3D Printable Ammo Clip Skirts New Proposed Gun Laws 1862
Sparrowvsrevolution writes "Over the past weekend, Defense Distributed successfully 3D-printed and tested a magazine for an AR semi-automatic rifle, loading and firing 86 rounds from the 30-round clip. That homemade chunk of curved plastic holds special significance: Between 1994 and 2004, so-called 'high capacity magazines' capable of holding more than 10 bullets were banned from sale. And a new gun control bill proposed by California Senator Dianne Feinstein in the wake of recent shootings would ban those larger ammo clips again. President Obama has also voiced support for the magazine restrictions. Defense Distributed says it hopes to preempt any high capacity magazine ban by showing how impossible it has become to prevent the creation of a simple spring-loaded box in the age of cheap 3D printing. It's posted the 3D-printable magazine blueprints on its website, Defcad.org, and gun enthusiasts have already downloaded files related to the ammo holders more than 2,200 times." Update: 01/15 23:15 GMT by T : Mea culpa; please blame my flu for mistakenly letting through that headline with "clip" where it should say "magazine." I know the difference — and I don't own any clips.
Clip (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Clip (Score:5, Informative)
Clip [wikipedia.org] versus Magazine [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:3)
Maybe they were printing cartoonish 30-round WWI-era stripper clips? :)
Re:Clip (Score:5, Informative)
If you know where to look you can still get sane prices. I just bought a pair of AR15 lowers and an AR10 lower for $150 each. The honest manufacturers are not raising prices.
Also you can still get 30 round magazines at the normal $15.00 each price. just buy a full ammobox of 5.56, all the rounds come in magazines ready to fire. I just bought a box of 250 rounds in magazines and a nice metal ammo can for $155.00 I can even buy 55 gallon drums of loose 55gr .223 brass shells for $825. There is about 6000 rounds in the drum. Then start selling them for $2.00 a round to the local morons that are panic buying and make yourself a nice profit. A local gun shop has recently done that, although he sells normal price to his regulars.
Re:Clip (Score:4, Informative)
Uh, yes it is. Gouging is a political word, not an economic one. Current price reflects future value. If something suddenly is more valuable to people, prices will (and should) rise. The higher prices are both signal and capital to produce more. Higher prices also prevent totally exhausting supply, which allows scarce inventory to be more widely distributed until more inventory can be made.
Re:Clip (Score:4)
Re:Clip (Score:5, Insightful)
"Some of the confusion comes from the fact that we don't really have free markets for many things, instead we have protectionist markets."
Mod up. Many people today seem to confuse crony corporatism with "capitalism", when they are not even remotely the same things. Our economic woes have not been due to capitalism at all... but rather to the lack of same.
Re:Clip (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's a better one: why don't we focus on the underlying issues rather than basically meaningless terminology that everybody involved understands what is meant anyway.
Re:Clip (Score:5, Insightful)
Sometimes it undermines credibility when you display ignorance like that. If he created a sprocket and called it a spring, I'd expect the same criticism.
Re:Clip (Score:5, Informative)
Sprockets never interact with another sprocket. Gears do.
Re:Clip (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Clip (Score:5, Informative)
A sprocket is specifically to run a chain on.
A gear is a ratio of two rotating sprockets (describing the power vs motion) OR any thing with teeth on it that meets something else with teeth on it.
So, all sprockets are gears, but not all gears are sprockets. In certain industries, they are interchangeable because the gears all have a chain on them, and there's a need to use "gear" to describe the power vs motion ratios.
Re:Clip (Score:5, Informative)
A sprocket is a wheel with projections that meshes with a chain or toothed/perforated belt. A gear is a wheel with projections that mesh with other gears. A cog is the projection in either case, although sometimes "cog" is used as shorthand for "cogwheel" which would be a gear. A pinion is the smallest gear in a set, or the gear that drives a rack (which is a gear of infinite diameter, ie flat)
A clip holds multiple bullets together so they can be more easily loaded into the gun's magazine. Once this happens the clip is removed. A magazine is the container that holds the bullets and can either be an integral part of the weapon (such as some rifles, or revolver pistol) or detachable.
