morven is your icon blushing, and was she blushing before? sorry for off topic but i legit don't know if her face was always pink and it's driving me slightly crazy.
My grandparents have a bunch of hunting shotguns, and I tried doing some sports shooting but there were no left-handed guns and, for some reason, this person over here with a bunch of mental disorders, no impulse control and occasional homicidal urges can't buy a gun. ETA: For reference, gun/hunting culture in Corsica is pretty big, but the French gun control laws still apply.
ohhhhh it's so tiny i couldn't tell, but of course it's shutter shades my icon had blue ones until earlier today when apparently everyone in that thread is marrying everyone or sth, so now i have a tux and flower hat.
http://www.cracked.com/article_20396_5-mind-blowing-facts-nobody-told-you-about-guns.html Cracked classic article advertised on my Facebook feed. Kek'd at the timing Edit to add: I only posted for the timing, not the article itself. The article makes fair points but ignores what was brought up in this thread, so really it's sort of subjective.
i live in rural virginia (well, rural-ish--most of the nearby house are on ~5 acre lots, a major route into d.c. is within a hundred yards of my house, and a small-ish town is spread over the next couple of miles). anyway, it's the east coast, "rural" is pretty densely populated out here. there's not a ton of wilderness, just a few state parks and some farms-and-woods-only stretches between towns. we still have a lot of predators in the area. mostly small ones--i've seen various birds of prey, possums, raccoons, and once a fox--but there are apparently coyotes in the area, and i learned a couple of weeks ago that there's even the occasional bear-sighting. oh, and weasels! i haven't seen any of those, but after something got into our chicken coop and slaughtered or maimed around a dozen chickens, we were told that it was probably a weasel. so i guess we have those too. we have a dog, which probably keeps a few things away, but we still lose several chickens/ducks/guinea fowl to predators every year. they usually come back for more, so we use traps and/or guns to deal with them. (sometime i will tell the horrifying story of how my brother's reluctance to shoot an animal in a cage got him an encounter with a zombie possum.) we also use guns for butchering our meat goats. Spoiler: story time: animal butchering with the amish once we had a pig which i named lambchop. when it was time to butcher it, my father asked the amish farmer he bought feed from if we could take the pig up to him and watch how he butchered it, because we'd never done anything that big before. i know, because he and my mother talked about it, that they were thinking that maybe the amish had a more refined method of butchering than blowing a hole in the animal's head, seeing as they're kind, old-fashioned pacifists. so the amish guy said yes and my father hauled lambchop up to his farm. they got the pig unloaded and gave it something to snack on, and then the amish guy went into his house, came out with a shotgun, and blew a hole in its head. so ... that's how we butcher our large animals. so defending our animals from predators and killing our animals is the main use of our guns. they could theoretically be used in self-defense, but when they're not in use we keep them unloaded and locked up/hidden, and i'm not actually sure i could retrieve and load one of them fast enough for it to do any good in the event of someone coming into our house with the intent to harm us. as children we never had toy guns (except for waterguns). we were allowed to play war games, but my mother had one very strictly enforced rule about those, which was that the person holding the gun was not allowed to shoot, or even point the gun, at noncombatants--that is, people not playing the game, or people playing the game but as emergency medical personnel or something. my brother who works with guns learned "never point a gun at something you're not willing to destroy" from the guy who ran his gun safety course, which seems like a good principle. overall, the people who worked with guns and taught me about guns emphasized that they're not toys, they're tools, and they're really good at what they're designed to do, so don't mess around when you're using them. and on that note:
Oof yeah foxes will fuck up your chicken coops something fierce. Of course, sometimes they're useful, like when you have an utterly vicious but gorgeous show rooster your family has forbidden you to shoot so you quarantine said rooster in a second pen to "protect the hens from him" ... and then pull up a small, say, fox sized corner of the chicken wire mesh and aw damn, guess we need a new, hand-tame rooster. My Pappa is a clever old cuss
Oh also I forgot, it wasn't actually legal to hunt in his area, since it was just outside of town, but his and all his neighbors' properties all backed up against an outdoor gun range, and they all understood that sometimes the "gun range" seemed awful loud and close during deer, duck and turkey season. And sometimes "get these damn deer out of my apple trees" season.
@Aviari that's hilarious. i've only seen a fox once, and it came right up to our house in broad daylight and looked really, really sick, so my brother had to go out and put it down. there was too much of a risk of it attacking (or being attacked by) someone's pet and spreading whatever-it-was-sick-with. we called animal control to find out if they wanted to come and get it to test for rabies, and they said ... they don't do that anymore? or they do but you have to pay them or something? so we'll never know what was wrong with the poor thing. somehow the gun range thing reminded me: i was over at a family-friend's house and saw a cop car crawling along the road. turns out, the police got a call from a person living on their street that someone was discharging a gun, and the police were like "...yes? probably someone was shooting at a deer eating their garden or doing target practice, but i guess we can patrol if that makes you feel better?" a ton of the people around here work in d.c., so we get a fair number of people moving down from there or from another city and being super confused to discover that guns are a thing for people who are neither police/military/private security nor organized crime.
In general I wish both major political parties would stop using guns for a political football. Neither wants practical, data-driven laws or to reach a sensible compromise. They make too much political capital being unreasonable.
the same could be said about just about any issue, tbh. the general public does not handle nuance well.
