I have always had a fascination with guns.... but I am fascinated by a lot of technology, particularly military technology. I have a rather sizeable library of military history and the history of military technology of various types.
I served in the military, but in a branch and in a capacity where we did not have personal weapons (Navy). I have owned several guns over the years--but strangely, very few military type weapons--mostly shotguns and bolt action rifles. The military style weapons I have or did have were handguns (Series 70 1911a1 and a 9 mm). Only the shotguns saw any real use (I shot competitive trap and skeet and hunted small game). Mostly they sat in a gun safe and collected dust.
But I still do a lot of reading and watch a lot of Youtube videos about guns and about weapons, in general.
I understand the fascination because I share it--but I do not share the need or desire to possess or use the weapons. I do not see them generally as much beyond a pathway to trouble at a personal level. They don't represent solutions to problems.
We have both too many weapons and too many of particular types of weapons.
Outside of law enforcement or the military there is basically zero need for a high capacity, self-loading weapon. They should be illegal and controlled--just like fully automatic weapons are currently. People have WANTS--but they should not be given the same level of consideration as NEEDS. That is a product of our over-individualist consumer society.
When I was a kid it was illegal to use a self-loading rifle to hunt. It was all bolt action, lever action, or single shot. It wasn't considered sporting, otherwise. What happened to that?
Manually operated weapons work fine for hunting and most shooting sports.. and for self-defense and home defense... and you do not need more than a few rounds in the weapon.
I disagree. They aren't the solution to most problems, but they're the only solution to some.
Yesterday, a police officer in my safe and leafy Chicago suburb pulled over a car to write a ticket. Routine and quiet. A second car swerved up behind the cop and stopped. The driver jumped out and charged the cop with a hatchet. The officer had to shoot him because any other decision would have resulted in his head being split wide open.
The officer is fine. Hatchet man is dead. Without that gun, it would have been the opposite.
To repeat: guns are not the solution to all problems, but they're the only solution to problems like this.
"Manually operated weapons work fine for . . . self-defense and home defense . . . and you do not need more than a few rounds in the weapon."
Wrong. Handguns are the overwhelming choice for home and personal defense because they're easy to have on you. But handgun ammo is so underpowered that violent attackers are not routinely stopped with one shot. It takes two, three, six, a dozen. Sure, sometimes it's one shot fired = one attack stopped. But that's not the norm.
The rule of self-defense is that if you are forced to shoot to defend yourself from death or injury from a violent attack, you shoot the attacker until he stops. That often requires more than "a few rounds in the weapon."
Example: in Chicago several decades ago, a violent convict being transferred from court to jail broke his restraints, grabbed a cop's gun, and killed him. Cops flooded the zone, and several spotted him running away. They shot him with 9mm bullets. He shot back, not stopping. They emptied their magazines into him, 9's and .45s. He didn't stop. He'd been hit by dozens of bullets, but he did not stop. An officer blasted him with a 12-gauge shotgun round. He slowed but didn't stop. Another officer hit him with shotgun slugs made to bring down angry game. After absorbing dozens of handgun rounds and three shotgun rounds, he finally collapsed and stopped.
That was one guy. He was an outlier, of course; very very few attackers keep fighting with that level of damage. But some do, and since they don't make appointments to attack us, we have to assume the reasonable worst. I'm not willing to bet my life on the Barney Fife rule: that one bullet is all you need.
I haven't even mentioned attackers who rove in packs and gangs--particularly home invaders, who are making an evil art out of crashing down doors and pouring en mass int the target's home. Or attackers looped on nerve-deadening drugs that negate the pain and destruction of bullets for a long time. Or attackers who wear body armor and helmets.
"I do not see them generally as much beyond a pathway to trouble at a personal level."
You don't want to own or carry, that's fine. I choose otherwise, and that's fine, too. The only "pathway to trouble" that will come from that will be to whoever tries to kill me. I hope that never happens, because I have no interest in shooting, let alone killing, anyone. But if they insist, the trouble will be theirs, not mine. Anyone who doesn't try that, will never see my gun, let alone get anything but a cheerful word from me.
Guns are not central to my life, nor do I own many, nor do I collect, nor are they a substitute for anything. They're fun to shoot, fascinating artistically and mechanically, and, like you, interesting culturally: I study Gun World constantly.
But I own and carry weapons for a reason: personal self-defense. I'm not going to avail myself of lesser defensive tools because criminals misuse theirs to kill innocents.
Finally, you can use a single-shot gun on pheasants because if you miss and have no more, they don't turn and murder you. Human attackers do. You cannot compare defensive weapons with hunting gun; they aren't remotely the same. A twenty-round magazine is not needed to hunt Bambi. One might be needed to stop Brutus.
I lived in Chicago most of my life and I asked my friend who was a cop if I should get a knife or a gun to fend off an attacker. He said "only if you want to get shot or stabbed." He proceeded to role play with me with a gun in my pocket and him a mugger. Suffice it to say he had that gun away from me in barely a second. He said unless you are well trained and carry the weapon in your hand and are ready to use it, you will just be handing your assailant a weapon. Your best defense is stamping on his foot and running like hell screaming. They won't chase you.
For what it's worth, I would never try to draw a gun against a mugger. I'd rather hand over my wallet than risk dying. But I do carry a gun in case I'm ever in a situation where there is an "active shooter", e.g. somebody who's actual intent is to shoot and kill people. I suspect that if we could poll people who have been there or died in such terrible situations, they would tell us they wish they had the ability to fight back and not just cower and hope for the best. I want to have more options available to me than to run and hide. Obviously what I do is situation-dependent, but you can't add the option just when you realize you need it.
You made some good points. However, this assumption was unnecessary, "I'm sorry you don't trust yourself to use weapons safely and responsibly. " And you have ignored the fact that only about 1% of the time do would be victims with a gun protect themselves, and the fact that a gun in the household is far and away more likely to injure or kill a household member.
After Trump won in 2016, there were a number incidents where Trump voters abused Hispanic and Muslim people (usually women) in public because they said Trump's win gave them permission. Rabid 2A types, who all call themselves responsible gun owners, have been threatening their political opponents, and they could feel the same permission if the GOP wins another election. People may need guns to protect themselves from people who style themselves as law-abiding gun owners.
"you have ignored the fact that only about 1% of the time do would be victims with a gun protect themselves."
Where did you get that notion, and what is the source?
"People may need guns to protect themselves from people who style themselves as law-abiding gun owners."
Yes, they might, and those risk from another round of Trumpism should start practicing now. If a tighty-whitey MAGA goes medieval on a gay person, woman, Hispanic, Jew, or other supposed "enemy," he should be shot until he stops. I have no tolerance for the abuse of innocent parties by anybody, and as we saw all too well in Uvalde, you are largely on your own: police are not going to save you from the wrath of racists and killers.
As for my snark, yeah, it was unnecessary. But I'm tired of gun owners, particularly hunters, who insist that their own needs apply to everyone. They only need one bolt-action rifle, so why should anybody be allowed to own anything else?
That said, you make a fair point, so in the interest of civility, I've edited out the snark.
Criminals usually have the element of surprise. Your probably unloaded gun is somewhere else, in a drawer, or the gun cabinet, but probably not on your person. but if readily available the ammo is somewhere else. I would have thought you already knew this statistic. I certainly did not make it up. https://vpc.org/revealing-the-impacts-of-gun-violence/self-defense-gun-use/
"According to a Harvard University analysis of figures from the National Crime Victimization Survey, people defended themselves with a gun in nearly 0.9 percent of crimes from 2007 to 2011.
David Hemenway, who led the Harvard research, argues that the risks of owning a gun outweigh the benefits of having one in the rare case where you might need to defend yourself.
"The average person ... has basically no chance in their lifetime ever to use a gun in self-defense," he tells Here & Now's Robin Young. "But ... every day, they have a chance to use the gun inappropriately. They have a chance, they get angry. They get scared."
Um, "your probably unloaded gun is somewhere else, in a drawer, or the gun cabinet, but probably not on your person, but if readily available the ammo is somewhere else"? Really? Why would you assume that?
Second, I know the 0.9 statistic, I wanted to make sure we were talking about the same one, as the gun wars are filled with dancing data.
Third: David Hemenway is full of baloney, Harvard notwithstanding.
Here's why, by the numbers:
--There were 1.3 million violent crimes in the United States in 2020. There were more property crimes, but violent crimes are the ones that get defended against with weapons.
--Hemenway and the Violence Policy Center he supports admit in one VPC reports--buried in the middle of Page 5 on a sub-page of a sub-page on its website--that 60,000 Americans per year defended themselves against violent attacks with a gun. (Another, expanded, VPC study says 67,000 per year.)
--But 0.9 percent of 1.3 million is 13,000. Why the huge gap between 13k and 60k? Or 67k? Neither VPC nor Hemenway explain.
"A study published in 2013 by the Violence Policy Center, using five years of nationwide statistics (2007-2011) compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation estimated that defensive gun uses occur an average of 67,740 times per year." (from Wikipedia)
--VPC rejects the notion that Americans should own any gun, because director Josh Sugarmann makes a fine living being the NRA of gun control. I reject VPC as a fair or evenhanded commentator on guns, as much as I reject the NRA for same. But, I'm using VPC numbers because if VPC admits 60,000, the real number is far higher.
--The Centers for Disease Control makes that point, saying this about its roundup of all DGU studies, government and university:
"Estimates of defensive gun use vary depending on the questions asked, populations studied, timeframe, and other factors related to the design of studies. The report 'Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence' indicates a range of 60,000 to 2.5 million defensive gun uses each year."
Or it did until last month, when the CDC quietly removed the numbers and changed the paragraph to this bland:
"Estimates of defensive gun use vary depending on the questions asked, populations studied, timeframe, and other factors related to the design of studies. More studies are needed."
I am, of course, shocked, shocked that anyone might believe the CDC bows to political pressure.
--Anyway, throwing out the high and low numbers, I'm comfortable saying the actual number of DGUs is 100,000 per year.
--Americans suffered 20,000 total murders in 2020, of which 14,000 were carried out by pistols, rifles, and shotguns. Americans owned 400,000,000 guns in 2020. So, 0.003 percent of our guns were used to murder anyone in 2020 . . . and 99.997 were not. Americans overwhelmingly use guns lawfully and responsibly.
