Defending Semiautomatic Long Guns With Detachable Box Magaznes

Frank Ettin said:
carguychris said:
...Mateen HAD the requisite licenses to wear a uniform and a badge!
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I believe he was a private security guard. Was he vetted using the same process as Orlando police officers? I suspect not.
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True, but I think that the significant points are that the licenses allowed him to legally go about armed where ordinary civilians could not, and more perhaps more importantly, they symbolically identified him as one of the "good guys".

I will concede that had he been a police officer, it is far less likely that his reported tendencies towards bigotry and angry, unpredictable, and irrational behavior would have gone unnoticed or unreported.
 
^^^ This is good to know, but I think it's of limited value here, because I perceive the current gun-control push as being less about ordinary crimes and "gun deaths" and more about stopping terrorists and lunatics from inflicting mass casualties.

(As a footnote, I have frequently argued that supporting an AWB is absurd when it comes to decreasing "gun deaths" that mostly consist of suicides, as it takes only 1 shot to do oneself in, and absent some Rube Goldberg contraption, the probability of follow-up shots is minimal. A single-shot break-open .410 shotgun is perfectly adequate and virtually no one is seriously discussing banning those.)
 
Drives you crazy doesn't it?
They have had 40 years of dumbing down our population.
The fact that they are asking you the question tell you they dont really know what going on.
That being said, its imperative that we as a group start to counter their narrative. Its going to be a wide row to hoe. but we need to do it.

In regard to this specific question.
"Why would you want to ban the gun you pray for police to show up with?"

If they would feel under gunned.And would not do it. Why should I? If I am involved. That means I am the true 1st responder. The police would just be there to break it up or document what happened.
 
I perceive the current gun-control push as being less about ordinary crimes and "gun deaths" and more about stopping terrorists and lunatics from inflicting mass casualties.
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Probably true.

A shame, then, that the wider public don't get equally regular reports of armed civilians deterring or repelling would-be attackers.

If every day, there were reports of regular folk come out on top in a confrontation with a criminal whether a shot was even fired or not, public perception would be altered. Perhaps not reversed, but certainly swayed.

If media outlets won't cover these stories, perhaps it should be done by members of congress who are pro-gun.... It might be one way for them to show it and no one could fault them for sharing the news that x number of law abiding citizens had successfully avoided becoming victims....

It might not address the issue of box mag semi autos, but it would be a step in the propaganda war. (which it does appear to be)
 
I've actually thought about putting together 5 (or 10) bullet points that counters anti arguments and print 'em on business cards. In these days of facetweets, the public has no attention span.
 
carguychris said:
....I perceive the current gun-control push as being less about ordinary crimes and "gun deaths" and more about stopping terrorists and lunatics from inflicting mass casualties.....
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I think the push for gun control has, for years, been about fear and mistrust.

Many people fear those of us who have guns. They really can't understand why we have guns and why we struggle so hard to keep them. And while it's true that most on-gun owners probably understand that every gun owner is not a rampage ready to happen, they probably aren't sure which very few of us are and which of us aren't.

So maybe there are a couple of folks in your neighborhood who have a tiny sliver of primal fear that if they politely and meekly complain that your party is too load you'll get mad and shoot up the town. The proposition is absurd, but the fear is real and a motivating factor.
 
And the anti's will point out that the chance that anyone will "need" a magazine-fed semi automatic rifle for personal self-defense is even slimmer than slim-to-none. A 6 shot revolver or 10 shot pistol will be plenty. Bolt actions are fine for hunting.

You've painted yourself into a corner and you're going to lose every time you depend on that argument.
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You're misinterpreting my post. I'M not arguing that, I'm saying that the ANTI's make the argument about slim-to-none.
 
And the whole "slim-to-none" thing is silly. The chances of an earthquake, war (actual war, not the endless series of bad decisions in which we've been mired), etc are all slim-to-none, but we buy insurance and maintain our military and do all kinds of behaviors "just in case".

An example is the whole environmental movement -- it is predicated on concern for future generations, and so it is with our stewardship of the portion of the 2A which focuses on the right to resist tyranny. Obv that's not happening anytime soon (drama queens howling from both sides of the aisle to the contrary), but we keep the right alive for those distant, future generations because we're smart enough to learn from history, which tells us how badly it sucks to be under the heel of tyranny.
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I agree, and the future generations argument is a good explanation for dealing with anti's, but if one just makes it seem like they have guns because they're concerned of the current government becoming tyrannical, it can make them seem paranoid to an anti.
 
I'd have to say it's not disingenuous if you understand the reasoning behind it.

Inanimate objects don't do things by themselves. Kind of what inanimate means, unable to animate (move) by themselves.

The all take a HUMAN to do something.

The other part is that it is the person that makes it dangerous, not the item itself. People who know how, and have the desire to do it can kill with bare hands or any object they can physically move, including your own body.

People are dangerous, THINGS are not.
 
