How about you show me where it says "only firearms that the Government chooses to allow the people to own." Also consider that that the Constitution and Bill of Rights were written in a manner that made it clear that if the documents didn't specifically limit something, then there were no restrictions.
I greatly enjoy target shooting with my PS90, AR15's and even my 10/22 and there is absolutely no reason to not have 50, 30 and 10 round magazines for these to appease someone like you is afraid of law abiding citizens and inanimate objects.
The Constitution doesn't specifically restrict air pollution, because that wasn't around to be restricted in 1789. But the Courts nonetheless allowed the Clean Air Act. The government has quite a few powers to do things in 2012 that it did not have in 1789.
Nobody's afraid of you as a law-abiding citizen. What scares us shitless is that you have friends and family who know where your firearms are. Nancy Lamza was you. She was as responsible as you are. She was a good person. But due to the fact she had the same hobby as you she was shot, and her son took out 20 first-graders for reasons that are still unclear. If she'd been a LARPer instead she probably still would have died (most LARPers have real, or at least real-looking, swords in their homes), but it's entirely possible those kids would have lived.
That wants to kill. I can build a gun in less than 3 days from parts at a home improvement store. making black powder is easy. But if I do that, why not just build pipe bombs instead. Those are far more effective and stop guys in ballistic armor.
Only fools think that gun controls will stop the sick minded disturbed people from killing.
You're assuming sick-minded fools have technical skills. They apparently don't, because the sick-minded fools in China are using legal knives rather then illegal firearms. Their sick-minded fools kill a lot less people then ours do.
You do understand that laws don't work by magic, right?
It is a lot more complicated than that.
LK
This would be easier to enforce then you'd think.
Criminals will actually be the last people to hold on to these weapons. If all it takes to have your entire operation investigated by the cops is a neighbor noticing you have an AR-15 you damn well don't have AR-15s lying around where curious cops can find them. That's why none of the criminals involved in any massacre using an AR-15 bothered pushing out the one pin that stops it from firing full auto.
If there was a buyback program, and the Feds got a warrant for the records of companies that sell these things; a lot of refuseniks would be tracked down.
You might get some wildcat manufacturing of illegal firearms, but criminals aren't bothering to manufacture RPG-7s or full-auto AK-74s, when either could be made fairly simply at any machine shop. Why would they bother doing it with AR-15s or high-capacity clips?
So, yes, if city-boys controlled Congress and the Presidency, and they decided to spend tax money on buying up all "modern rifles," and "high-capacity clips," then criminal usage of said things would drop to zero. The problem is city-boys don't control either House of Congress, not that the idea is actually unworkable.
this sort of thing would only work in a Star Trek perfect-ed world.
Just one example comes to mind: what if a bad guy is holding my kid with a knife to his throat and I can take him out with a double-tap to the head? Oops - my super smart gun won't let me because I'm aiming near a child. Sorry kid - better luck in your next life:/
And if you'd risk missing the dude's head, or having him stab the kid in his death throws, you probably aren't a very good father.
The government must fear pissing off its citizens. Guns are power. Do you want only the military and the police to have power? Society works best when all types of power are distributed and not concentrated in just a few areas or restricted to just a few people or groups.
I sure wouldn't want the government or military to be able to turn off our weapons, and I sure don't support laws that say only the military and police can have the most powerful weapons. That puts the balance of power away from the people.
Actually yes, I want only the government to have physical power.
The reason is simple: historically the Federal government has almost never oppressed individuals. Generally when it did (the Sioux, Japanese-American Internment), the alternative to using jack-booted thugs was sitting back and letting armed vigilantes engage in genocide.
OTOH from the 1870s-1950s private citizens in the South engaged in a very purposeful campaign of genocidal terrorism against their black neighbors. It worked fairly well -- the black population dropped roughly 20 points in Dixie during those years -- and only stopped when Eisenhower decided to send in the jack-booted thugs of the 101st Airborne.
And if the argument is going to be "it'll be legally mandated that all guns have this," you run into the same problem that gun control laws run into right now. Criminals - especially those who are planning on committing multiple murders and probably killing themselves in the process - really don't give a crap about following the law.
I agree with the rest of your post, but this is just silly.
