The calls for more gun control are already starting

Status
Not open for further replies.
I think everyone needs to keep their britches from getting in a bunch.

Give it a week, if in a week this is still the #1 story akin to 9/11, when JFK was shot, etc then expect that there will be a major gun control push.

If, just like after the Gabby Giffords shooting this story is on page 10 next Saturday then I expect this will just fade into history; a talking point for only the likes of the Brady bunch to pull out when they feel like saber rattling.
 
Seems it was a "GUN FREE ZONE".

Dan Myers of Cinermark’s corporate office said that; "Cinemark’s official policy is that ONLY law enforcement officers CAN CARRY INTO THEIR THEATERS."
 
Fwiw, Gander and Bass Pro have said they sold the 4 guns legally in May. The $300 in Blackhawk gear came from a police supply company in MO iirc.
 
I love how within minutes the grandstanding about gun control began.

However, not that we shouldn't remain vigilant, but the whole gun control issue is a political non-starter. This is not the first time politicians have grandstanded trying to shore up public support, but it just never manages to materialize.

A LOT of people are going to be talking about "Gun Free Zones" yet again. That's a good thing. We've either got to quit advertising the easiest places to victimize large numbers of people or businesses that insist on having gun free zones need to start providing some security. I'm still waiting for the inevitable lawsuit.

Politicians who have run on gun control quickly find themselves without support. They'll talk up "reasonable" measures but as long as voters continue to punish them the talk will go nowhere.

Be aware that gun control advocates are VERY VOCAL. Do not let them cow us into silence. I am surprised to find how many people in my office are gun owners and 2nd Amendment supporters. Especially among people I thought would be fairly liberal. There are far more people who believe in the preservation of the 2nd Amendment then there are trying to take it away.

I think in the end, politicizing tragedies does not get gun control advocates the results they want.
 
When is enough considered enough

Again, avoiding any specific incidents, two of the recent proposals have been

- Limiting how many firearms can be purchased at one time
- Limiting how much ammunition can be purchased at once

I've been pondering on this and they both seem like reasonable proposals on the surface. Except too vague. It reminds me of the old poorly thought out software requirements -

"The system shall be fast"

The ammunition is the trickiest. Like most things, buying in bulk is often the best way to get a discount and ammunition is already expensive. To me, it looks like stealth gun control. "We can't stop the sale of guns, but maybe if we just make bullets prohibitively expensive no one can afford them."

Yeah, tell that to smokers.

I suspect a cottage grey market industry around ammunition reloading would unfold quickly.

Firearm sales could easily be limited per day, but I suspect the NRA would push back because it would impact gun shows.

You could make a good argument for "Well, you don't NEED to buy 4 firearms at once" but I'm not sure if there is a practical point.

Maybe I just haven't thought this through. Everytime I think of something that makes this seem reasonable I can either punch holes in it or the limit is so stringent it is an infringement or so large it is pointless.
 
Maybe I just haven't thought this through. Everytime I think of something that makes this seem reasonable I can either punch holes in it or the limit is so stringent it is an infringement or so large it is pointless.
Click to expand...

Maybe because the premise is "shall not be infringed". Why should tools be doled out per a bureaucrat's idea of what's enough?

Rick
 
An interesting observation from the Washington Post:
Two of the top priorities for gun-control advocates are a ban on assault weapons and an expansion of required criminal background checks to include buyers at gun shows. But those measures wouldn’t have stopped James Holmes, the alleged shooter in Colorado, from buying most of his firearms. A ban on assault weapons may have blocked his purchase of an AR-15 assault rifle, but he still would have been able to buy the two pistols and shotgun he allegedly brought with him to the movie theater. All four weapons were purchased legally after background checks.
Click to expand...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...th-sides-say/2012/07/20/gJQAdrO2yW_story.html

So there you have it from one of the leading proponents of gun control. A ban on "assault rifles" would have made little difference. Of course, they would ban all guns.

