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New York Passes Landmark Gun Law
New submitter mallyn points out that the state of New York has become the first state to pass a new gun control law since the school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary last month.
"Called the New York Safe Act, the law includes a tougher assault weapons ban that broadens the definition of what constitutes an assault weapon, and limits the capacity of magazines to seven bullets, down from 10. The law also requires background checks of ammunition and gun buyers, even in private sales, imposes tougher penalties for illegal gun use, a one-state check on all firearms purchases, and programs to cut gun violence in high-crime neighborhoods. ... New York's law also aims to keep guns out of the hands of those will mental illness. The law gives judges the power to require those who pose a threat to themselves or others get outpatient care. The law also requires that when a mental health professional determines a gun owner is likely to do harm, the risk must be reported and the gun removed by law enforcement."
Meanwhile, the Obama Administration is expected to propose a new federal assault weapons ban later today.
Considering how easy it would be to set off some of those cheap Blue-Rhino propane tanks and get a similar death-toll, I hop that NYC is going to have gas control next on the agenda.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
No criminal will dare violate the law now.
Of the ~750 murders with firearms a year in NY, 5 were with rifles of any kind... So, banning "assault rifles" is nothing other than a feel good measure to make idiots feel like they accomplished something.
All of this is nothing more than a circle jerk. They don't care about preventing real violence. Like bureaucrats, they want to pretend they are solving the problem but are actually doing nothing.
Actually, it does make a lot of popular guns illegal, and they are only cosmetically different from guns that remain legal. I'm sure that will fix everything.
Nobody's TERKIN YER GERNS
Yet. This little gem. The law also requires that when a mental health professional determines a gun owner is likely to do harm, the risk must be reported and the gun removed by law enforcement."
Is ripe for abuse, and I will enjoy seeing this bitch slapped down by the federal judiciary faster than you can say Zen Fascism. After all no bad law has ever been passed in the emotional furor after a tragedy.
I laughed at the weak who considered themselves good because they lacked claws.
Actually, they are. Detachable mag and one "military style" feature is now an evil "assault weapon". Owners have a brief period in which to sell them out of state. Seven round mags are simply not available, so just about all that's left are revolvers and old fashioned rifles.
There are some things that *ARE* being taken. M1 Garand has an internal magazine that holds 8. When you load it you load a clip of 8 and press it into the magazine. Because you have to load the gun with a full clip you are loading too many bullets into the gun when you load the gun (even if you then immediately remove one bullet from the gun, you are a criminal for having put 8 into it at once. Legally using this gun is very questionable in NYS right now. Does the gun count as a relic? It's greater than 50 years old on design, but there have been a large portion of these guns rebuilt in the last decade with new wood, etc. Does this affect the relic status?
Do you Gentoo!?
Lets say, you like firearms. But, lets say you are going through some troubling times personally and need to see a therapist.
We've seen the same thing in the military, people are afraid to ask for help, because they will be branded as having mental health problems and no longer be allowed to serve.
So, will the problem be made worse now?
Personally, I know this isn't a gun problem, it is a mental health problem. Mentally health people don't go mow down other human beings - only those with severe mental deficiencies do.
Sounds reasonable to me. There is no reason for anyone to have such a weapon, other than to cause mass mayhem.
I do not understand how any of these reduced clip laws, or assault rifle bans, get passed when it is supposed to be legal to operate and join a militia and to have the ability to fight your own government if they turn tyrannical enough.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Nationalism? Nah, we're a police state that's a beacon to those Communist nations, bent on proving that we are God.
Hey, let's apply these same changes to your right to free speech, this should be easy.
You can only write up to 7 paragraphs in an article.
Any web form that allows you to put more than 10 paragraphs into an article has to be destroyed or sold out of state.
You have to have a background check before submitting your article to anyone but immediate family.
You can only buy your text editor from a licensed dealer.
Your okay with all of those restrictions, right? You should be because I can promise that you that speech and ideas have killed far more people than guns ever have.