Lamza used legal weapons. The VA-Tech shooter used legal weapons. The Aurora shooter used legal weapons. Despite the fact an AR-15 can easily be modified to make it more lethal and illegal the police almost never engage in firefights with criminals who have actually illegally modified their weapons.
We can argue about the reasons until the end of time, but the simple fact is that very few criminals carry weapons that are illegal for a civilian to posses.
If every gun is supposed to have one of these chips, all guns that don't are confiscated, and it requires actual work to get rid of said chip without automatically alerting the cops; then very few criminals will bother messing with the chip.
Question: When, in American history has freedom ever been secured by privately-owned firearms?
Never. The Revolution was not secured until Congress bought a whole bunch of guns for the Continental Army. The Civil War was a war against tyranny, and it was fought with a fairly significant proportion of private firearms, but the private-firearms-using troops were almost all the pro-tyranny Confederates.
After the war Confederate veterans partially restored their tyranny with a genocidal campaign of terrorism carried out entirely by privately-owned firearms.
BTW, if you think an AR-15 is any good against US Troops just ask an Iraq vet: were more casualties caused by AKs or IEDs? HJell ask a VBietnam vet about AKs vs. booby traps. The Mythbusters know a lot more about how to beat the US Army then anyone in the NRA because hey can figure out how to blow up a tank using coffee creamer.
And where, pray tell, would criminals get six-shooters if six-shooters were illegal?
That's the problem with every argument based on the idea that criminals are well-armed. When guns are banned criminals are the very first people to give them up because criminals do not want to be arrested for carrying a weapon that's clearly illegal. Japan is the perfect example. The Yakuza will actually punish any of their members who acquires a gun because the police are sure to arrest that guy, and then the local Yakuza boss gets to go to jail.
I'm amused that the poster uses the phrase "completely fails to see any possible technical problems with this". It's an article about a possibility. Of course it's not going to get into possible problems with implementation details that don't exist yet. Bad editorialisation sucks (and slashdot is chock-full of radical individualists who provide a lot of that), but here the editor doesn't even finish his/her idea. If you want to express that technolibertarian rage, try harder:)
The main technical problem with something like this isn't actually technically a technical problem because it has nothing to do with whether technology actually works reliably.
It's that we've got hundreds of millions of gun which do not have this feature, and are completely legal. While this would make the Va Tech shooter's murders less likely, because they purpose-buy their weapons; it would actually make murder easier for the Adam Lamzas of the world because their stolen firearms are old enough not to have the new smartgun feature.
To get this done we'd need a government that a) had the legal authority to buy up all 100 million of those weapons, b) had the money necessary to do so, and c) had the ability to move a bill authorizing this purchase through the US Congress. a) is unlikely to be upheld by the Courts, given that the Roberts Court is moving ever closer towards declaring the NRA's guns as individual rights position to be valid, b) just won't happen until the economy's turned around, and for c) to happen you'd need the Dems to take the US House (not happening until they redraw the district lines in 2020) and a Senate dominated by rural gun-rights interests to agree.
Now, if you could develop a magical weapon that could drop an armed suspect without killing him, sure, that would be nice, but it is VERY difficult to develop such a thing or they would be around already. There is a fine line between delivering enough force to stop somebody from doing what they are doing (and make sure they stay stopped, every time) and delivering enough force to actually kill them. Since even multiple gun shots are often not enough to immediately stop a psycho high on drugs and/or adrenaline, what chance does a rubber bullet or something like that have?
The difficulty with developing non-lethal weapons is that it has to be non-lethal for everyone. A tranq-gun works great, if you happen to know exactly the gender and weight of the person you'll be shooting at so you can get the dose right. If you go to high you'll kill your target with one shot. If you go to low you'll have to shoot your target multiple times, which is a pain, and since two shots each capable of knocking out a 90-lb person will kill a 120-lb person...
Things like pepper spray and stun-guns are easier to calibrate, but also very close range and they take a while to work.
This is the problem with the public. You want to end spending but because this is a republican and he has some agenda revolving around the law he introduced (probably just to make the president look bad) you denounce it. Instead, support legislation that achieves your goals. I'll vote for anyone that'll lower taxes and spend less. Unfortunately that amounts to pretty much no-one in either party and I'm only allowed to vote for those 2 parties so I'm screwed.