=Smidge=
Re:Clip (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Clip (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Clip (Score:5, Insightful)
You only mock someone for using the wrong terminology when you dislike what they are saying and try to discredit them. Same as here. If you dislike gun control, argue against gun control. Don't get hung up on the words your opponents are using. Unless... opposition to limiting bullet-holder-thingies isn't limited to "You're using the wrong words" is it? There ARE other arguments against it, right?
Re:Clip (Score:4, Interesting)
I just the other day got an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday [Tuesday]. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially.
He's under the impression that delay (probably due to greylisting) between mail servers is due to network latency and that this network latency is due to commercial things in the Internet. Oh, and that an email is 'an Internet'. If someone started with that and then said something that I agreed with, then it would still be very hard to respect them. But then, it would be quite hard for someone with such a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the technology to say anything reasonable about it.
Re:Clip (Score:5, Insightful)
The point is how many fucking bullets you fucking gun nuts want to put in your fucking guns: or in other words, how many children you can kill in a single burst.
Thousands. All of us who shoot really want to go out some day in a blaze of glory shooting preschoolers with grenade launchers, leaving nothing but a thin red mist of former preschoolers in our wake.
Or, you know, the nut here is you.
--
BMO
Re:Clip (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Clip (Score:5, Interesting)
A good rule of thumb is that in a self-defense shooting scenario, 4 of 5 rounds fired will miss. (These numbers are born out by the historical record, BTW: they're not made up. Consider when the NYPD shot Amadou Diallo. Five officers, part of a highly-trained unit with advanced firearms training, opened fire on an unarmed and harmless Diallo from a range of under five meters. Despite the tactical environment being perfect -- the officers were at point blank range, they all had the time to make a proper firing stance, etc. -- of the 41 rounds fired, 22 rounds missed. That's over a 50% miss rate under perfect conditions by well-trained personnel.)
Another good rule of thumb is that you need to place a minimum of two rounds into your target to have good -- not necessarily great, but just good -- odds of stopping the threat.
Do the math and you quickly discover that to place two rounds on target, with each round having an 80% chance of missing, results in you needing 14 rounds in the magazine. That means that with a 15-round Beretta 92, a 17-round Glock 17, a 16-round FN FNP-9, a 13-round Browning High-Power, etc., you can be relatively confident of having enough ammunition in the magazine to stop one -- one -- attacker.
There's a reason why cops carry high-capacity magazines and at least two spares, and it's the same reason why civilians who use pistols for self-defense need high-cap magazines and at least two spares.
Re:Clip (Score:4, Insightful)
Its not the question, its the manner and tone in which he stated it. Making assumptions that everyone who owns guns is nuts, then proceeding to ask how many bullets they want is irrational and completely an emotional response.
GP is not using their minds to rationally debate logical statistics, facts, and information. Gun nuts are not a major killer in todays world in any country, even countries in an actual state of war.
Re:Clip (Score:5, Insightful)
But YOU wanting to control OUR guns is bullshit. Thats like me wanting to control your driving.
Preach it brother. No commie faggot is going to tell me what side of the road to drive on. How fast I can drive in a school zone. Make me have working brakes.
Re:Clip (Score:5, Informative)
When are you going to go after the hammer nuts? After all, more people were killed in 2011 with hammers than were killed with rifles.
Another gun-nut factoid that isn't actually true.
1) They claim it comes from FBI figures. In fact the FBI don't publish figures on homicide by hammer. They have figures on homicide by blunt objects, for which they give examples as (hammers, clubs, etc.) So if I kill someone by hitting them over the head with a candlestick, lead pipe, chair, rock, ashtray, club or whatever, that too will be included in the figures the gun-nuts are claiming is "hammers".
2) Every single type of murder involving any type of blunt object when added together comes to slightly more than the number of homicides by rifle. Of course add in all the other varieties of gun, and you're up to about 35 times the numebr of blunt object murders.
3) In fact the number of rifle murder themselves may outnumber the number of blunt object murders. They have "Other guns or type not stated" stats of 1684. Many of those may well be rifles.
Re:Clip (Score:5, Informative)
And you can't get precise figures because the NRA lobbied congress to forbid government funding from paying for research into gun fatalities.
http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1487470 [jamanetwork.com]
Viewpoint: Silencing the Science on Gun Research FREE ...