Actually, rampage killers typically create meticulous plans over time, they don't cool off, they build pressure.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
You're right, anyone could build what they need to spread murder and mayhem.
Here's my counterargument: Why don't they then? I mean, we supposedly have a bunch of terrorists in our midst, we have drug dealers and pimps all trying to carve out territory, and we have just plain crazy people who would love to blow things up or dose everyone with mustard gas. Surely, some of them would be enterprising enough to build and use these weapons on a regular basis. But in fact, napalm attacks don't happen.
Some reasons I can think of:
- It's hard to make those kinds of things just on the spur of the moment. Someone who's trying to make a shrapnel bomb has to carefully plan ahead, think things through, etc. By contrast, many shootings are where somebody's snapped and not really capable of doing that kind of planning.
- There's significant risk of screwing up when building such weapons and injuring / killing yourself. Most mass murderers aren't the sort of people that have learned how to properly handle explosives or chemical munitions. Even bad guys who have reason to know what they're doing have problems - there are cases of terrorists having their bomb blow up as they're driving to the Israeli border, for example.
- These weapons are all less portable and concealable than,say, a 9mm.
- Building these weapons takes considerably more brains than firing a gun. I grant you, the brains required are something along the lines of "Google it and follow the instructions", but there are a lot of people who can't handle that but can handle "point gun at target, squeeze trigger".
I am officially gone from
Sensible changes
[citation needed]
and increased penalties for violence
Studies have proven time and again that increased penalties don't significantly reduce violence. This is what is wrong with your side in this argument. You are not interested in facts. You are only interested in feeling good. You are not interested in freedom, because you are insufficiently responsible for it. So are many gun owners, but is that something that just happened or a situation deliberately fostered by our government, who wants us dumb so that we can be more readily controlled? How will giving up your right to meaningful self-defense (7 rounds? really? in a state known for gang violence?) increase your safety when the police have been shown to commit crimes at the same rate as the general population?
None of these laws are going to reduce crime. I will bet you a dollar that gun crime will in fact increase in NY after these changes.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Not just ripe for abuse, but now borderline people will have more of a reason to lie to their psychiatrists about their inner demons. I can see APA hating this.
Does it ban the gun used - No
Was the shooter diagnosed with mental illness - No
So after this legislation someone exactly the same as the shooter could still obtain the same gun in the same way, or buy it themselves so how exactly is this stopping this happening again?
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
The BIG convenience of owning a gun and ammunition is that I can take my amphetami^D^D^D prescription meds, drink a shot of jack and then impulsively decide to unload said gun on anyone that is within range, immediately, with immediate effect and a very low risk of danger to self.
The BIG convenience of owning a gun and ammunition is that I can take my gun and ammunition and defend my home from you, immediately, with immediate effect, without the high risk of waiting 20 minutes for the police to arrive.
And for dropping someone jacked up on drugs, 7 rounds might not be enough to get the job done definitively.
The intent of the new law is to make it more difficult for someone who intends to commit mass murder to be successful. The "two-feature" test never accomplished this. I'm not saying that the "one-feature" test is better, but let's stop pretending that the old law was effective.
Law abiding people won't bring guns into a "gun free zone", like schools, malls, etc. Criminals and mass murderers do so often. The results are predictable.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
They must be going after rifles because they know they'll have an easier time banning them than they will with handguns. It has nothing to do with whether or not it will help anyone or not.
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
The 'one feature' or 'two feature' generally does nothing to alter the functionality of the weapon. It is purely cosmetic. Different stock, different grip, different barrel. I used to own an AR-7. Small .22lr survival rifle. It could be changed from a now illegal (in NY) assault rifle to a legal hunting rifle in about 30 seconds, by simply changing the stock. It would still fire exactly the same.
"News for nerds" indeed. We don't come to Slashdot to read a day-late version of a story we've seen on many other general-interest news sites.
To quote Rowan Atkinson in The Thin Blue Line:
"It is my duty to ensure that only those people who _should_ be in possession of a handgun _are_ in possession of a handgun, in doing this I must judge their character.