Here's the thing about democracy: it's not a dictatorship of you.
The reason you only have two choices is that people like you don't do the work necessary to sustain a third party. Most don't even know the work required, and very few even bother getting past the easy stuff (filing the forms with a state, writing a platform, holding a convention, talking to the media) when they realize they'll have to compromise their personal views at all. They think everyone has a right to an ideological clone who works 70-hours a week for a month before the election, even in non-Presidential years.
I suspect what most of these people want isn't an actual third party, because that isn't hard to get, but they want an excuse for not showing up on election day that doesn't sound like an admission of laziness. So they learn exactly enough about public policy to decry both parties and then mindlessly repeat it whenever somebody asks if they voetd.
And if the UK bans all non-imitation and non-airgun firearms one would expect that criminals would turn to imitation firearms and airguns. Simple supply and demand. The supply of real guns is cut off, therefore price goes up, therefore people (including criminals) turn to alternatives. s for airgun deadliness, do you have any idea how much the NRA would howl if somebody used a crime committed by an airsoft as evidence that real guns need to be controlled? They'd be convinced that the anti-gun dude was proving he knew squat about guns. But now that the anti-gun dude is saying "hey, airguns don't count," the NRA-type is saying "clearly you, anti-gun-dude, do not understand that airguns are real guns."
As for Aussie gun laws, again it depends on how you define strict. In terms of handguns yes, it was quite strict. But there was no regulation at all on the weapons used in the Port Arthur massacre because Tasmania refused to implement them. But if you play with the definition enough everybody has both weak and strong gun control because everybody bans something (AFAIK RPGs are illegal even in third world countries that tolerate private ownership of AKs), but not everything (even the Brits have airguns).
The relevant question is not whether a sophist make the gun laws look 'weak' or 'strict,' what's rel;event is whether the relevant gun restriction does what it is supposed to do. And the simple fact is that Tasmania in the pre-Port Arthur era allowed pretty much anyone to buy long guns with minimal checking, and they didn't really bother with the checking. Since then you can't buy a lot of massacre-friendly long guns.
Which has solved the gun massacre problem completely.
The Port Arthur Massacre is the reason Australia has those strict gun control laws. It was April 28th, the gun buy-back scheme did not start until October.
Please name the British massacres. They have had one since they tightened their gun laws in '97 as a response to Dunblane, but one is not plural, and in a country 1/5 of our population you'd expect two or three. Given your poor ability to grasp the linear nature of time, I'm fairly confident you're just wrong about math too. Especially since British gun crime stats include toy guns and air guns.
And how many of these guys would be willing to turn their weapons in to the police for a month to be fitted with a loaded chamber indicator? How many would freak out if you proposed mandating new weapons have such an indicator?
How many oppose even the concept of a smart-gun that can only be fired by authorized people? How many freak out when closing the gun show loophole, which allows crazy axe-murderers to buy literally anything, gets opposed?
Too many gun-owners are a lot like drivers. They're absolutely convinced they are perfectly safe, therefore the rules are more like guidelines. Only idiots/irresponsible people/etc. ever actually get hurt. And of course it's the guys most like this who make the rules neccesary.
Depends on what you mean by promised. If you mean "exactly what my grandpa gets today, for the low-low-low taxes he paid in," hell no. But I'm only 31, so that's never really been promised me.
If you mean something that's a less then he gets but pretty close (ie: 80%), for the same taxes; or the same as he gets for more (ie: 120%) in taxes then yes.
The numbers for Social Security are actually pretty easy to bring into balance. You could fix it completely by either eliminating the cap on social security tax paid, without increasing benefits for the wealthiest; or by cutting benefits. Medicare is more trouble, but that's because US Healthcare as a whole is the place where money goes to die.
I suspect a solution one way or the other will be found next time the American people make up their damn minds and pick a Senate, House, and President all of the same party.