Arthur L. Kellermann, MD, MPH; Frederick P. Rivara, MD, MPH
JAMA. 2012;():1-2. doi:10.1001/jama.2012.208207.
The nation might be in a better position to act if medical and public health researchers had continued to study these issues as diligently as some of us did between 1985 and 1997. But in 1996, pro-gun members of Congress mounted an all-out effort to eliminate the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Although they failed to defund the center, the House of Representatives removed $2.6 million from the CDC's budget—precisely the amount the agency had spent on firearm injury research the previous year. Funding was restored in joint conference committee, but the money was earmarked for traumatic brain injury. The effect was sharply reduced support for firearm injury research.
To ensure that the CDC and its grantees got the message, the following language was added to the final appropriation: “none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”4
Precisely what was or was not permitted under the clause was unclear. But no federal employee was willing to risk his or her career or the agency's funding to find out. Extramural support for firearm injury prevention research quickly dried up. Even today, 17 years after this legislative action, the CDC's website lacks specific links to information about preventing firearm-related violence.
When other agencies funded high-quality research, similar action was taken. In 2009, Branas et al5 published the results of a case-control study that examined whether carrying a gun increases or decreases the risk of firearm assault. In contrast to earlier research, this particular study was funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. Two years later, Congress extended the restrictive language it had previously applied to the CDC to all Department of Health and Human Services agencies, including the National Institutes of Health.6
These are not the only efforts to keep important health information from the public and patients. For example, in 1997, Cummings et al7 used state-level data from Washington to study the association between purchase of a handgun and the subsequent risk of homicide or suicide. Similar studies could not be conducted today because Washington State's firearm registration files are no longer accessible.8
Re:Clip (Score:5, Insightful)
I know, right? We all know what it means, who cares about the pedantic "right" word?
Now as long as I have your attention... Would you mind giving me a hand upgrading the RAM in my hard drive? I can't seem to get the case off the monitor...
Re:Clip (Score:4, Insightful)
One supposes the deterrent effect is there.
OTOH, there is no way to "prevent gun crime", period, short of the place becoming a police state.
Re:Clip (Score:5, Insightful)
So you'd rather focus on an irrelevant distinction than talk about the underlying issues.
Is it an irrelevant distinction if lawmakers were discussing a law which would restrict "memory" (RAM) to, say, 256MB sticks, when they actually meant flash cards and/or USB flash drives? I'd give a car analogy, but I am afraid I am not knowledgeable enough in commonly confused car terms.
Discussing how to address the underlying issues is great. But when pig-headed politicians are looking to ram something through that they have no idea wtf it actually means, then you cannot just ignore it.
Re:Clip (Score:5, Insightful)
Thank you!
Maybe we should allow Senator Feinstein to ban 30 round "clips," thus protecting the sale of 20 and 30 round magazines.
Re:Clip (Score:4, Insightful)
And framing the debate in these terms is not going to help you if they decide to propose legislation that requires all civilian magazines for rifles with a capcity of 10 rounds must be unloaded except when in use at licensed firearms ranges, and for handguns with magazines in excess of ten rounds, the remaining capacity must be filled with dummy rounds if carried off one one's own property or outside of a licensed firearms range...
My point is that attempting to stonewall the debate instead of participating in it will probably result in something at least at stringent as the previous assault weapons ban, and could result in something even more strict. If firearms enthusiasts take a good look at the ills that come from firearms ownership and themselves suggest limits, then they can craft what happens. And one can rant and rave about the Second Amendment all one wants, the court has ruled that previous restrictions are in fact legal, and would very likely continue to do so as long as restrictions do not outright prohibit any kind of firearm.
Re:Clip (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe we should allow Senator Feinstein to ban 30 round "clips," thus protecting the sale of 20 and 30 round magazines.
Maybe you should read what she actually said and not the headline some idiot put on it here.
http://www.feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ID=28d0c499-28ec-42a7-902d-ebf318d46d02 [senate.gov]
Re:Clip (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Clip (Score:5, Insightful)
You do realize that you guys lost that war at least 35 years ago? I was raised in the 1960s and 1970s, around lots of cops and other heavy users of firearms, who all called their handgun magazines "clips". I don't think I even heard the word "magazine" used for such things until I was an adult.