I'll also add a link to the actual city ordinance on firearms in Aurora, Colorado. I've seen some online blogs and comments by pro-2A supporters referring to Aurora's "strict" gun laws. In all fairness, I would not use that adjective, especially in relation to ordinances like those in Chicago and Washington, D.C.
 
Botswana said:
Maybe I just haven't thought this through. Everytime I think of something that makes this seem reasonable I can either punch holes in it or the limit is so stringent it is an infringement or so large it is pointless.
Click to expand...
You might want to look up the definition of "infringement." The fact is, ANY limit is an infringement.

The 2nd Amendment does NOT say anything about allowing "reasonable" infringements. It plainly states that the RKBA "shall not be infringed." It's the Supreme Court who managed to somehow interpret that simple statement to mean "the RKBA shall not be unreasonably infringed ... but we don't know what unreasonably means yet." The problem is that, once the door is opened to "reasonable" regulation (which really means "reasonable infringement"), the arguments commence as to how MUCH infringement is "reasonable." What's reasonable to you may seem excessive to me, or vice versa. And so it goes.

"Hey, this slope is getting steeper, and why is it so slippery?"
 
The article read:

"A ban on assault weapons may have blocked his purchase of an AR-15 assault rifle, but he still would have been able to buy the two pistols and shotgun he allegedly brought with him to the movie theater. All four weapons were purchased legally after background checks."

What they meant was:

A ban on assault weapons may have blocked his purchase of an AR-15 assault rifle, but he still would have been able to buy the two pistols and shotgun he allegedly brought with him to the movie theater. All four weapons were purchased legally after background checks and therein lies the problem.
 
I said THIS in the L&P forum on March 7, 2000.

That opinion has not changed regardless of all of the wins we have gained in the SCotUS.
 
Four guns, a few thousand rounds of ammo, some magazines and some unrelated junk makes an "arsenal" in the eyes of the newsies
Click to expand...
Man, that just sounds like a decent loadout for the weekend for me :rolleyes:

There are going to be more calls for gun control. That's a given. I find it sick and opportunistic that one major group had a petition for such up on their site before the shooter's name was even known.

The question remains: how are they going to make new restrictions happen? The votes aren't there in Congress. We have two Supreme Court victories under our belt. The President shies away from anything but the most vague utterances about having a "conversation."

And, to some extent, the American public is aware and active regarding 2nd Amendment issues more than any time I can recall. Let a few activists and politicians crow--it amounts to nothing.

Calling for gun control makes for a good 5-second soundbite to appease some of the constituency, but it's a lie. The real questions we need to be asking cut deep into the fields of sociology and psychology, and they don't have easy answers.
 
The 1st Amendment contains a prohibition against laws that abridge the freedom of speech, but the Supreme Court has often held that there can be some restrictions on time, place, and manner of speech.

There will always be some restrictions on the exercise of the 2nd as well. The question is where the boundaries lie, and we're a long way from hashing that out.
 
Two shootings, two outcomes -- both in Aurora, CO.

One gained local attention; and one gained national attention.

One created little comment; and one created a call for more gun control.

Only one got the attention of the President of the United States.

Only one got calls for more gun control from famous people and national news organizations.

Had the result been the same in the first incident as that of the second, all of the above would have been the same -- national attention, calls for gun control, the attention of the President, and the attention of the national press and famous persons.

The only difference between these two stories was the presence of an armed citizen on the scene to stop the carnage.

SOURCE

Saturday, 21 July 2012 14:00
Two Aurora Shootings: One Widely Known; the Other Ignored
Written by Bob Adelmann

On April 22 of this year a convicted felon, just out of jail, went to an Aurora, Colorado, church and shot and killed a member of the congregation before being killed himself by a congregant carrying a gun.

...

No doubt the president was unaware of the other, less-publicized lethal shooting that took place earlier in the year in Aurora, when there was only one victim, thanks to the quick thinking and action of a responsibly armed individual.

<MORE>
Click to expand...
 
Thank you, JimPeel, for remembering that the church shooting was also in Aurora. I didn't connect the dots on that one.