Don't forget to outlaw sheet metal brakes, tin snips, bandsaws and anything else that can be used to make high capacity magazines (protip, ammo clips only come in 10 rounds for the ar-15 so there are no high or low capacity clips). I would suspect most major criminal operations don't bother making their own high capacity magazines however, it's simpler to buy or steal them from militaries around the world. So don't forget to limit our own military guys to 10 round magazines as well.
Perfect logic.
The problem is several countries have banned these things, and those countries do not have massacres.
In science perfect logic that does not jive with experimental data is called "Philosophy."
OK but who has standing to sue if the county does nothing but comply? Maybe a permit holder, but again nothing has changed when the county stands up to the state like this. I just don't see how the county refusing to do this prevents a legal challenge from occurring.
You answered the question. Permit holders have the right to sue. They have actually been damaged by the information release, therefore there is a case before the Courts.
You have also failed to answer the question of who actually has the right to sue in Putnam County, NY. Which means that, according to you, it is impossible for anyone in Putnam County but Putnam County itself to sue. I'm not sure you;re right on that. To my knowledge no local unit of government has ever managed to win a Court case banning a policy they failed to implement on the grounds of the Federal Constitution. That doesn't mean that it's impossible, or that it never happened, it just means it doesn't happen nearly as often as state-level policies being over-turned because of lawsuits from private citizens.
And if you re-read my arguments you'll note I didn't go so far as to say "prevent," I said it would make it less likely to happen. {Putnam would not lose standing to sue by agreeing to the FOIA, but thousands of it's residents do lose standing. That makes it less likely that it will happen
The argument I've been refuting for days is that privately-owned firearms are a necessary check on government power. For that specific argument, who actually purchased the firearm in the first place is more important then any other factor. Government-purchased firearms = government power = potential for oppression, while privately purchased firearms = check on government power = freedom.
Criminals like Adam Lamza will steal from lawful citizens, therefore if you make it illegal to own AR-15s and high capacity ammo clips and do a mandatory buyback criminals will no longer be able to find AR-15s with high capacity clips.
How exactly is this mandatory buyback going to work? Cause I think if I were a criminal with a AR15 magazine and they announced a mandatory buyback, as soon as I got done laughing, I'd start figuring how my illegally owned and wholly unregistered stack of AR15 mags were going to help me out.
This logic actually works for handguns, but AR-15s are a different beast. For example, Australia did it's buyback, and since then crime committed with these weapons has gone to zero.
The reason is pretty simple. Humans either plan ahead or they don't. If they're criminal people who don't they don't have an AR-15 unless they're gonna use it like tomorrow. Which means pretty much none of these criminals actually posses an AR-15. If they're criminal people who plan ahead they realize that AR-15s have suddenly become a quick trip to jail.
Always remember: a criminal's number one priority is not getting caught. And it's really hard not to get caught if people notice you;re carrying a clearly illegal weapon.
The majority of the colonies were rebels, therefore the Tyrannical Majority won and a full 5% of the population fled to Canada.
The South's government was certainly tyrannical, probably as bad as the Soviets, and probably wouldn't have won a majority for secession in fair referendums that allowed slaves to vote. But once it succeeded in seceding the majority was clearly on the side of the rebels.
Moreover if that's the best you can do you've neatly illustrated the pointlessness of using your personal gun to fight tyranny. The colonists won some battles with personal weapons, but could not have won the war without Washington's Army, and Washington's Army used government muskets.
The very first skirmishes of the Civil War used local militias with their own weapons, but that didn't last. By Bull Run pretty much everyone was using a weapon the government paid for.
Moreover in the Civil War the South had a strong militia system before-hand. It wasn't Billy Bob and random neighbor Zeke shoot yankees, it was Lt. General Lee of the Virginia militia orders the Third Virginia Infantry to advance at a run. Gun-owners today don't belong to that kind of organization.
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How about you show me where it says "only firearms that the Government chooses to allow the people to own." Also consider that that the Constitution and Bill of Rights were written in a manner that made it clear that if the documents didn't specifically limit something, then there were no restrictions.
I greatly enjoy target shooting with my PS90, AR15's and even my 10/22 and there is absolutely no reason to not have 50, 30 and 10 round magazines for these to appease someone like you is afraid of law abiding citizens and inanimate objects.