--I do not include gun suicides here. Suicides are sad, but they're freely chosen by and imposed upon only the victim. Suicide is legal, and it is not a violent attack against unwilling victims. Including suicides with murders as "gun violence" is propaganda.
--Assault-rifle murders are a micro-fraction of total murders and gun murders. Only 1.5 percent of those 14,000 murders were performed with an assault rifle. That number includes all mass murders by guns.
--Hemenway, one more time: "The average person ... has basically no chance in their lifetime ever to use a gun in self-defense." Well, except for 100,000 or more who do. "They have a chance to use the gun inappropriately. They have a chance, they get angry. They get scared."
And yet, they don't open fire. Gun owners get angry. They get scared. BUT THEY DO NOT SHOOT ATTACKERS, THEY SCARE THEM AWAY, AND THE DATA PROVE IT.
Did I mention Hemenway is a big bag of dicks?
--I don't know about you, but I'm delighted that 100,000 Americans went home safely instead being rushed to hospital or morgue because they had a gun on them when the attack began. Since they hardly ever had to shoot an attacker to make him stop, carrying guns is a social good, not a social evil.
--This has no bearing on whether we should ban assault rifles, because ARs are rarely used in personal self-defense. But it's a strong argument for allowing concealed carry of handguns to continue unmolested.
The probability that you will have a loaded gun on your person at the unexpected moment a criminal threatens you is very low. You have ignored all the people who couldn't get to their gun, or who ended injured or dead regardless of the gun.
You have to read the study to find out how "defensive" in these surveys is defined. In some cases, the gun comes out because both parties have created an escalating situation. Or it is brandished as a preemptive "defense."
Your assumptions about CDC motivations is not an established fact. Hemenway was not supporting VPC. He was disputing their numbers. And he is correct about the odds of ever needing to use a gun The vast, vast majority of people will never even come close to wishing they had a gun their whole life. And the proper math is not the number of guns used out of all the guns in America. The proper math is the number of people who used guns.
Instead of getting bogged down arguing about statistics, I have a question about framing. Does what anybody else does with a gun (good or bad) have any actual control over what I do with a gun?
We often see statistics cited as justification for policy proposals. That's like saying "because some people drive drunk and kill others, everybody should have to have a breathalyzer device on their car they have to blow into before it starts." Most people would have a problem with that, and that doesn't involve an enumerated constitutional right.
Should my desire to be well-equipped and prepared should a statistically improbable yet very consequential bad thing happen to me be subjugated to the irresponsible (or worse) choices made by other people who I have no connection to other than sharing the same nation of residence?
I'm tempted to go on a rant about the fetishizing of statistics in our world today, but I'll refrain for now. I'll just point out one of many flaws in that approach. It's easy to forget (especially when using statistics to advance an agenda as opposed to an attempt to discover relevant accurate data) that the denominator matters.
In this example, let's say suicides are being compared to defensive gun use. The number of defensive gun uses is not static, nor is it independent. It is very dependent on the actions and choices of other people (e.g. the bad guy). The argument assumes that there will never be any change in the number of bad guys doing bad things, and they are evenly distributed. Yet everybody knows that if you live in certain neighborhoods in your town, your chances of interacting with a bad guy are extremely low. If you drive across town to certain other neighborhoods, that changes dramatically. Most people will live their whole lives without ever wishing they had a gun. A few will face situations where a gun will make the difference between life and death.
Can government legislation and policy differentiate between all that in advance?
If we're not using statistics--you know, real data--to advance arguments, then we'd be relying on anecdotal evidence and gut feelings. Do you think we'd end up in a better place in policy world going off of those forms of explanation instead?
You should remember the quote that "all statistical models are false, but some are useful." It explains that no statistical model is perfect, but that it is the best alternative to all other forms of data investigation. By contrast, anecdotal evidence and gut feelings are far less accurate and fall subject to things like confirmation bias and sampling bias. Unless you can tell me how to properly calculate beta values for statistical sampling sizes and properly assess how statistical methodology is performed in a study, I don't want to hear shit from people not in the know about how inaccurate the stats cited are. How do you know they're inaccurate when you probably couldn't even tell me what covariance is without the use of Google? This some real Dunning-Kruger shit right here.
Your assumption that use of statistics when the statistics do not support your view is a fetish is unwarranted. Yes indeed, denominators are important . However, you do not have to imagine a denominator. You can go to the data and see what the denominators were.
Even in situations where a gun might make the difference between life and death, because the criminal usually has the element of surprise, the gun is usually not going to be available when you need it.
A great point, John. These "justifications" amount to, "Your neighbor drove drunk, so we're here to tow *your* car. You're willing to walk everywhere if it saves just one innocent life, right?"
The tiny fraction of gun owners who criminally abuse the right should not dictate what the rest of us can do.
"Only a tiny fraction of people who drive drunk actually kill anyone. Why punish all the other drunk drivers by making drinking while driving illegal via BAC over the actions of a few who killed people while driving drunk? Why do you get to use the state to prevent *me* from driving drunk just because some other dipshits did bad things while driving drunk? Why am I being punished collectively, as a law-abiding drunk driver, for the illegal actions of others? The tiny fraction of people who kill others when abusing the natural right to drive drunk should not dictate what the rest of us can do." - what you sound like rn
Aw, geez, I hope your back feels all right today. You must have pulled a muscle reaching for this leaden and illogical argument.
There's no such thing as a "law-abiding drunk driver." Drunk driving is a crime by itself; no injury or death required. When caught, drunks are arrested and their cars impounded. Your license and car are safe and so are mine, because the state doesn't hold us responsible for the crimes of others.
Society requires a criminal act to justify punishment.
Gun control, conversely, punishes all gun owners for the crimes of a few. Since a fraction of 1 percent of gun owners commit all the gun murders, the other 99.997 percent should pay equally for their crimes by losing their right to own guns, right?
No. That's groupblame at its very worst. I wouldn't let the state tow my car because my neighbor was caught driving drunk, and I will not let the state ban my guns because a kid in Uvalde went nuts.
You want to go after the noxious pests who hurt and kill people with their guns? Go right ahead, I'll help you. Gun violence is bad for everyone, including me. But leave the rest of us alone. We didn't hurt you, we're not going to hurt you, and we're not taking the blame for those who do.
We have DUI blood-alcohol limits, because even though I can hold MY shit while driving sloshed (j/k), most people canтАЩt. Why should I be punished just because other people drive like shit while drunk? See where IтАЩm going with this?
We already have lots of gun laws that people like me don't like and think are pointless (for example a 16" AR-15 barrel is fine, but 15.9" unregistered makes me a felon facing years in prison) but we deal with them anyway, but that's not the point. The question is whether the actions and choices of another person are predictive of my future choices and actions. We would reject that idea in other areas yet it seems to be accepted by many arguing for various changes in gun policy.
We definitley accept that idea in other areas, especially car insurance rates. A very responsible 17-year-old is going to pay higher rates because of the actions and choices of other less responsible 17-year-olds. This applies to areas involving risk assessment.
Thank you for saving me the time to make these points. :) One other factor you didn't mention is hit rate vs number of shots. You get the impression people think every round fired will be on target, and every bullet is so powerful that it only takes one shot to stop every bad guy. Yet even in law enforcement incidents the data shows the hit rate is very low. I've seen videos of officers firing entire handgun magazines (17 rounds) without hitting the bad guy. 30 rounds in an AR magazine is barely adequate for many real world scenarios.
ThatтАЩs because police training is shit and those guys donтАЩt have the round count or the instruction to react properly when gunfighting. TheyтАЩre trained to point and dump. ThatтАЩs it. Try getting them to change their tactics and the тАЬthin blue lineтАЭ crowd plus the unions get whiny as shit because they donтАЩt want to admit that theyтАЩve been training their officers improperly for decades.
Police training is certainly a topic worthy of discussion (many serious shooters mock the low standards in marksmanship, for example), but I used it as a reference point because most people would probably assume police are better trained than the typical gun owner. Also, it's something that has actually been studied a little bit to produce some hard data.
But I wouldn't say that they are "trained to point and dump", it's probably more because that's the natural instinct in those high stress situations. Take a person who shoots well at paper on a range and put them into force on force training with projectiles being shot at them and they will probably completely forget about their sights and blindly point and shoot as fast as possible.
Cops are literally trained to get sight picture/sight alignment on the threat, and then fire rounds in rapid succession until "the threat is stopped." It's why you'll see videos of cops dumping rounds into people in wheelchairs, or teens in hotel hallways that are clearly unarmed, or civilians walking around the Empire State Building. Conditioned gunfighters don't "rise to the occasion" in a gunfight, they default to the levels of their training. Most cops are trained to preserve their lives at all costs and to dump on threats they assume are present, which is why you almost never see a cop shooting a suspect just once or twice. They always put something like 5+ rounds into the suspect. The average police shooting involves 11 rounds fired. They're not hitting their targets. The cops have *terrible* training and refuse to address it. Civilian gun owners have even less training. It's only the folks with real combat experience and folks who take training seriously on their own that I even see doing the right thing. The average civilian can't even walk around at the low ready without flagging the shit out of half the line with their gun barrel 7 times out of 10. At least that's been my experience. The firearms community--including cops--barely take firearms training seriously, and firearms training *is not* just going to the range to practice marksmanship on a paper target while standing in a static position. That is *not* training, but a significant chunk of civilian gun owners think it is, which is why they default to unskilled shootings in the field just like the cops do.
This is wandering far from where it started. The original point was about whether there's a "need" for things like semi-auto guns, high capacity magazines, etc. I was pointing out that if even police usually don't hit their target (nevermind hit the right spot on the bad guy) how is it reasonable to say that normal people (not in LE) don't "need" at least the same weapon capabilities that LE has?
(Of course this assumes that a person would grant normal people the right to prepare to defend themselves against threats if they choose)
There is certainly much worth discussing regarding law enforcement training, what responsible gun ownership ought to look like, etc but that's something I'll leave for another time.
You imply another point. There have been situations where the police come upon someone using their gun to defend themselves or others and mindlessly shoot because "GUN." Or the man at the traffic stop who responsibly told the officer he had a gun in the glove compartment with his drivers license, and the cop promptly shot him dead with his wife and toddler in the car.
