Baton Rouge Advocate, Dec. 14
According to my son, the gun being advertised is the same type of weapon that the Oregon mall shooter used. That killer didn’t buy the weapon; he stole it from a gun owner. Still, I cannot for the life of me understand why it ought to be legal to purchase such a weapon.
Aside from that, though: Wow, could the ad placement be any worse? This is in part a dramatic snapshot of our problem with guns.
Travis says: More than magazine size even, the problem is replaceable magazines. If the mag size is 10 but they’re detachable and swappable in a matter of a couple seconds, you’re really not changing much.
Civilian weapons should not be allowed to have field-swappable magazines – they should have to be reloaded one round at a time. This would introduce significant delays into the process of shooting a lot of people, while not significantly inhibiting legitimate civilian target shooting or hunting.
do we really think that other democratic nations with stringent gun control are really so much less free than us?
Yes, absolutely. You can get prosecuted and convicted in a lot of European countries for saying things that are politically incorrect. In France, even pointing out statistics that certain groups commit more crimes than others can get you prosecuted. In non-Anglosphere countries, there is no right against self-incrimination. In Germany, you have no right to homeschool your children.
EddieInCA says: As far as the NRA is concerned 20 dead kindergarden kids is just the cost of freedom.
The NRA has gotten in the way of every single possible sensible gun safety legislation. Every. Single. One.
There is not gun control safety issue to which they will not respond with “They’re gonna take yer guns”.
pacopond says: I am a gun owner. Many of my long guns are old bolt-action military rifles I collect for historical reasons, but I have others, including a recently acquired Ruger Mini-14 .223 with 20 and 30 round magazines. I have revolvers and semi-auto handguns and a couple of shotguns.
There are many points I might bring forward. I don’t know what an “expert” is, but I certainly know a lot more about guns than most people. But now is not the time.
The slaughter of innocents has shaken me. Right now the pro-gun arguments pale and shrivel in the presence of overwhelming grief.
Give it a break.
JLF says: Of all our rights protected by the Bill of Rights, the right to keep and bear arms is the most precious, purchased last year by more than 10,000 lives. What a savage and uncaring society we most certainly are. And with what hypocrisy do we welcome the Advent season.
Bob Mitchell says: Simple pacopond send me your guns. I don’t own a gun myself but I so revere those solemn words that our founding fathers etched in the hearts of all free men that I will happily remove that burden from your shriveled belief in Constitutioanl rights. (This at least is what the ACLU sounds like when they are defending some pornographer.)
You know I was really sad about piss Christ but no one took that artists free speech away. Read George Stone’s article in HuffPo today and you see this is a full out assault on the Bill of Rights by the left. Say what you want about the Patriot Act, but it didnt prohibit the exercising of any emumerates constitutional right. Having hid behind the Constitution during their Long March to power the left now wants to encase itself and start making people pay. For what it isn’t clear, but their will be blood.
M_Young says: Fred, should I give you a description of the various illnesses that AIDS inflicts on a body? After all we permit, indeed some states now encourage, the activity whereby AIDS is transmitted half the time, because of freedom.
cecelia says: It seems to me that those who oppose ANY form of gun control deny the reality of what humans are like – there are among us the depraved, the desperate and the sick. Because of our Bill of Rights we cannot nor will we run around profiling such people and lock them up. So they are out there – willing to do harm. It seems that in the same way we take other precvautions to assure the public safety we should take reasonable precautions to mitigate the damage that is done by such people when they can access guns. The purchase of a gun should require training, thorough background check, people can’t get howitzers for their personal protection, replaceable magazines etc should be limited in their sale.
As for the arguement presented by April – by your logic we should then be able to have grenades, mortars, land mines, even tactical nuclear weapons. I reject such logic – we limit our individual rights for the sake of the safety of others in so many ways – speed limits – traffic lights – limit your rights – yet we agree for the sake of a harmonious society to accept such limitations on individual freedom. The NRA is no different from the many lobbies that have taken over our democratic process.
What happened in Connecticut is not likely to be prevented by gun control – but it does remind us that we are surrounded by millions of people with guns – some number of whom represent a danger to all of us. I think mitigating that danger is rational.
“Change can come to our hearts and therefore actions only when we renounce violence not only as a first choice, but a kind of pornographic entertainment. Violence of any sort should become a voluntary societal taboo.”
Great! But in the meantime, let’s get rid of those semiautomatic weapons. Unless you think renouncing violence is quicker and easier.
Fred says: M_Young,
After you give me that list, give me a reason why your analogy is relevant, and not utterly pathetic.
kb says: If not guns, explosives would become the more fashionable hobby and method of crime in gangs, public attacks, etc.
One thing to keep in mind is that this kind of weapon is actually critical for self-protection in rioting situations. An interesting activity is to search on YouTube for videos of the LA riots. Some of them have videos that show the difference between the Korean part of town and the rest of LA. The Koreans came armed to the teeth. Guess what – no one even bothered them. It was really funny because the news commentator said that the Koreans were “looking for a confrontation”. This is particularly funny because they were the only ones in the whole city *without* confrontation. It was the people who failed to arm themselves against rioters who were the ones who were, in practical terms, “looking for a confrontation”.
And, when facing rioters, I should point out that you would want a gun with a high-capacity, fast-reload magazine. The AR-15 style gun has a lot of other modern enhancements, such as a barrel shroud which keeps you from burning yourself if you accidentally touch the barrel.
In any case, even if you don’t think you need to defend yourself against the government, there are good reasons you might want high-capacity semi-automatic rifles.
Cecelia: Your argument is disjointed and contradictory. Like the citizenry, the government also used to have only lethal weapons “that shot out lead bullets made by the [soldier] doing the shooting—with a rifle that was not that accurate and lost accuracy the more it was shot.” So the citizenry and the government had a level playing field since they had the same weapons. It was much easier for the citizenry to protect itself against a hostile government if need be. You then state that “if the government was really out to get you—your pathetic guns won’t stop them—our military has tanks, armored vehicles, deadly fighter planes etc etc.” Indeed. So to level the playing field (as much as it can be) the 21st century citizenry need more than muzzle-loading rifles to protect itself against a hostile government.
“The founding fathers never envisioned the sort of weaponry that is all over this country”—no they probably didn’t. But they probably didn’t envision that our military would ever have “tanks, armored vehicles, deadly fighter planes etc etc” either. Automatic, semi-automatic, and other assault weapons are merely leveling the playing field again. If the founding fathers envisioned an armed citizenry protecting itself against an armed government, then they might think that perhaps citizens should be armed with “tanks, armored vehicles, deadly fighter planes etc etc.” You know, to level the playing field. It wasn’t about the type of weaponry; it was (and still is) about a citizenry protecting itself, and having the right to do so.
You also say that “even with a gun—it isn’t so easy to defend oneself…” True. But it’s not easy to defend oneself bringing a knife to a gun fight. I’d rather have a gun than nothing at all. I’d rather my neighbor have a gun than nothing. I’d rather there be 270,000,000 guns in civilian hands than the civilians standing there empty handed.