The Constitution doesn't specifically restrict air pollution, because that wasn't around to be restricted in 1789. But the Courts nonetheless allowed the Clean Air Act. The government has quite a few powers to do things in 2012 that it did not have in 1789.
Nobody's afraid of you as a law-abiding citizen. What scares us shitless is that you have friends and family who know where your firearms are. Nancy Lamza was you. She was as responsible as you are. She was a good person. But due to the fact she had the same hobby as you she was shot, and her son took out 20 first-graders for reasons that are still unclear. If she'd been a LARPer instead she probably still would have died (most LARPers have real, or at least real-looking, swords in their homes), but it's entirely possible those kids would have lived.
That's why I'd love it if your hobby was banned.
When's the last-time you heard or a murderer with the skills necessary to make homemade bullets?
That wants to kill. I can build a gun in less than 3 days from parts at a home improvement store. making black powder is easy. But if I do that, why not just build pipe bombs instead. Those are far more effective and stop guys in ballistic armor.
Only fools think that gun controls will stop the sick minded disturbed people from killing.
You're assuming sick-minded fools have technical skills. They apparently don't, because the sick-minded fools in China are using legal knives rather then illegal firearms. Their sick-minded fools kill a lot less people then ours do.
You do understand that laws don't work by magic, right?
It is a lot more complicated than that.
LK
This would be easier to enforce then you'd think.
Criminals will actually be the last people to hold on to these weapons. If all it takes to have your entire operation investigated by the cops is a neighbor noticing you have an AR-15 you damn well don't have AR-15s lying around where curious cops can find them. That's why none of the criminals involved in any massacre using an AR-15 bothered pushing out the one pin that stops it from firing full auto.
If there was a buyback program, and the Feds got a warrant for the records of companies that sell these things; a lot of refuseniks would be tracked down.
You might get some wildcat manufacturing of illegal firearms, but criminals aren't bothering to manufacture RPG-7s or full-auto AK-74s, when either could be made fairly simply at any machine shop. Why would they bother doing it with AR-15s or high-capacity clips?
So, yes, if city-boys controlled Congress and the Presidency, and they decided to spend tax money on buying up all "modern rifles," and "high-capacity clips," then criminal usage of said things would drop to zero. The problem is city-boys don't control either House of Congress, not that the idea is actually unworkable.
this sort of thing would only work in a Star Trek perfect-ed world.
Just one example comes to mind: what if a bad guy is holding my kid with a knife to his throat and I can take him out with a double-tap to the head? Oops - my super smart gun won't let me because I'm aiming near a child. Sorry kid - better luck in your next life :/
And if you'd risk missing the dude's head, or having him stab the kid in his death throws, you probably aren't a very good father.
The government must fear pissing off its citizens. Guns are power. Do you want only the military and the police to have power? Society works best when all types of power are distributed and not concentrated in just a few areas or restricted to just a few people or groups.
I sure wouldn't want the government or military to be able to turn off our weapons, and I sure don't support laws that say only the military and police can have the most powerful weapons. That puts the balance of power away from the people.
Actually yes, I want only the government to have physical power.
The reason is simple: historically the Federal government has almost never oppressed individuals. Generally when it did (the Sioux, Japanese-American Internment), the alternative to using jack-booted thugs was sitting back and letting armed vigilantes engage in genocide.
OTOH from the 1870s-1950s private citizens in the South engaged in a very purposeful campaign of genocidal terrorism against their black neighbors. It worked fairly well -- the black population dropped roughly 20 points in Dixie during those years -- and only stopped when Eisenhower decided to send in the jack-booted thugs of the 101st Airborne.
You can out-run him. You've got longer legs.
And if the argument is going to be "it'll be legally mandated that all guns have this," you run into the same problem that gun control laws run into right now. Criminals - especially those who are planning on committing multiple murders and probably killing themselves in the process - really don't give a crap about following the law.
I agree with the rest of your post, but this is just silly.
Lamza used legal weapons. The VA-Tech shooter used legal weapons. The Aurora shooter used legal weapons. Despite the fact an AR-15 can easily be modified to make it more lethal and illegal the police almost never engage in firefights with criminals who have actually illegally modified their weapons.
