Gun Control

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Justin.T

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I wrote this to a friend of a friend and wanted to see if there are others that think like me. I am a pretty liberal guy, not really the bleeding heart type if you want to try and stereotype, but liberal none the less. I own 3 firearms, believe in the ability to protect yourself on an individual level, believe in hunting for food and enjoy the sport of shooting a couple times a year. I am not scared of the government and believe in regulation to protect society.

"So I get that guns can be cool, interesting, shooting can be fun. I was a cop for 3 years and even owned an ar15 with an eotech halo sight on it. It was fun to shoot. Really easy to hit the target. Also, ballistics and trajectory and all that stuff is fascinating in a really scientific way. You have to be pretty smart to understand it.

However, I've changed my mind on how this should be regulated after seeing tragedy after tragedy and nothing being done to try and make impactful positive changes.

Here is the thing, there is a model at how to address mass shooting and its been completely successful but it would be a huge change in this country and would not go over smoothly. If I was in charge I would do it in a second.

Australia banned certain types of guns after a mass shooting and one hasn't happened since. I think they count a mass shooting as more than 5 people not known by the shooter.

I realize other gun crimes could still happen but you can't compare gun all gun violence and mass shootings. Mass shooting are their own animal and what allows them to happen is the precision and effectiveness of the guns we allow citizens to own in this country.

We would have to outlaw semi automatics, period. I am all for it, I'd gladly regulate my right so that everyone can go to events with out fear. We would have to not grandfather in anything, we would have to have a mandatory gun buy back AND anyone who did no comply must face federal prison time. Harsh penalties, years in prison if you're caught keeping your gun.

I used to say ban high capacity semi autos, but now I just say semi autos. It's what Australia did and its easier that way. It creates a black and white line. If people want to negotiate I'd say maybe I'd be willing to negotiate on handguns. For example, again, ban the semi autos, which, like a glock with high capacity magazines can do tremendous damage, but keep revolvers which are technically double action and not semi auto legal because they traditionally and physically have a lower capacity anyways. I'm also ok with highly regulated carrying options for people that need to protect themselves on and individual level.

Or another idea, and how Australia does it, is still allow for handguns but highly regulate them through strict permitting. I kinda like that idea and passing a federal concealed carry license. I do believe concealed carry helps with the day to day crime prevention.

Also we could regulate and limit ammo sales like we do pharmaceuticals and incorporate psych evals some how.

There's plenty more we could do with out losing our right to own guns for protection, hunting and recreation."

Its like if I have a hammer and you have a nail gun you are going to build a lot more houses than me. Except human lives being taken.

I think its really selfish to put your hobbies and enjoyment ahead of protecting society from mass shootings. It's not easy to come up with an analogy but I'll try. Its like if for some reason explosives were never regulated and people never used them for evil and you and I really got into making bombs and just blowing stuff up because it was fun. Then people started using them to kill large amount of people at events and people were calling for regulation and we were like "but we are having fun and not hurting anyone so don't take this away!"

On top of my recommended gun control above another idea I once had was to do as I said I would like to see done above but then make another exception for recreational shooters. I've done a 3 gun match before (only once, placed second out of 20 some people, not to brag) I know people enjoy it and at the time I even did.

What if you allowed people to own ar15s and whatever military/police grade weapons still, with extensive background checks and whatever else for recreation BUT they had to be kept at a shooting facility in an armory and could only be checked in and out for events and for practice?"

I just wanted to share my thoughts, and am open to listening to yours, whether I agree with them or not we can at the very least discuss. I know some of the thoughts are incomplete and maybe it might be a little all over the place. This was just kind of a brainstorming more or less.

Thanks,

J
 
Don't understand why you (or anyone) would think that laws and restrictions do anything to change the mind of lunatic murderers?

All of your laws and restrictions and regulations ONLY affect the rational folks who follow laws.
 
The road to nowhere !!!

Your thoughts and opinions are just that and no more. There is no sharing as eventually it gets into a spitting contest and accomplishes nothing. :rolleyes:


Wishing you well and;
Be Safe !!!
 
I live in Nevada. One of my customers had to bury her 30 year old cousin with a family cause she was at the concert and took a bullet to the brain. I just am really tired of these events and playing through the idea that could happen to my girlfriend and what it'd be like to have to live with.
 
Criminal laws do not prevent crime, they DISCOURAGE crime and prescribe "punishment" for convicted criminals.
 
Let me break some of this down:

However, I've changed my mind on how this should be regulated after seeing tragedy after tragedy and nothing being done to try and make impactful positive changes.
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First of all, I'd task you with pointing me to one gun control law in this country that has actually achieved its stated aim: to demonstrably reduce gun violence. This won't be easy. The plain fact is, laws restricting the ownership of certain firearms, or by certain people, are a lazy, incomplete answer.