You're quite welcome. Yes, hit rate is a genuine problem--NYPD did a study years ago and found that officers forced to shoot felons hit their targets only 20 percent of the time. The other 80 percent of the bullets went off to hit god knows what.
Pistols that carried rounds powerful enough to kill a charging bear--the equivalent of an angry, drug-infused human killer running at you with a hatchet--would take the shooter's hand off with recoil, and punch through the killer, five cars behind him, and the brick wall behind the cars. Handgun rounds are not powerful so they are controllable, so more than one round is often needed to stop an angry attacker.
"One shot, one kill" is a dandy title for a movie, but it has nothing to do with real-life defensive shootings.
I agree. It's tough to shoot and kill another human being, even if you have to. Army studies showed that most of the shots fired in battles in past wars didn't hit enemy soldiers. Our guys fired their weapons because they were expected to, but the shots went wide because they psychologically didn't want to kill. That wasn't universal, of course, but it was a serious enough issue that the Army revamped its training systems to desensitize soldiers enough that they'd take the kill shot.
I wish the world would find another way to settle its differences, since war truly blows for everyone but the profiteers.
The NYPD installs stiff triggers in department-issued Glock 19s because theyтАЩre so worried about the low low firearms training standards for their 30,000+ sworn officers leading to negligent discharges in the field. ItтАЩs why they had a couple officers dump magazines near the Empire State Building and hit nothing but civilians lol. TheyтАЩre not recruiting or training their best.
I know, right? That New York trigger is hideous, and it's there to disguise the lack of firearms training cops get. NYPD is recruiting officers as best it can, since getting qualified people is a challenge for every department these days. But it certainly isn't training remotely well. Not in actual gun handling, and not in remaining cool in the face of attacks. No suspect needs to be shot 80 times, for god's sake.
Exactly. I own a bolt-action precision rifle and a 10-rd handgun. I feel perfectly safe, especially because I'm well-trained. I'm more worried about the proliferation of assault weapons and body armor--particularly among younger, emotionally-unstable teenagers. These are tougher threats than the ones I went up against in Iraq. Those guys weren't running around with red dot sights/scopes, 300+ rounds of ammo, and body armor. The insurgency would have looked real different had that been the case. There's a reason why more cops are getting killed or wounded in these mass-shootings: the bad guys increasingly have body armor and assault rifles to out-gun the cops with, only they're not robbing a bank in North Hollywood anymore. The mission isn't armed bank robbery now, it's taking as many lives as possible before you commit suicide by cop.
"Those guys weren't running around with red dot sights/scopes, 300+ rounds of ammo, and body armor."
They didn't, but you did. Why did you carry all that gear on patrol in Iraq? Because you didn't know what you'd run into, so you were smart to prepare yourself for (most) situations.
I cannot imagine you would been comfortable in Iraq with a ten-round handgun instead of a 30-round M4 with six magazines. I'm not arguing that U.S. civilians need to carry ARs to the Country Kitchen for breakfast. But it makes no sense to deny them seventeen-round Glocks and a reload if they want to carry that weight on their hip. I'm comfortable with my ten-rounder in my leafy suburban paradise. But I'd want the option to upgrade that if I need to travel into a high-crime neighborhood.
Nobody knows the threat they may face, because bad guys don't make appointments.
The trend in the 2A community towards capacity over precision is one of the reason IтАЩm so concerned. The US is not Iraq. There are rules here. I own accountability for every single one of those ten rounds I carry. If youтАЩre going up against multiple threats, you should be transitioning between targets, which would be like placing two into one target before moving to the next. If you need more than ten rounds to cover a max of x5 threats (target transition after two rounds), chances are you suck at shooting and are better off running.
Training cops & civilians to go high on capacity and dump rounds тАЬuntil the threat is neutralizedтАЭ is how you end up with a bunch of people walking around with guns with 15+ rounds just dumping them into a тАЬthreatтАЭ when they get scared and not thinking about whatтАЩs behind the target or how many shots they are missing. IтАЩm just as worried about the societal liability of a bunch of fuckin rookies walking around with the power to kill and little to no training or appreciation for what comes with that. Dipshits like George Zimmerman and Kyle Rittenhaus were perfect examples. Look what they did to the gun culture and national politics.
I certainly agree that "if ten bullets are good, ninety are better!" is a trend that needs to end ASAP. "Spray and pray" is a nightmare for society. But putting rounds on the exact place needed to stop the threat quickly and with few bullets requires a vast amount of training and practice. Police departments and even the military won't fund the amount of ammo and instruction required to make the skills stick.
Individual cops might go get that training on their own, but most don't; their jobs require so many responsibilities beyond shooting that gun skills fall to the bottom of the list. My own city's PD runs a world-class shooting operation that every officer is required to pass, four times or more a year. But it's expensive and most departments won't bother.
I can't agree that two rounds per attacker is all you'll ever need. Some attackers require no rounds, and that's the norm: the presence of the gun by the prey makes most predators run away. But some attackers require a dozen rounds to stop, no matter how expertly you place those shots.
It's why I'm an evangelist for regular training and live-fire shooting for anyone who carries a gun, whether police or not. I'm not concerned about someone carrying the 33 rounds provided by a Glock 17 and one spare magazine because, hey, they might need it. But carrying that much firepower without knowing how to use it rightly give us shudders.
I didnтАЩt say you only needed two rounds to put down a threat. I said that if there are multiple closing threats then you should be target transitioning. While youтАЩre busy dumping rounds into threat #1, threat #s 2,3,4 and 5 are closing ground to fuck you up. ThatтАЩs why you put x2 JHPs onto threat #1, then x2 on threat #2, etc. IтАЩve done extensive pistol training with prior 0317s and 0321s in force on force scenarios and low-light/darkness applications. Thousands of rounds down the pipe of my Glock 48 MOS. I do burpees before all my drills. My 10 rounds count for something. Wish everyone else trained that way too. Instead, they train to stand still and dump rounds. And the 2A community promotes capacity over precision fundamentals and medical training, etc. тАЬSpray and prayтАЭ seems to be the current cultural flavor.
As youтАЩve pointed out, some threats can take multiple rounds without stoppingтАФusually due to adrenaline dumps on their end and poor shooting/training on the defenderтАЩs end. I donтАЩt care how much meth someone shoots up, if you place a round into their high thoracic cavity, they are going down. Tell me how many people youтАЩve seen keep charging when their throat blows out internally and theyтАЩre choking on their own blood if their lights donтАЩt go out from CNS disruption immediately.
You kinda are arguing that people need to be able to take their AR's to Country Kitchen. Bad guys don't make appointments, after all. Might be good to have a few flashbangs too, as well as a couple of hand grenades. And for these roving bands, a full auto SAW doesn't seem out of the question.
We can always find scenarios where we'd want more firepower, but as can be readily seen, that increased access to firepower is coming with increasing costs in our society. I'd feel a lot safer in my home if I was allowed to use claymores and could keep an RPG in the corner (home use only of course) to take out that SUV full of attackers.
Yes, I'm being a bit absurd, but we should try to find a balance between personal protection and societal safety, and of course, everyone isn't going to be perfectly happy with that balance. The thing we do too much of (IMO) is error on the side of fear of hypotheticals or very rare occurrences. We have an epidemic of people being massacred going about their daily lives, but I'm not seeing the evidence of hundreds of people dying every year from not having powerful enough guns. Does it happen, sure. Enough to warrant our current permissiveness of gun capability and ownership and the attendant, near daily problems?
I find that there are well armed people who argue that they need to be safe.
In my younger days I lived in a lot of places and been pickpoketed and purse snatched a few times when I was young, but had been taught how to be wary and careful. No dark allies, take a cab at night, keep you doors locked. But I'm usually not afraid. It must be horrible to feel you have to carry around so much fire power because you feel like you live in a war zone. You don't live in a war zone, do you.
If you are asking this of me, then no, I don't. Though you may have misread some of my satire as serious, as I don't really want an AR in the coffee shop or claymores around my house (the RPG would still be nice for target practice though). ;)
"We should try to find a balance between personal protection and societal safety, and of course, everyone isn't going to be perfectly happy with that balance."
Agree completely, knowitok. The trick is figuring out that balance point.
One is the right to open carry. I don't like open carry because it frightens the public for no good reason. So, I don't support bringing ARs and other assault rifles to Country Kitchen. In fact, I would ban open carry of long guns and handgun outside of rural and hunting zones. People concerned with personal protection can accomplish the same goal with a concealed weapon, and since they can, frightening the public with the sight of their smoke poles is not supportable. Concealed carry gives people the protection they want without making grandma nervous when she eats her biscuits. That is a fair balance between need to protect yourself and the right of the public to not be worried about what you intend to do to them with your rifle.
Grenades are illegal because they're explosives, which aren't protected by 2A. Flashbangs, ditto; they're explosives. Ditto claymores, RPGs, dynamite, and nuclear weapons. We've already established the balance between personal safety and public concerns when it comes to explosives, and that's fine.
If you want to argue that assault rifles present such a unique danger to Americans because their use in mass slaughters outweighs any other value they might have, I'd probably accept that and agree to a ban . . . OR, better, reclassification into machine gun status, with its much heavier restrictions.
But other semiautomatics, including handguns, have a social value that drastically outweighs their criminal misuse, and I won't agree to ban them like I would assault rifles.
We don't have an epidemic of mass shootings, by the way. It appears so because the slaughter are so horrible, but assault rifles are used in only 1 percent of the 20,000 gun murders we suffer every year. Those 200 or so include all mass murders like Uvalde.
That said, we can't look only at cold data; mass slaughters by assault rifles are a serious public concern despite the low numbers, and so a ban or heavier regulation or bans is supportable.
Me, I'd raise the age of gun ownership to 25, with the caveat that honorable military service or passing a federal weapons training course (which doesn't yet exist, though it should) would allow you to own at 21. Prove you're mature enough to handle a gun, you can own it at 21. Kids could use guns before those ages, but only under the direct supervision of an adult, which allows hunting to continue.