We can argue about the reasons until the end of time, but the simple fact is that very few criminals carry weapons that are illegal for a civilian to posses.
If every gun is supposed to have one of these chips, all guns that don't are confiscated, and it requires actual work to get rid of said chip without automatically alerting the cops; then very few criminals will bother messing with the chip.
Question:
When, in American history has freedom ever been secured by privately-owned firearms?
Never. The Revolution was not secured until Congress bought a whole bunch of guns for the Continental Army. The Civil War was a war against tyranny, and it was fought with a fairly significant proportion of private firearms, but the private-firearms-using troops were almost all the pro-tyranny Confederates.
After the war Confederate veterans partially restored their tyranny with a genocidal campaign of terrorism carried out entirely by privately-owned firearms.
BTW, if you think an AR-15 is any good against US Troops just ask an Iraq vet: were more casualties caused by AKs or IEDs? HJell ask a VBietnam vet about AKs vs. booby traps. The Mythbusters know a lot more about how to beat the US Army then anyone in the NRA because hey can figure out how to blow up a tank using coffee creamer.
And where, pray tell, would criminals get six-shooters if six-shooters were illegal?
That's the problem with every argument based on the idea that criminals are well-armed. When guns are banned criminals are the very first people to give them up because criminals do not want to be arrested for carrying a weapon that's clearly illegal. Japan is the perfect example. The Yakuza will actually punish any of their members who acquires a gun because the police are sure to arrest that guy, and then the local Yakuza boss gets to go to jail.
I'm amused that the poster uses the phrase "completely fails to see any possible technical problems with this". It's an article about a possibility. Of course it's not going to get into possible problems with implementation details that don't exist yet. Bad editorialisation sucks (and slashdot is chock-full of radical individualists who provide a lot of that), but here the editor doesn't even finish his/her idea. If you want to express that technolibertarian rage, try harder :)
The main technical problem with something like this isn't actually technically a technical problem because it has nothing to do with whether technology actually works reliably.
It's that we've got hundreds of millions of gun which do not have this feature, and are completely legal. While this would make the Va Tech shooter's murders less likely, because they purpose-buy their weapons; it would actually make murder easier for the Adam Lamzas of the world because their stolen firearms are old enough not to have the new smartgun feature.
To get this done we'd need a government that a) had the legal authority to buy up all 100 million of those weapons, b) had the money necessary to do so, and c) had the ability to move a bill authorizing this purchase through the US Congress. a) is unlikely to be upheld by the Courts, given that the Roberts Court is moving ever closer towards declaring the NRA's guns as individual rights position to be valid, b) just won't happen until the economy's turned around, and for c) to happen you'd need the Dems to take the US House (not happening until they redraw the district lines in 2020) and a Senate dominated by rural gun-rights interests to agree.
Now, if you could develop a magical weapon that could drop an armed suspect without killing him, sure, that would be nice, but it is VERY difficult to develop such a thing or they would be around already. There is a fine line between delivering enough force to stop somebody from doing what they are doing (and make sure they stay stopped, every time) and delivering enough force to actually kill them. Since even multiple gun shots are often not enough to immediately stop a psycho high on drugs and/or adrenaline, what chance does a rubber bullet or something like that have?
The difficulty with developing non-lethal weapons is that it has to be non-lethal for everyone. A tranq-gun works great, if you happen to know exactly the gender and weight of the person you'll be shooting at so you can get the dose right. If you go to high you'll kill your target with one shot. If you go to low you'll have to shoot your target multiple times, which is a pain, and since two shots each capable of knocking out a 90-lb person will kill a 120-lb person...
Things like pepper spray and stun-guns are easier to calibrate, but also very close range and they take a while to work.
This is the problem with the public. You want to end spending but because this is a republican and he has some agenda revolving around the law he introduced (probably just to make the president look bad) you denounce it. Instead, support legislation that achieves your goals. I'll vote for anyone that'll lower taxes and spend less. Unfortunately that amounts to pretty much no-one in either party and I'm only allowed to vote for those 2 parties so I'm screwed.
Here's the thing about democracy: it's not a dictatorship of you.
