Soon they’ll get no weapon signs enforced by the law. That’ll show them liberals!

3583

4th of July in Chicago!

So I am sure the majority of you here agree with that police superintendent but…really? The city of Chicago has some of the most restrictive gun laws in the USA. Clearly, they are not working. Right? That can not be up for debate, can it?

So, why aren’t they working? Because criminals ignore laws! That’s why! Its not a mystery. This is not a gun problem. Its a people problem.

3584

Your logic makes no sense, whatsoever. You could draw the conclusion that it is not a problem solvable by more gun laws, particular local-level laws. But to weirdly say it’s not a gun problem makes absolutely no sense when discussing shootings. It is, by definition, a problem involving guns. Hence, a gun problem.

The conclusion is, rightly, that a city (or even a state) passing gun laws is largely spitting in the wind when borders within the US are effectively non-existent. Guns have too much mobility in the US, not just geographically, but between owners.

3585

Nobody would want to have at home a toaster that can explode and kill people. But in USA they have weapons at home that a 5 years old can find and try to use against his 9 years old brother.

But some people profit from selling the toaster, so theres some narrative that people that want to ban these toasters are trying to restrict your freedom. So theres political activism against banning these exploding toasters. It don’t make sense and only benefict the factory of the deadly toasters, but past some point is some self-sustained ridiculous partisanism that make intelligent people feel I-don’t-want-to-live-in-this-planet-anymore. But this partisanism works!, these toasters are not banned, so they continue killing people.

3586

I’ve seen some bad analogies in my time, but that’s one of the worst.