It's also time to get serious about prosecuting every violent gun crime as the danger to society they are. Do the crime, do the time: no more plea bargains, if you use a gun in an act of criminal violence, you go to prison. We don't do that now; gun laws are mostly on the books but unenforced. Change that to the toughness against gun violence that the laws claim, and criminals will get the message and change their ways. If they don't, at least they're behind bars until they begin to age out of wanting to pull the trigger.
Believe it or not, I am totally for reasonable restriction on gun ownership and hard attacks on gun criminals. I only differ in that banning this and banning that will not reduce the number of dead, so it's time to get creative.
From what I understand of the Rittenhouse case, he frightened people with his open carry, and some sought to disarm him, and he shot them. He had no business self-deputizing himself to be there in the first place.
Excellent summary. I would only add that something like the Mandalay Bay shooting is impossible with a handgun, and people tend to suck with handguns even at close range whereas the AR-15/M4 platform (and others in similar fashion) are ridiculously easy to shoot repeatedly with precision and fire a much more lethal round, which is exactly why they can teach an 18-year old how to kill out to 500y with one in just two weeks at places like MCRD Parris Island. Handguns are more difficult to kill masses of people with due to the accuracy loss even at short ranges, the lowered velocity and lethality of handgun ammo vs semi-auto mag-fed rifles, and the much lower effective range. Just some food for thought.
Thank you, Travis, and I agree: ARs and AKs may well present such a unique danger to society that other weapons don't, that banning them is justified to protect the public. I find your argument persuasive; the ease of use is exactly what makes it a tool for blood sport, not just self-defense.
But I won't go along with this ban if it's only the "next step on the road" to banning handguns, standard-capacity magazines, semiautomatic hunting rifles and shotguns, and all the other ornaments on the gun-hater Christmas tree.
I'm all for creativity in this, and love the idea of raising the age. I'd have knee-jerked to 21 (as a start), but 25 isn't crazy to me, and I like the carve out for those who have ... completed an enlistment? Not arguing, just looking for clarification. I wouldn't want someone who has only completed basic a few weeks ago getting an exception (maybe that counts for the 21 and a course thing you mentioned).
-----In 2020, handguns were involved in 59% of the 13,620 U.S. gun murders and non-negligent manslaughters for which data is available, according to the FBI. Rifles тАУ the category that includes guns sometimes referred to as тАЬassault weaponsтАЭ тАУ were involved in 3% of firearm murders. Shotguns were involved in 1%. The remainder of gun homicides and non-negligent manslaughters (36%) involved other kinds of firearms or those classified as тАЬtype not stated.тАЭ
ItтАЩs important to note that the FBIтАЩs statistics do not capture the details on all gun murders in the U.S. each year. The FBIтАЩs data is based on information voluntarily submitted by police departments around the country, and not all agencies participate or provide complete information each year. -----
So not saying you are wrong with the 1%, but not 100% sure it is as low as you are saying. Beyond that, do note that I'm not one calling for an assault weapons ban and washing my hands of it. The issue is much more complex, and definitely needs a multi-faceted approach. It is also going to take decades to fix, as we've taken decades to get to this point.
As for gun laws, plea deals, and enforcement, those are topics than need a lot of data to fully explore. Plea deals have a variety of issues around them, but I don't know for certain that they are the cause of gun laws not being enforced. My time on a local grand jury showed that the local prosecutor was really focused on seizing guns through forfeiture, but that's not the same a jail time, and only an anecdotal example.
About enlistment. Gun training for most military members is limited to several weeks with a personally-zeroed M16 during basic, and once a year at the range with an unzeroed M16. According to 2019 statistics, only 10% of the entire military force engage in battle. A larger percentage get the training, but not the field experience. It is a misconception that completing an enlistment is equal to extensive training.
Yes, honorable discharge from the military after whatever years of service. No washouts, no dishonorable, nothing but normal service would get that waiver.
I chose 25 because science suggests that human brains are not fully mature until that age. So, for purposes of owning a gun, I'd limit ownership to brain-mature adults. The carveout would allow kids to own a gun if they prove maturity and ability to handle weapons responsibly.
The FBI doesn't break out assault rifles as a separate category. They're include in the 3 percent of all rifles. One percent represents my educated guess. It could be as high as 2 percent, but no higher.
My insistence that we take violent gun felons out of circulation via prison (I'm not a lock-em-up-till-death guy; prison stinks as a social tool. But violent predators need to go somewhere till they age out of their lust to kill, and prisons are what we have) comes from reading that many gun murders are committed by people who had lengthy criminal records, including gun violations. They are released again and again to prey on the public, till finally they shoot someone during a carjacking. If we keep them in prison for a while after their first violent crime, whether it's robbery or murder, we keep them from repeat offenses.
Plea deals are the ultimate expression of laws not being enforced. Police arrest criminal shooters by the truckload, but if prosecutors don't follow through, shooter walks and they get the message we're not actually serious.
Yes, seizing guns through forfeiture does not send the message that "we're serious about you not shooting people." Forfeiture is just a cost of doing business, couple hundreds bucks gone, pick up another gun and get back to work.
A pleasure discussing this issue with you in a friendly and sane way!
That's fine for pheasants, because if you miss, they don't shoot back or stab you with a knife. Humans do. Hunting needs differ radically from defensive needs.
Which is why the police and the military have access to the weapons they do.
I am 60 years old. I have traveled over most of the US and into the second and third world. I have never been shot at or really even threatened with violence beyond fisticuffs in my life... and the likelihood of encountering higher levels of violence would be reduced if there were limits ands controls on guns.
I read a great book by Paul Theroux. He was 60 and he traveled by bus and hitchhiking alone from Cairo to Capetown. His description of camping alone in the desert next a pyramid was so cool. My point? He didn't carry a gun or weapon of any kind.
I agree, R, that most people will never have to deal with this. But given 1.3 million violent crimes a year in the United States, some will. If they're armed and don't hurt innocent people, why do you object?
As for odds would be lower, no, they'd be the same. Attackers don't need guns to hurt and kill people--there's all kinds of ways for them to do it.
Exactly. Deer hunting was done (by my family anyway) either with a bow or with a black powder rifle.
It was supposed to be about skill and patience, not firepower.
I also used to do a lot of groundhog hunting (farmers were happy to let us do it, some would even pay). I had a Sako .22-250 with a bull barrel, bipod and 14x scope for that. It was kind of like sniping, only without the ghillie suit or danger LOL. Usual ranges were between 200 to 400 yards.
Went chuck hunting on farms as a kid down in central Ky. Same in that most farmers were always happy to have a hand controlling these pests. Different in that terrain was hilly, fields were relatively small and ranges much shorter than yours. 100/125 yds a very long shot most days. 50, maybe 75 pretty common. Usually used just a .22, sometimes w/4x scope, often w/open sights. Worked perfectly well, as long as you were a decent shot. Had a friend who liked to see how close he could sneak up to one before taking the shot when there was anything resembling 'cover' like long grass, brush or hay present. Got pretty darned good at it...probably would have made a good sniper in the service.
Can't speak to all areas of the country or all types of game, but around here (Ohio) the deer vs. hunter population has shifted so much that limits have radically changed. When I was a kid my father was allowed one and only one deer per year. Now it is several. My guess (nothing more) is that allowing 'better' weapons for hunting was simply a method for increasing the kill rate on a growing population of deer vs. a decreasing population of hunters.
You don't need "better" weapons, you just need to be allowed to kill more. It isn't really THAT hard to kill a deer, provided you actually see one and provided you have decent aim.
True, as far as 'need' goes. But better weapons should increase the number of deer taken. Looking at the big numbers, some subset of hunters don't have the extra time to get the extra deer from the missed opportunities of having a single shot or having to work a bolt, etc.
And given the impact on society, I'd be all for climbing into the wayback machine and nixing better weapons for hunting. I'm just speculating on why they made the switch, over time, these many years ago.
Of course, I wouldn't be surprised to find out it was gun lobby driven as a way to increase sales...
The reality is that if the deer problem is that bad there are these people called game wardens who could probably do something about it.
The thing to understand about the arms industry is that it was once a very feast or famine industry. Guns, properly cared for, last a long time and they remain effective for most purposes outside of the military.
The big money for arms manufacturers was (and is) in government sales (military and police)--except military small arms needs went down after the age of mass industrialized warfare ended after WW2 where you no longer had multi-million man armies.
Plus the replacement of bolt-action rifles with semi-automatic and automatic weapons created a HUGE surplus of weapons. Many of the people that I knew growing up bought these weapons and refurbished them for personal use rather than buying a newly manufactured gun.
With the government you get one huge contract or two every decade or so, probably less now that we have been using the M16/M4 since the 60s. It will be interesting to see how many MX5s the government buys to replace M4s over the next few years (once the litigation of the contract is finished).
So you have all this expense and tooling to make these weapons--which sucks if you cannot generate a constant income stream from it--so you create "civilianized" versions to sell and push the holy crap out of it. Got to keep the shareholders happy.
I mean, the army has been having design competitions every few years to replace the M16/M4 which have largely been nothing but busy work for the arms manufacturers. I am amazed they actually decided to "replace" the M4 this time around, TBH.
Governments and militaries are notoriously reluctant to do things like change personal weapons unless there is some overriding advantage due to changes in technology (like replacing the M1903 with the M1) because of the huge inventory they have and the sunk cost. This is why the military arms market is sporadic/cyclic and the cycles tend to be LONG.
I have always had a fascination with guns.... but I am fascinated by a lot of technology, particularly military technology. I have a rather sizeable library of military history and the history of military technology of various types.
I served in the military, but in a branch and in a capacity where we did not have personal weapons (Navy). I have owned several guns over the years--but strangely, very few military type weapons--mostly shotguns and bolt action rifles. The military style weapons I have or did have were handguns (Series 70 1911a1 and a 9 mm). Only the shotguns saw any real use (I shot competitive trap and skeet and hunted small game). Mostly they sat in a gun safe and collected dust.
But I still do a lot of reading and watch a lot of Youtube videos about guns and about weapons, in general.
I understand the fascination because I share it--but I do not share the need or desire to possess or use the weapons. I do not see them generally as much beyond a pathway to trouble at a personal level. They don't represent solutions to problems.
We have both too many weapons and too many of particular types of weapons.