With this duty in mind I have but two questions for anyone who comes asking such a licence; Would you like to own a gun? and, if I were to issue this licence, will you then take that licence and use it to procure said weapon?
If the applicant answers to both in the affirmative, then I deem that they are not really the sort of person who I feel should be in possession of a gun."
It's as unpopular a view to state in front of Americans and it is a popular one to state in front of non-gun-owning countries. The usual comeback is what would happen if someone breaks into my house with a weapon, don't I wish I had a gun then? Yes, but I wish harder that the other guy never was able to get hold of a gun in the first place, and that's made much easier by gun control for private hands.
In my entire life, I have never discharged a weapon. I have never held a weapon. I have never seen a real, live weapon except in an airport where the police are routinely armed. I have never seen a live weapon discharged in my entire life. I have lived and worked in some of the most horrible, manky, poor, deprived, crime-ridden areas of my country. I have had people try to walk into my house past me, and have had physical threats against my person.
And not once did I ever think "What this situation really needs is another gun".
I can't emphasise it enough, if you point a gun in my direction, accidentally or not, I will do anything up to and including killing you to stop that situation occurring or continuing. But owning a gun expressly for that purpose will only cause the same reaction from the other party.
You do realize that home invasions aren't always a single person. Groups of 2 or 3 are quite common. 7 rounds to deal with 3 intruders is getting pretty darned dicey.
Even trained law-enforcement when shooting typically have between a 17% and a 40% hit rate (that's not a hit to a vital area - just a hit at all), varying somewhat between what department you're looking at and what they're shooting at. Which means that even if you take the upper number of 40% a trained LEO is only likely to get 2.8 hits out of 7 shots.
Of course, the law-makers realize the foolishness of that and give the cops more bullets because they need them, but apparently the average citizen defending their home isn't worth as much.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
> Doesn't matter to all the junior McVeighs here on Slashdot
It's a matter of imagination, not subversion. Nanny state dependents with no imagination can't understand that there are other ways to engage in mayhem. We live in a highly advanced technological society with potentially dangerous materials all around us. We also live in a free society where knowledge about how to use and abuse such materials is freely available.
An industrial arts class from the 80s could probably get around this latest attempt at legislating away technology.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Since Australia enacted stricter gun control laws after a horrible mass shooting in 1996 there hasn't been one since:
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2012/1224/Could-the-US-learn-from-Australia-s-gun-control-laws
So you tell us again this won't fix the problem. Go ahead.
Adam broke into the safe while she was traveling. Then shot her with a .22 rifle when she returned, and finished his plans (a couple of days with her dead on the bed).
Safes keep children and lawyers from guns. There isn't a safe that will withstand a smart and determined attacker with time to get it open.
Next they'll be calling those hunting rifles "Sniper Rifles." Disarmament advocates are never satisfied.
I think that about sums it up. There is no rational reason for these guns at all in a domestic setting except for their own sake.
It's a matter of imagination, not subversion. Nanny state dependents with no imagination can't understand that there are other ways to engage in mayhem.
Yeah, but penis extension worshipers just don't get the kick from propane.
How this stupidity is moderated as informative I can't imagine. I suppose all the female gun owners have penis envy too? The weak people who defend themselves with guns just wish they had bigger dicks?
Grow up.
I should grow up?
You do know that Bushmaster were advertising the AR15 with the slogan "consider your man card reissued"?
I'm just assuming they know their market.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Should be 'New York Passes Useless Gun Control Law', since nothing in the law will make any positive difference in crime rates, and will only impact legal gun holders. My prediction is that like Chicago, New York will continue down the path of passing more and more restrictive gun control laws, which make it easier for criminals to commit more crimes and serve only to continue to drive their violent crime rates even higher above the national average. Meanwhile, I live in a community of over 600,000 people in a state with very few gun control laws (Arizona) that has a violent crime rate almost have the national average. Where I can open carry into a bank (and have) and no one runs out in fear, the tellers smile, say high, and take my deposit as if nothing was wrong.
Because nothing was wrong.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.