The reason you only have two choices is that people like you don't do the work necessary to sustain a third party. Most don't even know the work required, and very few even bother getting past the easy stuff (filing the forms with a state, writing a platform, holding a convention, talking to the media) when they realize they'll have to compromise their personal views at all. They think everyone has a right to an ideological clone who works 70-hours a week for a month before the election, even in non-Presidential years.
I suspect what most of these people want isn't an actual third party, because that isn't hard to get, but they want an excuse for not showing up on election day that doesn't sound like an admission of laziness. So they learn exactly enough about public policy to decry both parties and then mindlessly repeat it whenever somebody asks if they voetd.
And if the UK bans all non-imitation and non-airgun firearms one would expect that criminals would turn to imitation firearms and airguns. Simple supply and demand. The supply of real guns is cut off, therefore price goes up, therefore people (including criminals) turn to alternatives. s for airgun deadliness, do you have any idea how much the NRA would howl if somebody used a crime committed by an airsoft as evidence that real guns need to be controlled? They'd be convinced that the anti-gun dude was proving he knew squat about guns. But now that the anti-gun dude is saying "hey, airguns don't count," the NRA-type is saying "clearly you, anti-gun-dude, do not understand that airguns are real guns."
As for Aussie gun laws, again it depends on how you define strict. In terms of handguns yes, it was quite strict. But there was no regulation at all on the weapons used in the Port Arthur massacre because Tasmania refused to implement them. But if you play with the definition enough everybody has both weak and strong gun control because everybody bans something (AFAIK RPGs are illegal even in third world countries that tolerate private ownership of AKs), but not everything (even the Brits have airguns).
The relevant question is not whether a sophist make the gun laws look 'weak' or 'strict,' what's rel;event is whether the relevant gun restriction does what it is supposed to do. And the simple fact is that Tasmania in the pre-Port Arthur era allowed pretty much anyone to buy long guns with minimal checking, and they didn't really bother with the checking. Since then you can't buy a lot of massacre-friendly long guns.
Which has solved the gun massacre problem completely.
According to Wikipedia the state of Tasmania where Port Arthur happened had virtually no gun control on long guns in 1996, and British gun crime stats include "imitation guns."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_Australia#Federation_and_the_rise_of_regulation_in_the_20th_century
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_the_United_Kingdom#Firearms_crime
Dude,
The Port Arthur Massacre is the reason Australia has those strict gun control laws. It was April 28th, the gun buy-back scheme did not start until October.
Please name the British massacres. They have had one since they tightened their gun laws in '97 as a response to Dunblane, but one is not plural, and in a country 1/5 of our population you'd expect two or three. Given your poor ability to grasp the linear nature of time, I'm fairly confident you're just wrong about math too. Especially since British gun crime stats include toy guns and air guns.
i don't know any 'gun guys' who feel this way.
And how many of these guys would be willing to turn their weapons in to the police for a month to be fitted with a loaded chamber indicator? How many would freak out if you proposed mandating new weapons have such an indicator?
How many oppose even the concept of a smart-gun that can only be fired by authorized people? How many freak out when closing the gun show loophole, which allows crazy axe-murderers to buy literally anything, gets opposed?
Too many gun-owners are a lot like drivers. They're absolutely convinced they are perfectly safe, therefore the rules are more like guidelines. Only idiots/irresponsible people/etc. ever actually get hurt. And of course it's the guys most like this who make the rules neccesary.
Depends on what you mean by promised. If you mean "exactly what my grandpa gets today, for the low-low-low taxes he paid in," hell no. But I'm only 31, so that's never really been promised me.
If you mean something that's a less then he gets but pretty close (ie: 80%), for the same taxes; or the same as he gets for more (ie: 120%) in taxes then yes.
The numbers for Social Security are actually pretty easy to bring into balance. You could fix it completely by either eliminating the cap on social security tax paid, without increasing benefits for the wealthiest; or by cutting benefits. Medicare is more trouble, but that's because US Healthcare as a whole is the place where money goes to die.
I suspect a solution one way or the other will be found next time the American people make up their damn minds and pick a Senate, House, and President all of the same party.
If they're criminal people who plan ahead they realize that AR-15s have suddenly become a quick trip to jail.
They're only going to jail if they get caught. And it's really hard to get caught if your only witnesses are dead or too terrified to testify.