Outside of law enforcement or the military there is basically zero need for a high capacity, self-loading weapon. They should be illegal and controlled--just like fully automatic weapons are currently. People have WANTS--but they should not be given the same level of consideration as NEEDS. That is a product of our over-individualist consumer society.
When I was a kid it was illegal to use a self-loading rifle to hunt. It was all bolt action, lever action, or single shot. It wasn't considered sporting, otherwise. What happened to that?
Manually operated weapons work fine for hunting and most shooting sports.. and for self-defense and home defense... and you do not need more than a few rounds in the weapon.
"They don't represent solutions to problems."
I disagree. They aren't the solution to most problems, but they're the only solution to some.
Yesterday, a police officer in my safe and leafy Chicago suburb pulled over a car to write a ticket. Routine and quiet. A second car swerved up behind the cop and stopped. The driver jumped out and charged the cop with a hatchet. The officer had to shoot him because any other decision would have resulted in his head being split wide open.
The officer is fine. Hatchet man is dead. Without that gun, it would have been the opposite.
To repeat: guns are not the solution to all problems, but they're the only solution to problems like this.
"Manually operated weapons work fine for . . . self-defense and home defense . . . and you do not need more than a few rounds in the weapon."
Wrong. Handguns are the overwhelming choice for home and personal defense because they're easy to have on you. But handgun ammo is so underpowered that violent attackers are not routinely stopped with one shot. It takes two, three, six, a dozen. Sure, sometimes it's one shot fired = one attack stopped. But that's not the norm.
The rule of self-defense is that if you are forced to shoot to defend yourself from death or injury from a violent attack, you shoot the attacker until he stops. That often requires more than "a few rounds in the weapon."
Example: in Chicago several decades ago, a violent convict being transferred from court to jail broke his restraints, grabbed a cop's gun, and killed him. Cops flooded the zone, and several spotted him running away. They shot him with 9mm bullets. He shot back, not stopping. They emptied their magazines into him, 9's and .45s. He didn't stop. He'd been hit by dozens of bullets, but he did not stop. An officer blasted him with a 12-gauge shotgun round. He slowed but didn't stop. Another officer hit him with shotgun slugs made to bring down angry game. After absorbing dozens of handgun rounds and three shotgun rounds, he finally collapsed and stopped.
That was one guy. He was an outlier, of course; very very few attackers keep fighting with that level of damage. But some do, and since they don't make appointments to attack us, we have to assume the reasonable worst. I'm not willing to bet my life on the Barney Fife rule: that one bullet is all you need.
I haven't even mentioned attackers who rove in packs and gangs--particularly home invaders, who are making an evil art out of crashing down doors and pouring en mass int the target's home. Or attackers looped on nerve-deadening drugs that negate the pain and destruction of bullets for a long time. Or attackers who wear body armor and helmets.
"I do not see them generally as much beyond a pathway to trouble at a personal level."
You don't want to own or carry, that's fine. I choose otherwise, and that's fine, too. The only "pathway to trouble" that will come from that will be to whoever tries to kill me. I hope that never happens, because I have no interest in shooting, let alone killing, anyone. But if they insist, the trouble will be theirs, not mine. Anyone who doesn't try that, will never see my gun, let alone get anything but a cheerful word from me.
Guns are not central to my life, nor do I own many, nor do I collect, nor are they a substitute for anything. They're fun to shoot, fascinating artistically and mechanically, and, like you, interesting culturally: I study Gun World constantly.
But I own and carry weapons for a reason: personal self-defense. I'm not going to avail myself of lesser defensive tools because criminals misuse theirs to kill innocents.
Finally, you can use a single-shot gun on pheasants because if you miss and have no more, they don't turn and murder you. Human attackers do. You cannot compare defensive weapons with hunting gun; they aren't remotely the same. A twenty-round magazine is not needed to hunt Bambi. One might be needed to stop Brutus.
I lived in Chicago most of my life and I asked my friend who was a cop if I should get a knife or a gun to fend off an attacker. He said "only if you want to get shot or stabbed." He proceeded to role play with me with a gun in my pocket and him a mugger. Suffice it to say he had that gun away from me in barely a second. He said unless you are well trained and carry the weapon in your hand and are ready to use it, you will just be handing your assailant a weapon. Your best defense is stamping on his foot and running like hell screaming. They won't chase you.
For what it's worth, I would never try to draw a gun against a mugger. I'd rather hand over my wallet than risk dying. But I do carry a gun in case I'm ever in a situation where there is an "active shooter", e.g. somebody who's actual intent is to shoot and kill people. I suspect that if we could poll people who have been there or died in such terrible situations, they would tell us they wish they had the ability to fight back and not just cower and hope for the best. I want to have more options available to me than to run and hide. Obviously what I do is situation-dependent, but you can't add the option just when you realize you need it.
Edited to eliminate my snarky bits, Mr. Mercer.
You made some good points. However, this assumption was unnecessary, "I'm sorry you don't trust yourself to use weapons safely and responsibly. " And you have ignored the fact that only about 1% of the time do would be victims with a gun protect themselves, and the fact that a gun in the household is far and away more likely to injure or kill a household member.
After Trump won in 2016, there were a number incidents where Trump voters abused Hispanic and Muslim people (usually women) in public because they said Trump's win gave them permission. Rabid 2A types, who all call themselves responsible gun owners, have been threatening their political opponents, and they could feel the same permission if the GOP wins another election. People may need guns to protect themselves from people who style themselves as law-abiding gun owners.
"you have ignored the fact that only about 1% of the time do would be victims with a gun protect themselves."
Where did you get that notion, and what is the source?
"People may need guns to protect themselves from people who style themselves as law-abiding gun owners."
Yes, they might, and those risk from another round of Trumpism should start practicing now. If a tighty-whitey MAGA goes medieval on a gay person, woman, Hispanic, Jew, or other supposed "enemy," he should be shot until he stops. I have no tolerance for the abuse of innocent parties by anybody, and as we saw all too well in Uvalde, you are largely on your own: police are not going to save you from the wrath of racists and killers.
As for my snark, yeah, it was unnecessary. But I'm tired of gun owners, particularly hunters, who insist that their own needs apply to everyone. They only need one bolt-action rifle, so why should anybody be allowed to own anything else?
That said, you make a fair point, so in the interest of civility, I've edited out the snark.
Criminals usually have the element of surprise. Your probably unloaded gun is somewhere else, in a drawer, or the gun cabinet, but probably not on your person. but if readily available the ammo is somewhere else. I would have thought you already knew this statistic. I certainly did not make it up. https://vpc.org/revealing-the-impacts-of-gun-violence/self-defense-gun-use/
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/gun-threats-and-self-defense-gun-use-2/
"According to a Harvard University analysis of figures from the National Crime Victimization Survey, people defended themselves with a gun in nearly 0.9 percent of crimes from 2007 to 2011.
David Hemenway, who led the Harvard research, argues that the risks of owning a gun outweigh the benefits of having one in the rare case where you might need to defend yourself.
"The average person ... has basically no chance in their lifetime ever to use a gun in self-defense," he tells Here & Now's Robin Young. "But ... every day, they have a chance to use the gun inappropriately. They have a chance, they get angry. They get scared."
Um, "your probably unloaded gun is somewhere else, in a drawer, or the gun cabinet, but probably not on your person, but if readily available the ammo is somewhere else"? Really? Why would you assume that?
Second, I know the 0.9 statistic, I wanted to make sure we were talking about the same one, as the gun wars are filled with dancing data.
Third: David Hemenway is full of baloney, Harvard notwithstanding.
Here's why, by the numbers:
--There were 1.3 million violent crimes in the United States in 2020. There were more property crimes, but violent crimes are the ones that get defended against with weapons.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/191129/reported-violent-crime-in-the-us-since-1990/
--Hemenway and the Violence Policy Center he supports admit in one VPC reports--buried in the middle of Page 5 on a sub-page of a sub-page on its website--that 60,000 Americans per year defended themselves against violent attacks with a gun. (Another, expanded, VPC study says 67,000 per year.)
--But 0.9 percent of 1.3 million is 13,000. Why the huge gap between 13k and 60k? Or 67k? Neither VPC nor Hemenway explain.
https://vpc.org/studies/justifiable20.pdf
"A study published in 2013 by the Violence Policy Center, using five years of nationwide statistics (2007-2011) compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation estimated that defensive gun uses occur an average of 67,740 times per year." (from Wikipedia)
--VPC rejects the notion that Americans should own any gun, because director Josh Sugarmann makes a fine living being the NRA of gun control. I reject VPC as a fair or evenhanded commentator on guns, as much as I reject the NRA for same. But, I'm using VPC numbers because if VPC admits 60,000, the real number is far higher.
--The Centers for Disease Control makes that point, saying this about its roundup of all DGU studies, government and university:
"Estimates of defensive gun use vary depending on the questions asked, populations studied, timeframe, and other factors related to the design of studies. The report 'Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence' indicates a range of 60,000 to 2.5 million defensive gun uses each year."
https://web.archive.org/web/20200606160510/https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/firearms/fastfact.html
Or it did until last month, when the CDC quietly removed the numbers and changed the paragraph to this bland:
"Estimates of defensive gun use vary depending on the questions asked, populations studied, timeframe, and other factors related to the design of studies. More studies are needed."
I am, of course, shocked, shocked that anyone might believe the CDC bows to political pressure.
--Anyway, throwing out the high and low numbers, I'm comfortable saying the actual number of DGUs is 100,000 per year.
--Americans suffered 20,000 total murders in 2020, of which 14,000 were carried out by pistols, rifles, and shotguns. Americans owned 400,000,000 guns in 2020. So, 0.003 percent of our guns were used to murder anyone in 2020 . . . and 99.997 were not. Americans overwhelmingly use guns lawfully and responsibly.
--I do not include gun suicides here. Suicides are sad, but they're freely chosen by and imposed upon only the victim. Suicide is legal, and it is not a violent attack against unwilling victims. Including suicides with murders as "gun violence" is propaganda.
--Assault-rifle murders are a micro-fraction of total murders and gun murders. Only 1.5 percent of those 14,000 murders were performed with an assault rifle. That number includes all mass murders by guns.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/195325/murder-victims-in-the-us-by-weapon-used/
--Hemenway, one more time: "The average person ... has basically no chance in their lifetime ever to use a gun in self-defense." Well, except for 100,000 or more who do. "They have a chance to use the gun inappropriately. They have a chance, they get angry. They get scared."