As long as we're only focusing on the instruments used, we're failing to ask why we keep creating monsters who think it's acceptable to kill strangers. Banning bump stocks or placing arbitrary caps on magazine size will do absolutely nothing. We need a new approach to the problem.

Australia banned certain types of guns after a mass shooting and one hasn't happened since.
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Australia wasn't really having them before Port Arthur, so that argument is a bit deficient. There has been one mass shooting since then, though Australian authorities moved the goal posts to reclassify it.

While there are claims the 1996 NFA reduced violent crime, it was already on the decline before then, and a 2008 University of Melbourne study struggled to find whether the law had any effect on crime.

In fact, actual compliance with the 1996 buyback was spotty at best. Most of the weapons they wanted "off the streets" are still in circulation.

Mass shooting are their own animal and what allows them to happen is the precision and effectiveness of the guns we allow citizens to own in this country.
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There has been no major advancement in firearms technology within the lifetime of most people in this debate. Any firearm used in these mass shootings is based on technology at least half a century old. Yet the rise in mass shootings has only been going on for about three decades.

There is simply no technical advancement that suddenly made mass shootings deadlier. Again, we're back to blaming the hardware rather than the act.

I think its really selfish to put your hobbies and enjoyment ahead of protecting society from mass shootings.
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I've been hearing this quite a bit lately, and sorry, but it's a cheap and dishonest argument. Preventing me from engaging in my "hobbies and enjoyment" is in no way going to protect society from mass shootings.

Here's a fun thought experiment: let's say we took things your way and banned all semiautomatics. If we still have mass shootings, will the law be repealed? Nope. It'll just be an excuse for a law on pump-action shotguns. Then another mass shooting, and a ban on all pistols. Then another, and a ban on all centerfire guns. This is how it goes, and it's how the gun-control lobby wants it to go.

With all due respect, you've been had. It's not your fault. Gun-control advocates have effective control over the narrative, and they've been pushing it for decades. We've all been fed the lie so pervasively and for so long, it takes on a life of its own.

But it's still a lie. They're selling you tollbooths to lower drunk-driving fatalities and banning Judy Bloom books from the school library to stop kids from doing drugs.
 
I get your point about having this technology since at least the Vietnam war. I was born in '86, so I can't account for back then, was gun culture different then? Maybe this is more of a gun culture thing. I grew up shooting but not militaryesque weapons. I know the NRA platform has changed, I think it was about safe shooting sports and now it's about making the gun industry bucks. I also know, as silly as it seems, but when the call of duty video games game out people got really into buying accessorizing and shooting military guns.

Back in the 60s 70s and 80s did many civilians own and shoot ar15s etc?
 
The Colt AR-15 was introduced in 1964. It is a semi-automatic version of the United States military M16 rifle.
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Wikipedia.

After Colt's patents expired in 1977,[10] an active marketplace emerged, as other manufactures began to copy the Colt AR-15 rifle's design.
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Wikipedia.

I suspect very few civilians owned a semi-automatic version until other manufacturers produced enough of the rifles to get the price down to a point that the civilian market could afford them, i.e., probably the very late 70's or early 80's.
 
I was born in '86, so I can't account for back then, was gun culture different then?
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Oh, yeah. Everybody belonged to shooting clubs, which were really more about clubs than shooting. We had a smaller available selection of firearms because there wasn't much demand to drive innovation. Glock hadn't happened yet, so you were still stuck with the same old standbys.

More to the point, the 2nd Amendment was about the National Guard or something back then. Emerson and Heller hadn't happened, so the prevailing "logic" was that there was no individual right. Since everyone got their information from television news, that was an easy interpretation to push.

I know the NRA platform has changed, I think it was about safe shooting sports and now it's about making the gun industry bucks.
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That's a narrative being pushed by gun-control advocates to drive a wedge. I've often and long challenged them to show some correlation between NRA donations and the "gun lobby." There isn't one. In fact, the organization that most closely fits that definition would be the NSSF.

As for the platform, it hasn't changed. If you have a chance to check out back issues of their magazines from the period, you'll see the same insistence on the RKBA they have now. The idea that they can't be a gun safety organization AND an advocacy organization is silly.

Back in the 60s 70s and 80s did many civilians own and shoot ar15s etc?
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Some did. The AR-15 in my circle was something of a rich person's toy. The civilian models were expensive, and they had a reputation for unreliability, though that might have been due to the ammunition available at the time. The idea of civilians wanting and having military rifles is by no means some fetish thing that just popped up recently. The military often has sound criteria for choosing the equipment they do, and it's natural that civilians would perceive those products as being of good quality.
 
Tom,

So if you can agree with me that mass shootings are their own problem, how do you think we address them?