KyJim said:
So there you have it from one of the leading proponents of gun control. A ban on "assault rifles" would have made little difference. Of course, they would ban all guns.
Click to expand...
Don't tell them, but it wouldn't have made any difference. I bought an AR during the span of the late, unlamented Federal AWB. It was fully post-ban configured -- no collapsible stock, no flash hider, and no bayonet lug. It would still accept an aftermarket drum magazine, and since the shooter didn't bayonet anyone in the theater the lack of a lug wouldn't have mattered. And the bullets coming out the muzzle don't care how long the stock is.
 
Criminals are intent on breaking laws by their very nature. If there was a law about owning X number of total guns, X number of guns per months, X rounds of ammo etc whats to stop a criminal; especially a very determined criminal from breaking the law?

Show me a GUN law that would have stopped any of the recent high profile mass shootings. A number of laws may have made it more difficult but I can't think of one outside an outright gun ban and confiscation that would have. When you have a determined criminal he or she will find a way to break the law to accomplish their goal.


The problem with "Reasonable" gun control is it ends up being unreasonable. While some laws may start with good intentions, inevitably gun-unfriendly states hijack the ideals to unduly punish lawful gun owners to score political points. Places like NJ, NY and CA are in a "race to the bottom" to see who can have the toughest gun laws. Not the gun laws that make an impact on criminals, or that "save the children" but just any law they can pass to give them the warm fuzzy when they go to sleep.
 
@Tom Servo: An election could give control of the house to the anti gun types. It is unlikely THIS time that it will happen but if the trend in demographics of our population continues as it has, considering the party those growing demographic segments vote for, and that particular parties history of an anti second amendment attitude continues then sooner or later they WILL have the votes. It might be 2020, it might be 2050 but unless something changes in the political landscape of America over the next 20 or so years its going to be bad news of the second amendment. The only hope we as gun owners have is to work hard and to work with new segments of society to change attitudes towards gun ownership.

Next,

This next election WILL WITHOUT A DOUBT put either a staunchly anti gun president back in power, or will bring a president to power with a dubious history when it comes to the second amendment.

I don't see either presidential possibility making it a priority that anyone appointed to the supreme court in the next 4 years has a proper judicial record in regards to the right to keep and bear arms.

The moral of this story: We can never let our guard down, the votes may not be there today but who knows what tomorrow is bringing.
 
Limit a person to 1 gun purchase a month and if they need 4, that just means one of the following is true:

1. They have to wait awhile to carry out their plan. If they're already expecting to have to plan long term then the wait means nothing to them.

2. They have to break the law to carry out their plan. If the plan involves mass murder then breaking the law again means nothing to them.

3. They have to acquire the additional guns via 3rd party purchases instead of from FFLs/dealers. That's not difficult to accomplish.

4. They have to figure out a way to carry out the plan with 1 gun instead of 4. If it's the right gun and the person plans well, that's not going to make any significant difference.

Ammunition is pretty much the same thing and the same points above still apply. Realistically it's unlikely that a person will use more than a couple hundred rounds of ammo even in a mass shooting. If we look at the North Hollywood shootout which was truly a statistical outlier, each shooter used about 1000 rounds of ammo. Any ammunition purchase limitations which were remotely reasonable wouldn't prevent a person from acquiring that amount of ammunition in a relatively short period of time.
 
Patriot86 said:
I don't see either presidential possibility making it a priority that anyone appointed to the supreme court in the next 4 years has a proper judicial record in regards to the right to keep and bear arms.
Click to expand...
A lot of judges spend entire careers on the bench and never have an actual RKBA case go through their courtroom. RKBA record (unless the candidate is an avowed gun banner) is not crucial.

More important, IMHO, is that we urgently need the next couple or three justices appointed to be strict constructionists (or, in current parlance, "originalists"): judges who view the Constitution as the highest law of the land, not as a "living document" in need of constant reinterpretation to follow the tide of public opinion. Judges who don't think we should be looking at what other countries are doing when interpreting OUR Constitution. Give us judges who respect the Constitution and the 2nd Amendment will take care of itself.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top