And yet, they don't open fire. Gun owners get angry. They get scared. BUT THEY DO NOT SHOOT ATTACKERS, THEY SCARE THEM AWAY, AND THE DATA PROVE IT.
Did I mention Hemenway is a big bag of dicks?
--I don't know about you, but I'm delighted that 100,000 Americans went home safely instead being rushed to hospital or morgue because they had a gun on them when the attack began. Since they hardly ever had to shoot an attacker to make him stop, carrying guns is a social good, not a social evil.
--This has no bearing on whether we should ban assault rifles, because ARs are rarely used in personal self-defense. But it's a strong argument for allowing concealed carry of handguns to continue unmolested.
The probability that you will have a loaded gun on your person at the unexpected moment a criminal threatens you is very low. You have ignored all the people who couldn't get to their gun, or who ended injured or dead regardless of the gun.
You have to read the study to find out how "defensive" in these surveys is defined. In some cases, the gun comes out because both parties have created an escalating situation. Or it is brandished as a preemptive "defense."
Your assumptions about CDC motivations is not an established fact. Hemenway was not supporting VPC. He was disputing their numbers. And he is correct about the odds of ever needing to use a gun The vast, vast majority of people will never even come close to wishing they had a gun their whole life. And the proper math is not the number of guns used out of all the guns in America. The proper math is the number of people who used guns.
Regardless of playing with numbers, the fact is the US is an extreme outlier in the number and use of guns. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/2/16399418/america-mass-shooting-gun-violence-statistics-charts And there is the serious matter of guns overtaking car accidents as the number one cause of death among children.
Instead of getting bogged down arguing about statistics, I have a question about framing. Does what anybody else does with a gun (good or bad) have any actual control over what I do with a gun?
We often see statistics cited as justification for policy proposals. That's like saying "because some people drive drunk and kill others, everybody should have to have a breathalyzer device on their car they have to blow into before it starts." Most people would have a problem with that, and that doesn't involve an enumerated constitutional right.
Should my desire to be well-equipped and prepared should a statistically improbable yet very consequential bad thing happen to me be subjugated to the irresponsible (or worse) choices made by other people who I have no connection to other than sharing the same nation of residence?
The point is a lot of people citing self-protection pretend like they are immune from statistics, as in, that only happens in other households.
I'm tempted to go on a rant about the fetishizing of statistics in our world today, but I'll refrain for now. I'll just point out one of many flaws in that approach. It's easy to forget (especially when using statistics to advance an agenda as opposed to an attempt to discover relevant accurate data) that the denominator matters.
In this example, let's say suicides are being compared to defensive gun use. The number of defensive gun uses is not static, nor is it independent. It is very dependent on the actions and choices of other people (e.g. the bad guy). The argument assumes that there will never be any change in the number of bad guys doing bad things, and they are evenly distributed. Yet everybody knows that if you live in certain neighborhoods in your town, your chances of interacting with a bad guy are extremely low. If you drive across town to certain other neighborhoods, that changes dramatically. Most people will live their whole lives without ever wishing they had a gun. A few will face situations where a gun will make the difference between life and death.
Can government legislation and policy differentiate between all that in advance?
If we're not using statistics--you know, real data--to advance arguments, then we'd be relying on anecdotal evidence and gut feelings. Do you think we'd end up in a better place in policy world going off of those forms of explanation instead?
You should remember the quote that "all statistical models are false, but some are useful." It explains that no statistical model is perfect, but that it is the best alternative to all other forms of data investigation. By contrast, anecdotal evidence and gut feelings are far less accurate and fall subject to things like confirmation bias and sampling bias. Unless you can tell me how to properly calculate beta values for statistical sampling sizes and properly assess how statistical methodology is performed in a study, I don't want to hear shit from people not in the know about how inaccurate the stats cited are. How do you know they're inaccurate when you probably couldn't even tell me what covariance is without the use of Google? This some real Dunning-Kruger shit right here.
Your assumption that use of statistics when the statistics do not support your view is a fetish is unwarranted. Yes indeed, denominators are important . However, you do not have to imagine a denominator. You can go to the data and see what the denominators were.
Even in situations where a gun might make the difference between life and death, because the criminal usually has the element of surprise, the gun is usually not going to be available when you need it.
A great point, John. These "justifications" amount to, "Your neighbor drove drunk, so we're here to tow *your* car. You're willing to walk everywhere if it saves just one innocent life, right?"
The tiny fraction of gun owners who criminally abuse the right should not dictate what the rest of us can do.
"Only a tiny fraction of people who drive drunk actually kill anyone. Why punish all the other drunk drivers by making drinking while driving illegal via BAC over the actions of a few who killed people while driving drunk? Why do you get to use the state to prevent *me* from driving drunk just because some other dipshits did bad things while driving drunk? Why am I being punished collectively, as a law-abiding drunk driver, for the illegal actions of others? The tiny fraction of people who kill others when abusing the natural right to drive drunk should not dictate what the rest of us can do." - what you sound like rn
Aw, geez, I hope your back feels all right today. You must have pulled a muscle reaching for this leaden and illogical argument.
There's no such thing as a "law-abiding drunk driver." Drunk driving is a crime by itself; no injury or death required. When caught, drunks are arrested and their cars impounded. Your license and car are safe and so are mine, because the state doesn't hold us responsible for the crimes of others.
Society requires a criminal act to justify punishment.
Gun control, conversely, punishes all gun owners for the crimes of a few. Since a fraction of 1 percent of gun owners commit all the gun murders, the other 99.997 percent should pay equally for their crimes by losing their right to own guns, right?
No. That's groupblame at its very worst. I wouldn't let the state tow my car because my neighbor was caught driving drunk, and I will not let the state ban my guns because a kid in Uvalde went nuts.
You want to go after the noxious pests who hurt and kill people with their guns? Go right ahead, I'll help you. Gun violence is bad for everyone, including me. But leave the rest of us alone. We didn't hurt you, we're not going to hurt you, and we're not taking the blame for those who do.
We have DUI blood-alcohol limits, because even though I can hold MY shit while driving sloshed (j/k), most people canтАЩt. Why should I be punished just because other people drive like shit while drunk? See where IтАЩm going with this?
We already have lots of gun laws that people like me don't like and think are pointless (for example a 16" AR-15 barrel is fine, but 15.9" unregistered makes me a felon facing years in prison) but we deal with them anyway, but that's not the point. The question is whether the actions and choices of another person are predictive of my future choices and actions. We would reject that idea in other areas yet it seems to be accepted by many arguing for various changes in gun policy.
We definitley accept that idea in other areas, especially car insurance rates. A very responsible 17-year-old is going to pay higher rates because of the actions and choices of other less responsible 17-year-olds. This applies to areas involving risk assessment.
Studies have shown that intoxicated people routinely overestimate their ability to drive.
Thank you for saving me the time to make these points. :) One other factor you didn't mention is hit rate vs number of shots. You get the impression people think every round fired will be on target, and every bullet is so powerful that it only takes one shot to stop every bad guy. Yet even in law enforcement incidents the data shows the hit rate is very low. I've seen videos of officers firing entire handgun magazines (17 rounds) without hitting the bad guy. 30 rounds in an AR magazine is barely adequate for many real world scenarios.
ThatтАЩs because police training is shit and those guys donтАЩt have the round count or the instruction to react properly when gunfighting. TheyтАЩre trained to point and dump. ThatтАЩs it. Try getting them to change their tactics and the тАЬthin blue lineтАЭ crowd plus the unions get whiny as shit because they donтАЩt want to admit that theyтАЩve been training their officers improperly for decades.
Police training is certainly a topic worthy of discussion (many serious shooters mock the low standards in marksmanship, for example), but I used it as a reference point because most people would probably assume police are better trained than the typical gun owner. Also, it's something that has actually been studied a little bit to produce some hard data.
But I wouldn't say that they are "trained to point and dump", it's probably more because that's the natural instinct in those high stress situations. Take a person who shoots well at paper on a range and put them into force on force training with projectiles being shot at them and they will probably completely forget about their sights and blindly point and shoot as fast as possible.
Cops are literally trained to get sight picture/sight alignment on the threat, and then fire rounds in rapid succession until "the threat is stopped." It's why you'll see videos of cops dumping rounds into people in wheelchairs, or teens in hotel hallways that are clearly unarmed, or civilians walking around the Empire State Building. Conditioned gunfighters don't "rise to the occasion" in a gunfight, they default to the levels of their training. Most cops are trained to preserve their lives at all costs and to dump on threats they assume are present, which is why you almost never see a cop shooting a suspect just once or twice. They always put something like 5+ rounds into the suspect. The average police shooting involves 11 rounds fired. They're not hitting their targets. The cops have *terrible* training and refuse to address it. Civilian gun owners have even less training. It's only the folks with real combat experience and folks who take training seriously on their own that I even see doing the right thing. The average civilian can't even walk around at the low ready without flagging the shit out of half the line with their gun barrel 7 times out of 10. At least that's been my experience. The firearms community--including cops--barely take firearms training seriously, and firearms training *is not* just going to the range to practice marksmanship on a paper target while standing in a static position. That is *not* training, but a significant chunk of civilian gun owners think it is, which is why they default to unskilled shootings in the field just like the cops do.
This is wandering far from where it started. The original point was about whether there's a "need" for things like semi-auto guns, high capacity magazines, etc. I was pointing out that if even police usually don't hit their target (nevermind hit the right spot on the bad guy) how is it reasonable to say that normal people (not in LE) don't "need" at least the same weapon capabilities that LE has?
(Of course this assumes that a person would grant normal people the right to prepare to defend themselves against threats if they choose)
There is certainly much worth discussing regarding law enforcement training, what responsible gun ownership ought to look like, etc but that's something I'll leave for another time.
You imply another point. There have been situations where the police come upon someone using their gun to defend themselves or others and mindlessly shoot because "GUN." Or the man at the traffic stop who responsibly told the officer he had a gun in the glove compartment with his drivers license, and the cop promptly shot him dead with his wife and toddler in the car.