Even if you haven't actually used the weapon yet anyone who sees it is a witness against you.
That's why Australia doesn't have crime committed with AR-15s/
So who in the State Assembly is gonna vote for this?
Why would the Governor sign it?
Don't forget to outlaw sheet metal brakes, tin snips, bandsaws and anything else that can be used to make high capacity magazines (protip, ammo clips only come in 10 rounds for the ar-15 so there are no high or low capacity clips). I would suspect most major criminal operations don't bother making their own high capacity magazines however, it's simpler to buy or steal them from militaries around the world. So don't forget to limit our own military guys to 10 round magazines as well.
Perfect logic.
The problem is several countries have banned these things, and those countries do not have massacres.
In science perfect logic that does not jive with experimental data is called "Philosophy."
OK but who has standing to sue if the county does nothing but comply? Maybe a permit holder, but again nothing has changed when the county stands up to the state like this. I just don't see how the county refusing to do this prevents a legal challenge from occurring.
You answered the question. Permit holders have the right to sue. They have actually been damaged by the information release, therefore there is a case before the Courts.
You have also failed to answer the question of who actually has the right to sue in Putnam County, NY. Which means that, according to you, it is impossible for anyone in Putnam County but Putnam County itself to sue. I'm not sure you;re right on that. To my knowledge no local unit of government has ever managed to win a Court case banning a policy they failed to implement on the grounds of the Federal Constitution. That doesn't mean that it's impossible, or that it never happened, it just means it doesn't happen nearly as often as state-level policies being over-turned because of lawsuits from private citizens.
And if you re-read my arguments you'll note I didn't go so far as to say "prevent," I said it would make it less likely to happen. {Putnam would not lose standing to sue by agreeing to the FOIA, but thousands of it's residents do lose standing. That makes it less likely that it will happen
"Functional difference"?
The argument I've been refuting for days is that privately-owned firearms are a necessary check on government power. For that specific argument, who actually purchased the firearm in the first place is more important then any other factor. Government-purchased firearms = government power = potential for oppression, while privately purchased firearms = check on government power = freedom.
Criminals like Adam Lamza will steal from lawful citizens, therefore if you make it illegal to own AR-15s and high capacity ammo clips and do a mandatory buyback criminals will no longer be able to find AR-15s with high capacity clips.
How exactly is this mandatory buyback going to work? Cause I think if I were a criminal with a AR15 magazine and they announced a mandatory buyback, as soon as I got done laughing, I'd start figuring how my illegally owned and wholly unregistered stack of AR15 mags were going to help me out.
This logic actually works for handguns, but AR-15s are a different beast. For example, Australia did it's buyback, and since then crime committed with these weapons has gone to zero.
The reason is pretty simple. Humans either plan ahead or they don't. If they're criminal people who don't they don't have an AR-15 unless they're gonna use it like tomorrow. Which means pretty much none of these criminals actually posses an AR-15. If they're criminal people who plan ahead they realize that AR-15s have suddenly become a quick trip to jail.
Always remember: a criminal's number one priority is not getting caught. And it's really hard not to get caught if people notice you;re carrying a clearly illegal weapon.
You don't seem to be very good at math.
The majority of the colonies were rebels, therefore the Tyrannical Majority won and a full 5% of the population fled to Canada.
The South's government was certainly tyrannical, probably as bad as the Soviets, and probably wouldn't have won a majority for secession in fair referendums that allowed slaves to vote. But once it succeeded in seceding the majority was clearly on the side of the rebels.
Moreover if that's the best you can do you've neatly illustrated the pointlessness of using your personal gun to fight tyranny. The colonists won some battles with personal weapons, but could not have won the war without Washington's Army, and Washington's Army used government muskets.
The very first skirmishes of the Civil War used local militias with their own weapons, but that didn't last. By Bull Run pretty much everyone was using a weapon the government paid for.
Moreover in the Civil War the South had a strong militia system before-hand. It wasn't Billy Bob and random neighbor Zeke shoot yankees, it was Lt. General Lee of the Virginia militia orders the Third Virginia Infantry to advance at a run. Gun-owners today don't belong to that kind of organization.