In language, actual usage always wins. If the general public uses a word a certain way, and even a lot of people relatively well acquainted with the subject use it that way, then the desires of a microscopic minority of obsessive pedants are just going to have to give way.
You may, of course, feel free to maintain the distinction in professional discussions among gunsmiths. But it's just stupid to expect anybody else to care.
Same applies to "hacker", by the way. Battle lost. Give up.
Re:Clip (Score:5, Insightful)
In the 60s and 70s they would have used revolvers and actual moon or half moon clips.
No one well acquainted with the topic uses the terminology that way.
Hair-splitting (Score:5, Insightful)
For one thing, these are not called "clips", they are magazines. And magazines hold rounds, not "bullets", which are part of a round. Seeing these terms used clues the reader in that the author knows little to nothing about firearms.
In a larger sense, I don't think we need printer control in response to this, because (a) not a single one of the new regulations being proposed would have stopped any of these mass shootings, and (b) because I can't see these plastic magazines working exceptionally well.
Re:Hair-splitting (Score:4, Insightful)
and (b) because I can't see these plastic magazines working exceptionally well.
And therein lies the irony. I'd bet that these would make it through an initial 30-round run fine. Probably wouldn't stand up to repeated firings though.
Think about that though: in a crime, or a shooting spree, the perp only needs to blast through the magazine once and then its dropped and discarded. The people who care about durability and reuse of magazines are typically competition and target shooters.
So effectively, legislation is likely to affect the completely legitimate uses of the magazines, while technology remains so that all the illegal uses people might want to use them for are still doable.
Re: (Score:3)
Sure, but can the printer nearly approach the functioning quality of the material used in those..?
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
The trouble isn't with polymers, most guns that aren't entirely metal or banged together in 1950's Soviet Russia People's 3rd Patriotic Machinery Plant, have polymer parts, it's that shitty extruded ABS filaments that are just about managing to stick to each other aren't even close to being in the same category as decent injection moulded parts, let alone glass-filled polymer composites and the like(and, if somebody does have a really classy 3D printer, the results probably cost more than proper parts prepa
Re:Hair-splitting (Score:4, Insightful)
The Virginia Tech shooter only had 10-round magazines and he did plenty of damage before killing himself. So no, these rules would have zero effect on killers but would serve to disarm lawful gun owners.
This about this: there are something like 200 million semiauto weapons in this country, owned by something like 50 million people. Out of that huge number, we have a few mass shootings. Statistically that means mass shootings don't even happen. I'm not making light of the carnage crazy people inflict or the pain people have gone through, far from it. I'm just pointing out that infringing the rights of literally millions of people for the false hope of safety won't work and is a complete waste of time.
I don't understand the "high cap" magazine ban (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I don't understand the "high cap" magazine ban (Score:5, Insightful)
It doesn't.
Re:I don't understand the "high cap" magazine ban (Score:4, Insightful)
It's stated in the article. They assume that since some previous gun incidents have been stopped when the gunman had to reload that limiting the amount you can fire off will allow someone to be a hero and tackle the gunman.
Horwitz points out that Tucson shooter Jared Loughner was tackled while attempting to reload a new magazine into his Glock handgun. And police say that Newtown, Connecticut shooter Adam Lanza may have allowed some of his victims to escape while he reloaded his smaller clips.
Re:I don't understand the "high cap" magazine ban (Score:5, Informative)
Virginia Tech being the obvious counter-example. Near 200 shots fired from stock pistol magazines, I think?
Re:I don't understand the "high cap" magazine ban (Score:4, Informative)
And the stupidity of this "theory" of theirs is only once has the squirrel found this nut. Every other mass shooter has gone through magazine after magazine of ammo without ever getting stopped. VT ran through 17 magazines averaging 10 rounds each and guess what, no one stopped him. It's a canard.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Here are my views on gun control:
Every year, an average of 9,200 Americans are murdered by handguns, according to Department of Justice statistics. This does not include suicides or the tens of thousands of robberies, rapes and assaults committed with handguns. This level of violence must be stopped.