You're quite welcome. Yes, hit rate is a genuine problem--NYPD did a study years ago and found that officers forced to shoot felons hit their targets only 20 percent of the time. The other 80 percent of the bullets went off to hit god knows what.
Pistols that carried rounds powerful enough to kill a charging bear--the equivalent of an angry, drug-infused human killer running at you with a hatchet--would take the shooter's hand off with recoil, and punch through the killer, five cars behind him, and the brick wall behind the cars. Handgun rounds are not powerful so they are controllable, so more than one round is often needed to stop an angry attacker.
"One shot, one kill" is a dandy title for a movie, but it has nothing to do with real-life defensive shootings.
They probably didn't want to hit their targets. It's one thing to shoot a gun, another to kill a person.
I agree. It's tough to shoot and kill another human being, even if you have to. Army studies showed that most of the shots fired in battles in past wars didn't hit enemy soldiers. Our guys fired their weapons because they were expected to, but the shots went wide because they psychologically didn't want to kill. That wasn't universal, of course, but it was a serious enough issue that the Army revamped its training systems to desensitize soldiers enough that they'd take the kill shot.
I wish the world would find another way to settle its differences, since war truly blows for everyone but the profiteers.
The NYPD installs stiff triggers in department-issued Glock 19s because theyтАЩre so worried about the low low firearms training standards for their 30,000+ sworn officers leading to negligent discharges in the field. ItтАЩs why they had a couple officers dump magazines near the Empire State Building and hit nothing but civilians lol. TheyтАЩre not recruiting or training their best.
I know, right? That New York trigger is hideous, and it's there to disguise the lack of firearms training cops get. NYPD is recruiting officers as best it can, since getting qualified people is a challenge for every department these days. But it certainly isn't training remotely well. Not in actual gun handling, and not in remaining cool in the face of attacks. No suspect needs to be shot 80 times, for god's sake.
Exactly. I own a bolt-action precision rifle and a 10-rd handgun. I feel perfectly safe, especially because I'm well-trained. I'm more worried about the proliferation of assault weapons and body armor--particularly among younger, emotionally-unstable teenagers. These are tougher threats than the ones I went up against in Iraq. Those guys weren't running around with red dot sights/scopes, 300+ rounds of ammo, and body armor. The insurgency would have looked real different had that been the case. There's a reason why more cops are getting killed or wounded in these mass-shootings: the bad guys increasingly have body armor and assault rifles to out-gun the cops with, only they're not robbing a bank in North Hollywood anymore. The mission isn't armed bank robbery now, it's taking as many lives as possible before you commit suicide by cop.
"Those guys weren't running around with red dot sights/scopes, 300+ rounds of ammo, and body armor."
They didn't, but you did. Why did you carry all that gear on patrol in Iraq? Because you didn't know what you'd run into, so you were smart to prepare yourself for (most) situations.
I cannot imagine you would been comfortable in Iraq with a ten-round handgun instead of a 30-round M4 with six magazines. I'm not arguing that U.S. civilians need to carry ARs to the Country Kitchen for breakfast. But it makes no sense to deny them seventeen-round Glocks and a reload if they want to carry that weight on their hip. I'm comfortable with my ten-rounder in my leafy suburban paradise. But I'd want the option to upgrade that if I need to travel into a high-crime neighborhood.
Nobody knows the threat they may face, because bad guys don't make appointments.
It'sa good thing we don't live in a war zone.
The trend in the 2A community towards capacity over precision is one of the reason IтАЩm so concerned. The US is not Iraq. There are rules here. I own accountability for every single one of those ten rounds I carry. If youтАЩre going up against multiple threats, you should be transitioning between targets, which would be like placing two into one target before moving to the next. If you need more than ten rounds to cover a max of x5 threats (target transition after two rounds), chances are you suck at shooting and are better off running.
Training cops & civilians to go high on capacity and dump rounds тАЬuntil the threat is neutralizedтАЭ is how you end up with a bunch of people walking around with guns with 15+ rounds just dumping them into a тАЬthreatтАЭ when they get scared and not thinking about whatтАЩs behind the target or how many shots they are missing. IтАЩm just as worried about the societal liability of a bunch of fuckin rookies walking around with the power to kill and little to no training or appreciation for what comes with that. Dipshits like George Zimmerman and Kyle Rittenhaus were perfect examples. Look what they did to the gun culture and national politics.
I certainly agree that "if ten bullets are good, ninety are better!" is a trend that needs to end ASAP. "Spray and pray" is a nightmare for society. But putting rounds on the exact place needed to stop the threat quickly and with few bullets requires a vast amount of training and practice. Police departments and even the military won't fund the amount of ammo and instruction required to make the skills stick.
Individual cops might go get that training on their own, but most don't; their jobs require so many responsibilities beyond shooting that gun skills fall to the bottom of the list. My own city's PD runs a world-class shooting operation that every officer is required to pass, four times or more a year. But it's expensive and most departments won't bother.
I can't agree that two rounds per attacker is all you'll ever need. Some attackers require no rounds, and that's the norm: the presence of the gun by the prey makes most predators run away. But some attackers require a dozen rounds to stop, no matter how expertly you place those shots.
It's why I'm an evangelist for regular training and live-fire shooting for anyone who carries a gun, whether police or not. I'm not concerned about someone carrying the 33 rounds provided by a Glock 17 and one spare magazine because, hey, they might need it. But carrying that much firepower without knowing how to use it rightly give us shudders.
I didnтАЩt say you only needed two rounds to put down a threat. I said that if there are multiple closing threats then you should be target transitioning. While youтАЩre busy dumping rounds into threat #1, threat #s 2,3,4 and 5 are closing ground to fuck you up. ThatтАЩs why you put x2 JHPs onto threat #1, then x2 on threat #2, etc. IтАЩve done extensive pistol training with prior 0317s and 0321s in force on force scenarios and low-light/darkness applications. Thousands of rounds down the pipe of my Glock 48 MOS. I do burpees before all my drills. My 10 rounds count for something. Wish everyone else trained that way too. Instead, they train to stand still and dump rounds. And the 2A community promotes capacity over precision fundamentals and medical training, etc. тАЬSpray and prayтАЭ seems to be the current cultural flavor.
As youтАЩve pointed out, some threats can take multiple rounds without stoppingтАФusually due to adrenaline dumps on their end and poor shooting/training on the defenderтАЩs end. I donтАЩt care how much meth someone shoots up, if you place a round into their high thoracic cavity, they are going down. Tell me how many people youтАЩve seen keep charging when their throat blows out internally and theyтАЩre choking on their own blood if their lights donтАЩt go out from CNS disruption immediately.
You kinda are arguing that people need to be able to take their AR's to Country Kitchen. Bad guys don't make appointments, after all. Might be good to have a few flashbangs too, as well as a couple of hand grenades. And for these roving bands, a full auto SAW doesn't seem out of the question.
We can always find scenarios where we'd want more firepower, but as can be readily seen, that increased access to firepower is coming with increasing costs in our society. I'd feel a lot safer in my home if I was allowed to use claymores and could keep an RPG in the corner (home use only of course) to take out that SUV full of attackers.
Yes, I'm being a bit absurd, but we should try to find a balance between personal protection and societal safety, and of course, everyone isn't going to be perfectly happy with that balance. The thing we do too much of (IMO) is error on the side of fear of hypotheticals or very rare occurrences. We have an epidemic of people being massacred going about their daily lives, but I'm not seeing the evidence of hundreds of people dying every year from not having powerful enough guns. Does it happen, sure. Enough to warrant our current permissiveness of gun capability and ownership and the attendant, near daily problems?
I find that there are well armed people who argue that they need to be safe.
In my younger days I lived in a lot of places and been pickpoketed and purse snatched a few times when I was young, but had been taught how to be wary and careful. No dark allies, take a cab at night, keep you doors locked. But I'm usually not afraid. It must be horrible to feel you have to carry around so much fire power because you feel like you live in a war zone. You don't live in a war zone, do you.
"You don't live in a war zone, do you."
If you are asking this of me, then no, I don't. Though you may have misread some of my satire as serious, as I don't really want an AR in the coffee shop or claymores around my house (the RPG would still be nice for target practice though). ;)
I did misread you. My apologies. But I bet there are people who think like that.
Dammit, and I really wanted that H-bomb . . .
"We should try to find a balance between personal protection and societal safety, and of course, everyone isn't going to be perfectly happy with that balance."
Agree completely, knowitok. The trick is figuring out that balance point.
One is the right to open carry. I don't like open carry because it frightens the public for no good reason. So, I don't support bringing ARs and other assault rifles to Country Kitchen. In fact, I would ban open carry of long guns and handgun outside of rural and hunting zones. People concerned with personal protection can accomplish the same goal with a concealed weapon, and since they can, frightening the public with the sight of their smoke poles is not supportable. Concealed carry gives people the protection they want without making grandma nervous when she eats her biscuits. That is a fair balance between need to protect yourself and the right of the public to not be worried about what you intend to do to them with your rifle.
Grenades are illegal because they're explosives, which aren't protected by 2A. Flashbangs, ditto; they're explosives. Ditto claymores, RPGs, dynamite, and nuclear weapons. We've already established the balance between personal safety and public concerns when it comes to explosives, and that's fine.
If you want to argue that assault rifles present such a unique danger to Americans because their use in mass slaughters outweighs any other value they might have, I'd probably accept that and agree to a ban . . . OR, better, reclassification into machine gun status, with its much heavier restrictions.
But other semiautomatics, including handguns, have a social value that drastically outweighs their criminal misuse, and I won't agree to ban them like I would assault rifles.
We don't have an epidemic of mass shootings, by the way. It appears so because the slaughter are so horrible, but assault rifles are used in only 1 percent of the 20,000 gun murders we suffer every year. Those 200 or so include all mass murders like Uvalde.
That said, we can't look only at cold data; mass slaughters by assault rifles are a serious public concern despite the low numbers, and so a ban or heavier regulation or bans is supportable.
Me, I'd raise the age of gun ownership to 25, with the caveat that honorable military service or passing a federal weapons training course (which doesn't yet exist, though it should) would allow you to own at 21. Prove you're mature enough to handle a gun, you can own it at 21. Kids could use guns before those ages, but only under the direct supervision of an adult, which allows hunting to continue.
