- green chicken feet
- Nov 5, 2015
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spray-paint the vegetables
dog food stalls
with the beefcake pantyhose
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Grimey Drawer
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I think the fear about 2nd amendment rights being taken away amounts to this: if a violent person breaks into your home, and it's legal for you to have a firearm, at least you have the chance of defending yourself or discouraging the invader, regardless of how physically-inferior you may be to that person. Many people would be unequipped to stop an attacker, or multiple attackers, based on physical prowess alone.
At the same time, I can see few logical reasons why the average person should have access to anything more "automatic" than a rifle or perhaps a revolver. I'm no gun expert, but I can't see a reasonable self-defense or hunting-based (i.e. not mass killing) application for semi-automatic or automatic weapons.
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Dec 4, 2015 00:07
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- green chicken feet
- Nov 5, 2015
-
spray-paint the vegetables
dog food stalls
with the beefcake pantyhose
-
Grimey Drawer
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I'm no gun expert either, but I'm at least a gun amateur.
1. Self Defense:
The chief purpose of automatic fire (be it exclusively automatic, or the automatic component of select-fire) is twofold:
1. Counterfire on Mass assault: This is the offensive use of automatic fire, and is rare, but is witnessed in war and in these mass shootings, as it is rare in other situations to have so many poorly protected targets.
2. Suppressive fire: This is the defensive use of automatic fire, and is common. The essential function of this use is to use the fire to pose such a high level of threat to prevent your opponent from returning fire. Obviously this has applications in self-defense. It can also be simulated by the firing of many weapons by many people at a single time, but the automatic mechanism(whichever design) simplifies this process and improves results to whatever degree.
2. Hunting
Semiautomatic fire can be desirable in hunting, for example to correct for a missed shot, or when performing large culling actions, such as against feral boars.
I can't think of an instance in common hunting where select-fire could be an asset, but perhaps if you were performing a large waterfowl harvesting application, you could save money by using an automatic shotgun rather than building a punt gun. Of course, the reason we don't use punt guns today either is that they are too good at their job, and nearly destroyed the native waterfowl communities of the U.S. and many other countries... but it is conceivable that circumstances could change in the future to where there is either a shortage of human labor or a surplus of waterfowl.
Also, automatic firearms are easier to manufacture than semi-automatic firearms and many manual actions.
Also, what do you mean when you say 'rifle"? That's an incredibly vague term that could refer to almost any rifled firearm.
Revolvers are more difficult to manufacture than self-loading firearms, and have many other undesirable characteristics (for example, there is a small gap between the cylinder and the chamber, letting gases out, the cylinders can develop problems with indexing, it is more difficult to manufacture semi-automatic and automatic revolvers than magazine-fed, they are inherently heavier in weight etc), which is why they have largely been replaced with semi-automatic magazine-fed pistols.
These are all points that hadn't occurred to me, except for the one about making it easier to defend against a larger number of assailants. Still in the case of robberies or such, it usually isn't 20 people invading a home (at least, I don't think!) whereas in mass shootings you see 20 innocents getting mowed down. So it seems more sensible to me to make weapons easily enabling mass murder more difficult to obtain.
About the rifles remaining legal - I'm talking about the kind that where you have to pause to re-chamber the ammo. I'm sorry, I don't know the technical term or if it is really referred to as a rifle or shotgun. But I'm talking about what your dad or grandpa might have hanging over his mantle and not military type of weapon like an AK-47. If someone is hunting a dangerous animal such as boar, then they could have multiple friends along to help, or try to shoot from a safer vantage point. People hunted animals in the past without the aid of automatic fire.
My basic thought is... allow the average person to have some kind of firearm that allows defense at a distance, and yet limit the legal types to weapons that aren't easy to use to mow down large numbers of people. As far as I know, many of the weapons used in mass murders / school shootings were obtained legally. These guys weren't the types of people with black market or gang connections.
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Dec 4, 2015 01:56
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- green chicken feet
- Nov 5, 2015
-
spray-paint the vegetables
dog food stalls
with the beefcake pantyhose
-
Grimey Drawer
|
You don't need to use the black market or gang connections to acquire firearms illicitly, although of course, you don't really need connections to use the black market either. 
You're probably talking about bolt-action rifles, and I knew that's what you meant before, but I just wanted to point out that the word "rifle" can refer to any firearm with a rifled barrel.
The thing is, this sort of rifle was a military weapon as recently as 70-80 years ago and they continue to appear alongside the AK in conflicts around the world.
You could also be talking about a lever action rifle,
Or a pump-action rifle
But fundamentally there is no real difference in capability. All have been in military service at one point or another in history, because, unsurprisingly, the military is a big force for development of weapons.
No, the reason you want follow-up shots for feral boar is because they start running when you start shooting, so you have to get the whole group of them quickly if you want to maximize your meat haul. You can go to TFR's hunting thread, there's a poster there that hunts feral boar. Also, I was referring to semi-automatic fire in that example, not automatic fire. Like I said, there is no common hunting application for automatic fire, as generally one shot is enough to kill an animal and shooting it more would ruin more of the meat that, after all, you are trying to eat. That people have hunted boar in the past(and indeed, today) with bolt-action rifles, muskets, bows and arrows and even spears, is not really a good reason to not use a better method.
Anyways, you probably won't succeed in your goal at actually stopping people from being able to fire two shots by pulling a trigger two times. The trouble is the firearms are real objects, made of steel and wood and plastic, and, being inanimate objects, are incapable of caring about laws. For example, in Japan, where firearms are heavily restricted, Japanese target shooters build tremendously expensive, very accurate slug-firing shotguns to get around the laws that forbid them from owning rifles. Banning guns is just like banning bicycles- they're such a simple and elementary machine (ultimately being 19th century technology) that you can't really stop anyone who wants to have one from having one, and all that a ban does is terribly inconvenience those people.
I'm admittedly naive when it comes to anything related to the black market...
It makes sense that various types of rifles have been in use in the military. If the rifle can only shoot once and then must have another load of ammo chambered, this would still effective when people are fighting en masse. Some of the group could be reloading while the others are firing. If a single person tried to shoot up a room full of co-workers with such a weapon, he or she would have much worse luck. So whether or not the weapon has ever been used in a military setting isn't really a concern, but whether it's easy for one or two people to go on a shooting spree with it.
This may be kind of a pipe dream, but I think it's still a worthwhile goal to take weapons that quickly up the body count on a murderous rampage off the market. Self defense, hunting, and other sport - these are fair enough applications of firearm ownership. Mass murder, no.
Does anyone know if it's legal to give a gun as a gift? Because if it is, that just about renders any background check concept nonsensical. For that matter, how about inheriting firearms?
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Dec 5, 2015 21:02
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Dec 4, 2015 00:07