I'd have to say it's not disingenuous if you understand the reasoning behind it.
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I understand the reasoning. I also understand that to say an AR is not a dangerous weapon lacks credibility in my opinion. I think that to say a sharp knife, or an AR, or a nuclear bomb, or countless other dangerous things are not dangerous denies their nature. Of course they are dangerous. If not we would find something else to do the job. In a gunfight I want an AR. Why? It is the most effective tool for the job. It makes me a very dangerous man. I also think that when the 2A was written the supporters knew that arms were dangerous and necessary.
 
I also understand that to say an AR is not a dangerous weapon lacks credibility in my opinion.
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That is an understandable position true, but that perception only exists because an AR almost always appears with a human attached to it.

If 62% of all ARs were naturally occurring in the wild as part of the landscape, it would be much easier to discern that the only potentially dangerous ones are the 38% that are in the hands of a human controller.

It makes me a very dangerous man.
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Not quiteIt allows you to reach your full "dangerous" potential. That same AR would be harmless in the hands of someone unwilling or incapable of firing it.

The 4 rules of gun safety are not there to de-claw the gun, they're there to counter people's gift for making stupid mistakes and errors in judgement.
 
Pond naturally occurring ARs in the wild are the most dangerous kind. You have to be very careful while harvesting...:D
 
So I was wondering what kind of arguments people here might have for explaining why such weapons are good.
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Well you could try this approach. Explain to the "Anti" that he/she is acting like a tyrant when they try to infringe on your constitutional right to bear arms. Go on to explain that when the government becomes tyrannical, it's imperative for citizens to be able to defend them selves against such a government, not just a single home intruder.

Say to the "Anti" "When push comes to shove, I need a 30 round magazine to kill YOU and 29 tyrants just like you before I have to change magazines".
 
"When push comes to shove, I need a 30 round magazine to kill YOU and 29 tyrants just like you before I have to change magazines"
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I think talk of killing 30 people just like and including the person you're talking to is counter-productive and uncalled for.

To be perfectly frank, it would just play into their hands and I don't think threats are advised. It ends up making our position far harder to defend and it helps turn public opinion against us...
 
Frank Ettin said:
Frank, that's an excellent illustration of how mistaken a majority can be about the importance of civil rights.
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Even so, it undercuts the effectiveness of the civil rights argument.

The political effectiveness of a civil rights argument is based on empathy. Whites empathized with Blacks suffering indignities and deprivations trying to do ordinary, benign, everyday things that Whites valued and took for granted -- drinking from a clean water fountain, going to school, eating at whatever restaurant they chose, riding a bus, voting, etc.
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In contexts and in some populations, your observation is undoubtedly true. However an argument that is ultimately based only in empathy isn't a civil rights argument; it's not truly an argument, but an assertion that we should be "nice".

1st Am. arguments are not based on empathy and they have ample cultural traction even amongst people who could tell you which amendment describes a free speech right. Very few people have empathy for Illinois nazis, but the idea that it isn't a right unless it protects odious expression too has broad support.

Unless the matter is argued as a civil right, one leaves it to be a merely political matter and necessarily cedes the contest for possession and use disfavored by the fever of the day.
 
Another angle to consider when buying this is just to point out that the reason semiauto rifles show up in mass shootings is because semiauto rifles have been the most popular, fastest selling rifles for two decades now. They are just in common use.

For example, just by numbers, white cars are most often in accidents because that is the most popular color of car people buy and has been for years. If you just looked at it anecdotally, you might think white cars were somehow more prone to accidents; but when you adjust for the popularity, they are actually about 10% less likely to be involved in an accident because of their high visibility.

AR15s show up often because it is a super common, very popular rifle. And ironically, the gun ban crowd does us a huge favor by demanding it be banned because:

1. As anybody who went through the 1994 ban can tell you, forbidden fruit is the sweetest. Prior to 1994, semiautos were much less mainstream - but the ban brought them to the attention of a lot more people. Even during the ban sales increased; and when the ban ended and you could have all the forbidden cosmetic features, sales exploded.

2. Everytime our opponents talk about a ban, they encourage panic buying that makes such rifles even more common. This is great for us because there is zero chance of them getting a ban through Congress for the next three years. So they aren't just spinning their wheels. They are actually helping us for that day in SCOTUS when we have to make the "common use" argument.

3. Everytime one of them lets the mask drop and starts talking about banning entire classes of commonly-owned guns, even gun owners who aren't paying any attention realize what the end goal of "reasonable, common-sense gun safety" as practiced by gun control proponents is. When that happens, the NRA gets stronger and we get stronger. The NYT running a front page gun banning editorial? If I was the NRA, I'd have paid them for that! The deranged, unhinged rants of various online "journalists" calling for fascist tactics to be used against gun owners? Brilliant. Gersh Kuntzman's recent sad piece on firing an AR15? That guy deserves a Golden Bullseye award both for that article and his sad defense of it afterwards.
 
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