It's also time to get serious about prosecuting every violent gun crime as the danger to society they are. Do the crime, do the time: no more plea bargains, if you use a gun in an act of criminal violence, you go to prison. We don't do that now; gun laws are mostly on the books but unenforced. Change that to the toughness against gun violence that the laws claim, and criminals will get the message and change their ways. If they don't, at least they're behind bars until they begin to age out of wanting to pull the trigger.
Believe it or not, I am totally for reasonable restriction on gun ownership and hard attacks on gun criminals. I only differ in that banning this and banning that will not reduce the number of dead, so it's time to get creative.
From what I understand of the Rittenhouse case, he frightened people with his open carry, and some sought to disarm him, and he shot them. He had no business self-deputizing himself to be there in the first place.
That's not remotely how it happened, and he had every legal right to be there.
Excellent summary. I would only add that something like the Mandalay Bay shooting is impossible with a handgun, and people tend to suck with handguns even at close range whereas the AR-15/M4 platform (and others in similar fashion) are ridiculously easy to shoot repeatedly with precision and fire a much more lethal round, which is exactly why they can teach an 18-year old how to kill out to 500y with one in just two weeks at places like MCRD Parris Island. Handguns are more difficult to kill masses of people with due to the accuracy loss even at short ranges, the lowered velocity and lethality of handgun ammo vs semi-auto mag-fed rifles, and the much lower effective range. Just some food for thought.
Thank you, Travis, and I agree: ARs and AKs may well present such a unique danger to society that other weapons don't, that banning them is justified to protect the public. I find your argument persuasive; the ease of use is exactly what makes it a tool for blood sport, not just self-defense.
But I won't go along with this ban if it's only the "next step on the road" to banning handguns, standard-capacity magazines, semiautomatic hunting rifles and shotguns, and all the other ornaments on the gun-hater Christmas tree.
A pleasure discussing this with you!
Thank you for the great response.
I'm all for creativity in this, and love the idea of raising the age. I'd have knee-jerked to 21 (as a start), but 25 isn't crazy to me, and I like the carve out for those who have ... completed an enlistment? Not arguing, just looking for clarification. I wouldn't want someone who has only completed basic a few weeks ago getting an exception (maybe that counts for the 21 and a course thing you mentioned).
Concerning the use of assault rifles:
From Pew:
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/02/03/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-u-s/
-----In 2020, handguns were involved in 59% of the 13,620 U.S. gun murders and non-negligent manslaughters for which data is available, according to the FBI. Rifles тАУ the category that includes guns sometimes referred to as тАЬassault weaponsтАЭ тАУ were involved in 3% of firearm murders. Shotguns were involved in 1%. The remainder of gun homicides and non-negligent manslaughters (36%) involved other kinds of firearms or those classified as тАЬtype not stated.тАЭ
ItтАЩs important to note that the FBIтАЩs statistics do not capture the details on all gun murders in the U.S. each year. The FBIтАЩs data is based on information voluntarily submitted by police departments around the country, and not all agencies participate or provide complete information each year. -----
So not saying you are wrong with the 1%, but not 100% sure it is as low as you are saying. Beyond that, do note that I'm not one calling for an assault weapons ban and washing my hands of it. The issue is much more complex, and definitely needs a multi-faceted approach. It is also going to take decades to fix, as we've taken decades to get to this point.
As for gun laws, plea deals, and enforcement, those are topics than need a lot of data to fully explore. Plea deals have a variety of issues around them, but I don't know for certain that they are the cause of gun laws not being enforced. My time on a local grand jury showed that the local prosecutor was really focused on seizing guns through forfeiture, but that's not the same a jail time, and only an anecdotal example.
About enlistment. Gun training for most military members is limited to several weeks with a personally-zeroed M16 during basic, and once a year at the range with an unzeroed M16. According to 2019 statistics, only 10% of the entire military force engage in battle. A larger percentage get the training, but not the field experience. It is a misconception that completing an enlistment is equal to extensive training.
A lot of trust funds do not allow the beneficiary full access to the assets until age 25. Interesting.
Yes, honorable discharge from the military after whatever years of service. No washouts, no dishonorable, nothing but normal service would get that waiver.
I chose 25 because science suggests that human brains are not fully mature until that age. So, for purposes of owning a gun, I'd limit ownership to brain-mature adults. The carveout would allow kids to own a gun if they prove maturity and ability to handle weapons responsibly.
The FBI doesn't break out assault rifles as a separate category. They're include in the 3 percent of all rifles. One percent represents my educated guess. It could be as high as 2 percent, but no higher.
My insistence that we take violent gun felons out of circulation via prison (I'm not a lock-em-up-till-death guy; prison stinks as a social tool. But violent predators need to go somewhere till they age out of their lust to kill, and prisons are what we have) comes from reading that many gun murders are committed by people who had lengthy criminal records, including gun violations. They are released again and again to prey on the public, till finally they shoot someone during a carjacking. If we keep them in prison for a while after their first violent crime, whether it's robbery or murder, we keep them from repeat offenses.
Plea deals are the ultimate expression of laws not being enforced. Police arrest criminal shooters by the truckload, but if prosecutors don't follow through, shooter walks and they get the message we're not actually serious.
Yes, seizing guns through forfeiture does not send the message that "we're serious about you not shooting people." Forfeiture is just a cost of doing business, couple hundreds bucks gone, pick up another gun and get back to work.
A pleasure discussing this issue with you in a friendly and sane way!
It was a point of pride for the teenage me to hunt pheasants with a single shot 12 gauge.
That's fine for pheasants, because if you miss, they don't shoot back or stab you with a knife. Humans do. Hunting needs differ radically from defensive needs.
Which is why the police and the military have access to the weapons they do.
I am 60 years old. I have traveled over most of the US and into the second and third world. I have never been shot at or really even threatened with violence beyond fisticuffs in my life... and the likelihood of encountering higher levels of violence would be reduced if there were limits ands controls on guns.
I think they are paranoid.
I read a great book by Paul Theroux. He was 60 and he traveled by bus and hitchhiking alone from Cairo to Capetown. His description of camping alone in the desert next a pyramid was so cool. My point? He didn't carry a gun or weapon of any kind.
I'm genuinely glad you've never been attacked by a monster. I have. It's not very much fun.
The vast majority of people in this country have not and are very unlikely to be--and those odds would be even lower if there were not so many guns.
I agree, R, that most people will never have to deal with this. But given 1.3 million violent crimes a year in the United States, some will. If they're armed and don't hurt innocent people, why do you object?
As for odds would be lower, no, they'd be the same. Attackers don't need guns to hurt and kill people--there's all kinds of ways for them to do it.
Exactly. Deer hunting was done (by my family anyway) either with a bow or with a black powder rifle.
It was supposed to be about skill and patience, not firepower.
I also used to do a lot of groundhog hunting (farmers were happy to let us do it, some would even pay). I had a Sako .22-250 with a bull barrel, bipod and 14x scope for that. It was kind of like sniping, only without the ghillie suit or danger LOL. Usual ranges were between 200 to 400 yards.
Groundhogs. Awww
They are large rats, somewhat cuter than your standard rat, but a rat nonetheless. :)
Went chuck hunting on farms as a kid down in central Ky. Same in that most farmers were always happy to have a hand controlling these pests. Different in that terrain was hilly, fields were relatively small and ranges much shorter than yours. 100/125 yds a very long shot most days. 50, maybe 75 pretty common. Usually used just a .22, sometimes w/4x scope, often w/open sights. Worked perfectly well, as long as you were a decent shot. Had a friend who liked to see how close he could sneak up to one before taking the shot when there was anything resembling 'cover' like long grass, brush or hay present. Got pretty darned good at it...probably would have made a good sniper in the service.
Can't speak to all areas of the country or all types of game, but around here (Ohio) the deer vs. hunter population has shifted so much that limits have radically changed. When I was a kid my father was allowed one and only one deer per year. Now it is several. My guess (nothing more) is that allowing 'better' weapons for hunting was simply a method for increasing the kill rate on a growing population of deer vs. a decreasing population of hunters.
You don't need "better" weapons, you just need to be allowed to kill more. It isn't really THAT hard to kill a deer, provided you actually see one and provided you have decent aim.
True, as far as 'need' goes. But better weapons should increase the number of deer taken. Looking at the big numbers, some subset of hunters don't have the extra time to get the extra deer from the missed opportunities of having a single shot or having to work a bolt, etc.
And given the impact on society, I'd be all for climbing into the wayback machine and nixing better weapons for hunting. I'm just speculating on why they made the switch, over time, these many years ago.
Of course, I wouldn't be surprised to find out it was gun lobby driven as a way to increase sales...
The reality is that if the deer problem is that bad there are these people called game wardens who could probably do something about it.
The thing to understand about the arms industry is that it was once a very feast or famine industry. Guns, properly cared for, last a long time and they remain effective for most purposes outside of the military.
The big money for arms manufacturers was (and is) in government sales (military and police)--except military small arms needs went down after the age of mass industrialized warfare ended after WW2 where you no longer had multi-million man armies.
Plus the replacement of bolt-action rifles with semi-automatic and automatic weapons created a HUGE surplus of weapons. Many of the people that I knew growing up bought these weapons and refurbished them for personal use rather than buying a newly manufactured gun.
With the government you get one huge contract or two every decade or so, probably less now that we have been using the M16/M4 since the 60s. It will be interesting to see how many MX5s the government buys to replace M4s over the next few years (once the litigation of the contract is finished).
So you have all this expense and tooling to make these weapons--which sucks if you cannot generate a constant income stream from it--so you create "civilianized" versions to sell and push the holy crap out of it. Got to keep the shareholders happy.
I mean, the army has been having design competitions every few years to replace the M16/M4 which have largely been nothing but busy work for the arms manufacturers. I am amazed they actually decided to "replace" the M4 this time around, TBH.
Governments and militaries are notoriously reluctant to do things like change personal weapons unless there is some overriding advantage due to changes in technology (like replacing the M1903 with the M1) because of the huge inventory they have and the sunk cost. This is why the military arms market is sporadic/cyclic and the cycles tend to be LONG.