Thanks for the discussion, I really appreciate it.
 
So if you can agree with me that mass shootings are their own problem, how do you think we address them?
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I don't have an answer, and that's really the only honest answer anyone's going to give you right now.

The problem is the people who jump right into the fray, waving a bill they wrote ten years ago, claiming it's the solution, and screaming that we don't care about the victims if we don't accept it. They suck all the oxygen out of the room for other approaches or viewpoints.
 
They suck all the oxygen out of the room for other approaches or viewpoints.
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Because they do not care for any other view except their own. Feinstein even stated on TV recently that NO law could have prevented what happened.

We need to stop blaming the object - we don't move to ban cars, even though 50,000 a year die from drunk drivers; we also don't move to ban alcohol (that lesson has been already learned) even though deaths, child/spouse abuse and other issues arise from it. We blame the folks who did the crime, not the object. Start THERE.
 
Tom,

Thanks again for the open and honest discussion, I think it helps us process these things as well as try to move towards solutions.
 
The solution would be honor the 2a as written.

If that had been done instead of rewriting it our culture would be more citizens armed now and these lunatics would be put down more often before they can shoot for 5 or ten minutes.

I have as much reason to hate guns as anyone but I'm staunchly unlimited RTKABA .

As Tom pointed out.
No gun law has ever done anything it was created to do.
Other than to infringe the right of the law abiding.
 
Gun Control is using both hands.

You can completely wipe the idea/concept of firearms and explosives (which lead to firearms) from the entire history of human collective memory and you would not even come close to making any impact on from murder/mass murder. People killing people has been with us from the very beginning. Banning guns (completely or in part) is not the answer. It never was and never will be. The thing called "gun control" is a lie that actually is an attempt at controlling peoples lives (not guns). If that guy in Vegas had not used an AR, he would have used something else.

What AR did Timothy Mcveigh use? What bump stock? He didn't. Any ban on anything about AR type firearms would have had no impact on the lives he took. To claim otherwise is ignoring the problem.
 
If a person's true goal is to lower the amount of gun deaths in this country, then starting by addressing the issue of mass shootings doesn't make sense. An article from FiveThirtyEight has this telling line:

"If we focus on mass shootings as a means of understanding how to reduce the number of people killed by guns in this country, we’re likely to implement laws that don’t do what we want them to do — and miss opportunities to make changes that really work."

Mass Shootings Are A Bad Way To Understand Gun Violence


And here's a Washington Post article by a journalist who changed her mind on gun control once she started to actually study the issue:

I Used to Think Gun Control was the Answer. My Research Told Me Otherwise.

The OP brought up Australia. Here's that author's take on that subject:

"I researched the strictly tightened gun laws in Britain and Australia and concluded that they didn’t prove much about what America’s policy should be. Neither nation experienced drops in mass shootings or other gun related-crime that could be attributed to their buybacks and bans. Mass shootings were too rare in Australia for their absence after the buyback program to be clear evidence of progress. And in both Australia and Britain, the gun restrictions had an ambiguous effect on other gun-related crimes or deaths."
 
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Can't fix people, only help to make it better

One of my customers had to bury her 30 year old cousin with a family cause she was at the concert and took a bullet to the brain
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Their loss, is our loss. Last month a neighbor who is a recovering alcoholic, was riding his bicycle because he lost his driver's license and was hit by a drunk driver also had no license. To date, no one is blaming the car, the beer or tavern that served the drunk. ..... :confused:

When it comes to these shootings, simple minds want to blame inanimate objects. I have yet to see any firearm or bullet, legally prosecuted. ... ;)

Also Pahoo, I'm just seeing what other shooters think. I've been very disturbed by this recent event.
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Not so, as you are the OP with a focused, set agenda. You are just looking for confirmation. You really need to look deeper as to the problem and see what you can do, on a personal level. Get a plan and start at your local level. Do more that present your slanted view/thoughts. Give it more thought and take positive action. ...... ;)

Be Safe !!!
 
We would have to outlaw semi automatics, period. I am all for it, I'd gladly regulate my right so that everyone can go to events with out fear.
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Because semi-automatic firearms are the only credible threat (or most dangerous threat) to large events?

What about trucks, or bombs or fire. What about fireworks or thunderstorms. Do you realize that some years ago 53 people were killed in a stampede at an outdoor concert when thunderstorms panicked them?

Pyrotechnics at one concert started a fire that caused 100 fatalities.

Are you going to make a list of things that have caused mass casualties at events and prioritize them by how common and deadly they are, start at the top and then keep working down the list until some pre-determined balance of personal freedom and regulation is reached, or are you just going to pick the most sensational/most aligned with other agendas and ignore the rest? In other words, is this really about preventing casualties or is it about using circumstances as a rationale to further an existing agenda?
 
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