I do not believe in taking away the right of the citizen for sporting, for hunting and so forth, or for home defense. But I do believe that an AK-47, a machine gun, is not a sporting weapon or needed for defense
Re:I don't understand the "high cap" magazine ban (Score:5, Insightful)
The purpose of the second amendment is not for sporting, hunting, or even home defense. It is there to prevent the government from disarming the people and instituting tyranny and/or fascism. We have the second amendment to preserve our natural right to shoot tyrants and fascists should our system of checks and balances fail and they come into power.
Re:I don't understand the "high cap" magazine ban (Score:5, Insightful)
Just to add on to your point: This is why this is really difficult issue. Limiting the size of clips would minimize the impact of assaults like this. But it would also limit the effectiveness of armed resistance against a tyrannical government.
What do you think of kaws requiring people to lock guns instead of laws limiting magazines? Locking guns would not significantly limit one's ability to resist the government, but would prevent psychologically damaged people from easily stealing them. Every gun owner I know has their gun(s) locked in the kind of case that would resist a rocket launcher anyway. I don't understand why that wasn't the case with Sandy Hook.
Re:I don't understand the "high cap" magazine ban (Score:5, Informative)
That's your interpretation of the intent, not the stated intent. The second ammendment actually says:
The stated purpose of the freedom is to allow for the security of the state, not to arm the populous in defense against the political leaders of the state. In fact, the Constitution outright criminalizes the waging of war against the government.
You can make good arguments about the necessity of guns for the protection of freedom against abusive government. I myself have argued that the most important part of the Second Amendment is that it bars the government from ever trying to completely disarm the populace. However, I also argue that the far-too-common reading of "Everyone gets to have guns so they can overthrow the government in the future" is utterly wrong. If you want to make the argument that you have a right to shoot anyone you feel is a tyrant, then you're going to have to support that argument with philosophy, not the Constitution.
In the end, the Supreme Court gets to decide what it really means, and how its intent should impact law. And while you might have the natural right to declare whoever you want to be a tyrant, everyone else has the right to disagree with you, and kill you for trying to overthrow their government.
Re:I don't understand the "high cap" magazine ban (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I don't understand the "high cap" magazine ban (Score:4, Insightful)
The citizens do not have an explicit right for guns for sporting, hunting, and home defense. They have a right for the purpose of fighting back from an oppressive government. If I see sporting/hunting with regard to gun rights again, I am going to ...
And don't be naive with regard to how the US government could turn on its citizens enough to warrant such use of guns. If the citizens cannot fight back, the oppression WILL happen. It would just be a matter of time.
And no, our military power couldn't stop an armed populace. The military wouldn't have a chance...unless they wanted to just kill everyone. But then who do you exercise power over at that point?
Re:I don't understand the "high cap" magazine ban (Score:4, Insightful)
Let us be clear here. Ownership of firearms has never really been about hunting or really even about home defense. It's about the right of the citizenry to have the means to protect themselves from tyranny. The government may not trust us with our guns but really we don't trust them much with their guns. There is always a certain level of paranoia about government control anyway and any attempt to limit weapons at all directly reinforces that paranoia. In short, Americans really don't trust their leadership and if you sit and listen to CSPAN for a few hours it's easy to understand why.
Re:I don't understand the "high cap" magazine ban (Score:5, Insightful)
Next you want to ban AK-47's, but I'm sure you don't know that effectively AK-47's, M16's and every other type of machine gun is already banned. The ban does not allow the transfer of any new machine guns to regular citizens that have been manufactured since 1984. Since this calls into the effect the laws of economics the supply is very limited and it costs around $20,000 to buy a M16 in addition to the background check and $200 tax stamp that one must go through with the BATF. Go look up crime statistics and you will find that the number of crimes committed with machine guns is either zero every year or in single digits.
An assault weapon is one that is capable of firing more then one round when the trigger is pulled and they are all tightly controlled by current regulation.
The three AR-15's in my gun safe are all semi-auto only and one of these days I'll pick up an AK clone that is also semi-auto only. These are amazing target rifles, low recoil, semi-auto, accurate. Yet at the same time my fiancee bolt-action 30-06 is much more powerful, has greater effective range and is far more lethal.
The 2nd Amendment makes no mention of sporting, self-defense, or other criteria that gun banners attribute to the 2nd Amendment. AR-15's are used in sporting purposes all the time. 3-gun matches are growing in popularity and an AR-15 is one of the best choices for this sporting competition.