I'm sure you've all heard the phrase "He who defines the terms wins the argument"? That card is being played heavily with regards to gun control. In days of yore an MBR or main battle rifle was the standard issue weapon. It fired a high-powered, high velocity, thirty caliber round and had an effective range of around 800 yards. They were often bolt action or semi-automatic (one bullet per trigger pull), and occasionally fully-automatic (as in the BAR, or Browning Automatic Rifle. Hold down the trigger to keep spraying until you're empty). This arrangement worked well enough for open field and trench battles. In WWII troops were complaining that they couldn't carry enough ammo because it was too heavy. They noticed the BAR was very effective, but difficult to aim due to the recoil, and ran out of ammo far to fast. They tried machine pistols (fully automatic pistol caliber guns, bigger than a pistol but smaller than a rifle), but had trouble with the short effective range and having to stock both pistol and rifle cartridges. So they invented the assault rifle. The term "assault rifle", as it was used when coined, means a fully-automatic small-caliber rifle, such as the M-16. The M-16 fires a much smaller and lighter bullet that an MBR (.223" as opposed to .300") but at similar velocities. The smaller, lighter projectile requires less powder to accelerate, which means a smaller, lighter cartridge. They were called "assault rifles" because they were intended for use while assaulting machine gun nests and bunkers; effective range was around 400 yards, you could put a lot of lead out there to keep the enemy's head down while approaching, and you could carry enough ammo so as to not run out while doing so. The AR-15 is not an M-16. The AR-15 is semi-automatic, not fully-automatic. For comparison, a double action revolver is also semi-automatic. Most deer hunting rifles are semi-automatic. All that means is that you don't have to work the action between shots. Fully-automatic weapons have been illegal for common purchase and possession since the 1930's. So it's not an assault rifle. The rifle used in Orlando wasn't even an AR-15, it was an MCX. It's functionally pretty much the same, but saying he used an MCX wouldn't get the same emotional response. The term "assault weapon" is purely a political term. It was invented by politicians who didn't know much about guns, and as legally defined relies purely on aesthetic features like adjustable stocks, pistol grips and barrel shrouds. It has nothing to do with the functionality of a firearm. If I were to take an actual assault rifle, a fully-automatic M-16 (which has been illegal for civilians since before it's invention), and give it an old-fashioned stock and put in a smaller magazine, it would skirt the definition of "assault weapon". If I were to take a semi-automatic hunting rifle, put on a pistol-grip adjustable stock and a barrel shroud, and put in a larger magazine, it would instantly become an "assault weapon" according to legal definitions. This is a big reason the Clinton "Assault Weapon Ban" was ineffectual. It legislated the appearance of rifles. Oh, and none of the afore mentioned weapons is a "machine gun". A machine gun is a crew-served belt-fed fully-automatic weapon. So yeah, that's why I get a bit offended when people call for a ban on "assault weapons like the AR-15 machine gun" used in Orlando. That phrase is three lies stacked together. If we're going to have a civilized conversation both sides need to at least use the same definitions of words.
And gun control legislation will be ineffective without being drafted by people who understand firearms. Emotional intensity sans understanding makes for bad legislation. One long-standing trait in gun legislation that I abhor is the urge to make them more expensive. Politicians like those laws because they don't affect them or their donors. The electorate likes them because of their pre-existing bias that the poor are bad people, which ties into racism. But if there are legitimate reasons to own firearms, then the poor have just as good a reason as the rich.
Thought I'd put this here. When people can't buy guns they make them: https://homemadeguns.wordpress.com/
Such a device was used in the recent murder of British MP Jo Cox. It's hard to make a rifle that's accurate at distance at home. A pistol or sub-machinegun, suitable for close-quarters killing, is easy for any semi-competent metalworker. Many people intent on mass killing are quite capable of finding a way. Easy availability of firearms makes it an easy choice, but most would have been willing to go to greater lengths. Improvised explosive devices are simple as well. I think focusing on the rare case of mass murder is not going to save many lives. I also think the current definition used by e.g. the FBI for "mass shooting" is unhelpful; they define mass shooting as 3 or more casualties, which is unhelpful except for propaganda purposes. It includes several different classes of crime. An indiscriminate spree killer is not the same thing as a multi-victim gang hit; neither is the family murder-suicide.
Indeed. Violent crime isn't even on the CDC's top 15 list for causes of death in the US. It's less than 0.7%, or 7 in 1000: In 2013, a total of 2,596,993 resident deaths were registered in the United States. • The age-adjusted death rate, which accounts for the aging of the population, was 731.9 deaths per 100,000 U.S. standard population. • Life expectancy at birth was 78.8 years. • The 15 leading causes of death in 2013 were: 1. Diseases of heart (heart disease) 2. Malignant neoplasms (cancer) 3. Chronic lower respiratory diseases 4. Accidents (unintentional injuries) 5. Cerebrovascular diseases (stroke) 6. Alzheimer’s disease 7. Diabetes mellitus (diabetes) 8. Influenza and pneumonia 9. Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome and nephrosis (kidney disease) 10. Intentional self-harm (suicide) 11. Septicemia 12. Chronic liver disease and cirrhosis 13. Essential hypertension and hypertensive renal disease (hypertension) 14. Parkinson’s disease 15. Pneumonitis due to solids and liquids http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr64/nvsr64_02.pdf So if we're really willing to do whatever it takes to save lives, there's a lot of lower hanging fruit than violent crime, and in the violent crime category there's a lot of lower hanging fruit than mass killings.
Exactly. When are we going going to get laws informed by rational analysis? Probably never :( One thing I keep seeing people say is that there's no way a bolt-action rifle can shoot as fast as a semi-auto. Unaimed fire, perhaps, but I know that I can shoot as quickly with an old Lee-Enfield as I can with a semi-auto if every shot is aimed. And so can everyone who puts in a bit of practice.
One proposal I have seen that might make sense is limiting magazine/clip sizes to ~10. That might force people to take breaks to reload and give an opportunity to stop them. I haven't thought really hard about that proposal yet.
