Firearm Expertise

Zeb_Carter said:

Bramblethorn is a she.

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Zeb_Carter said:

Bramblethorn is a she.

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Bramblethorn said:

As far as I'm aware, the last Federal-level election was the December 12 ballot to fill Jeff Sessions' old seat. Democrats won that one with a margin of 1.7%, in a state that went 62-34 Republican just a year earlier in the Presidential election and where Dems didn't even bother running a Senate candidate in 2014.

At the state level, the latest was just last week (Feb 27) with special elections to fill vacancies in State legislatures:

Connecticut #120: 51-49 D victory, in a district that Republicans won by 25% in 2016.

New Hampshire, Belknap 3: 54-46 D victory, in a district that Republicans won 54-46 in 2016.

Kentucky #89: 67-33 R victory. (Republicans won by 100% in 2016 because Democrats didn't run a candidate - but as with Alabama, a lot has changed since 2016.)

Last year there were 98 special elections at State level. Net result was +11 Democrat seats, which is huge - in a normal year the net change is about +/- 3 or smaller.

Those aren't isolated incidents; things have shifted a lot since 2016. November's going to be an interesting time.

Hypothetical question - leaving aside whether it's likely to happen, if pro-gun-control candidates did get enough votes to effect legal change (be that through Constitutional amendment, coming up with legislation that survives a SCOTUS challenge, whatever), would you accept that result?



Nope. Only the ones that we believe would be harmful and counterproductive. Gun control is a suggestion for protecting kids, it just isn't one that you like.



...we just went through this a couple of posts ago. Yes, some criminals would stockpile, but your average mass shooter doesn't have that kind of connections.



Er... isn't that the same 2014 CPRC stuff that you already linked to here? (last time via Breitbart, this time more directly.)



For clarity, I'm a dual US/Australian national and I've lived and worked in the USA, although most of my life has been in Australia. So I'm reasonably familiar with US culture (to the extent that there is a "US culture" per se - Hawaii is very different to Boston or the Midwest!)



I think we already talked about that last point? Even when people don't turn their guns in, if it pushes them to hide guns away where they can't easily be accessed, that's an improvement.



I can't comment on "in nature"; too many other factors muddying the waters. But we certainly had more than enough murderous young men in the 1980s and up to the mid-90s.



The UCR has a category for "shotguns", so that's not it. (Even if it was due to some other category of gun, the usual language for that is "other" or "not elsewhere classified", rather than "unknown"). Even allowing that there are types of firearms that aren't handguns, shotguns, or rifles, it seems unlikely that those other-guns are killing three thousand a year.

It's more likely to be due to differences in how regional authorities collect their information. FBI doesn't collect UCR data correctly; they get sent it by about eighteen thousand different law enforcement agencies, and not everybody records stuff the exact same way. My best guess would be that some agencies are recording details on the type of firearm used, and others just have a single box for "cause of death: gunshot wound".



Can you elaborate on that? What were the laws that should've prevented him from buying/owning guns? My understanding was that it's very, very hard to take away somebody's firearms without a criminal conviction, and that there simply wasn't much the police could legally do before he started killing people.



Drugs can be hidden just about anywhere. It's a bit harder to stash an AR-15 in a body cavity



Cheers. I do appreciate that you've been more courteous to me than I'm used to in this kind of discussion



Some firearms history.

Back in the 1950s, the US Army was looking for a 7.62mm rifle to replace the old M1 Garand. Armalite (more specifically, Eugene Stoner) designed and submitted the AR-10 for consideration in that role; it got some good reviews, but eventually lost out to Springfield Armory's T44, which was renamed the M14.

(Military procurement politics is some crazy crazy shit.)

The Vietnam War showed up some deficiencies in the M14, and military thinking shifted away from the 7.62mm round in favour of smaller calibres. Trying to capture that market, Armalite redesigned the AR-10 to produce a smaller version in 5.56mm: the "Armalite AR-15".

The US Army tested the Armalite AR-15 for military use. Once again, it did well, but the Army didn't adopt it at that time. Armalite sold the AR-15 to Colt, who made some minor tweaks to the design, and sold it to armed forces around the world. The US Air Force liked it and adopted it, and eventually after much drama it was also adopted by the US Army with a few more tweaks, and renamed the M-16.

So far, all these versions had been made for the military market, capable of semi-auto and full-auto fire. Colt then decided to broaden their market, so they produced a semi-auto version which they marketed as the AR-15. Eventually their patents expired, and then other manufacturers started producing AR-15 clones.

(Meanwhile, on the military side, the A2 and A4 refinements of the M16 also did away with full-auto mode, because it was largely counterproductive; most of the time semi-auto was a far more effective use of ammunition.)

In other words: the AR-15 was conceived as a military rifle, as the child of another military rifle, designed and redesigned for military use, adopted by military forces all over the world, and then slightly tweaked to sell to civilians by removing a feature that some of the military versions also removed. Calling it "not a military weapon" is... rather stretching things.



I know a few Muslims who might have something to say about that. And I do believe Coachie was blaming gun-control advocates for shootings just upthread.



Perhaps it's not okay?

If you haven't encountered anybody outraged by the idea, you're just not hanging with the right crowd. People have been arguing for more than a hundred years that it's immoral to send teenagers to war.

Wilfred Owen wrote this one some time between 1916 and 1918:

Let the boy try along this bayonet-blade
How cold steel is, and keen with hunger of blood;
Blue with all malice, like a madman's flash;
And thinly drawn with famishing for flesh.

Lend him to stroke these blind, blunt bullet-leads,
Which long to nuzzle in the hearts of lads,
Or give him cartridges of fine zinc teeth
Sharp with the sharpness of grief and death.

For his teeth seem for laughing round an apple.
There lurk no claws behind his fingers supple;
And God will grow no talons at his heels,
Nor antlers through the thickness of his curls.



They certainly can. They make it harder for people nearby to recognise that a shooting has started, or to locate the shooter, which reduces their ability to react and protect themselves.

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toeskr said:

Don't even know what that is and don't care, probably something you pulled out of your ass to make yourself appear smart. If that is a valid publication, can you provide a link? I've never heard of it and if you read it, I think that says more about you than me.

Pretty funny you assume you know what race I am. Clueless aussie.

You need to go bang your head in frustration on a eucalyptus tree and quit worrying yourself about America's business.

Your posts are becoming hilarious for posterity though. Thanks for the laughs.

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