Re:I don't understand the "high cap" magazine ban (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I don't understand the "high cap" magazine ban (Score:5, Insightful)
So what you're saying is that you want to prioritize fighting against events that take a few dozen lives at once versus several thousand that happen to occur one or two at a time?
That right there proves that the whole fiasco is more about publicity and feel good measures rather than actually trying to save lives.
Re:I don't understand the "high cap" magazine ban (Score:5, Insightful)
We need to wake up and realize that guns are a privilege not a right.
The 2nd Amendment says otherwise. Unless you want to claim all other amendments are just privileges and not rights?
Re:I don't understand the "high cap" magazine ban (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I don't understand the "high cap" magazine ban (Score:4, Insightful)
unless they can afford preban magazines, which will undoubtedly be more expensive
At no time during the previous ban did pre-ban magazines go above about $100 each, and I was able to find 30-rnd pre-ban magazines for one of my handguns during the middle of the last AWB for $25.
Now at this point, every magazine made for law enforcement use during that 1994 to 2004 period is now legal (and many have been surplused to the public). We also have had nearly 10 years of time when civilian production of normal capacity magazines resumed, and the companies right now are cranking them out and a maddening pace due to the public being afraid of another ban. There are enough on the market now to keep the shooting public going for probably close to a century. Prices will be higher, but not unattainable.
Now think: do you think anybody who's planning on committing a mass shooting followed by a suicide really cares how much the magazines cost? They'll throw 5 or 6 on their credit card bill that they're never going to pay again and then go off on their rampage.
Its stupid. It won't prevent anything, but it does force the average gun owner who ISN'T planning a suicide run to pay more for pre-ban magazines.
Going the wrong way (Score:4, Interesting)
So instead of convincing them not to ban large magazines, they'll just ban guns that don't have fixed magazines.
Is that really what they wanted?
It's a Magazine (Score:4, Informative)
Unfortunately, TV and film have filled us with bad terminology. This is about a magazine. A clip is a completely different thing.
Magazines hold multiple rounds. They're typically enclosed for protection from dust and dirt, and are inserted into a firearm through a receiving slot. Magazines are used in semi-automatic pistols like your average Glock, Sig Sauer, Walther, etc. They're also used in rifles like the M-16 or AR-15.
Clips hold two rounds together in a belt fed weapon, like the M-60. They're typically fed from an ammunition box or other container. The clips are expelled after running through the weapon. The expulsion is similar to the way the brass casings are expelled. It's basically a small curved springy piece of metal holding two rounds together.
The names are not interchangeable. There's no such thing as a 30 round clip. It's a 30 round magazine.
Re: (Score:3)
You store ammo in a magazine. Ships have magazines, semi-automatic pistols have magazines, and even your bolt-action hunting rifles have magazines.
Are you specifically talking about detachable magazines for semi-automatic rifles? Why didn't you say so? I hate it when people use generic terms when they mean something specific.
What's more likely? (Score:4, Insightful)
That our esteemed legislators say to themselves
"Well, that's that, then! I guess it's pointless to ban high-capacity magazines."
or
"This is insidious! Alongside a high-capacity magazine ban, we should also ban 3D printing! Clearly it's a technology that will only be used by TERRORISTS!"
I think something like the latter is more likely, and I'm not even one of /.'s famed government-hating libertarian fundamentalists!
This isn't good for anyone (Score:4, Insightful)
They are much more likely to inspire legislation banning 3D printing.
Oops, they forgot something (Score:5, Insightful)
You either toddler-proof the entire world or you realize you're not going to stop a crazy person from doing stupid shit. There is no solution to mass shooting problems unless you go get some oracles and put them in a pool and form a precrime division...and even that didn't work out, lol.
I'm from Wisconsin where we FINALLY become the 49th state to have a conceiled weapons permit available about a year ago. Now every store that's run by a dumbass has a sign that says "Only criminals are allowed to carry weapons in this store." It actually says "no guns or weapons allowed" but since criminals won't read or respect that, I translated it.
For the record, I don't own a gun. I only carry LTL weapons because they work better at disabling a target and the court case would go a lot better if someone who tries to rob me isn't dead. Also it's easier to get financial compensation from them, lol.
If they think 20 bullets per mag is going to stop someone from going on a shooting spree or that 20 less dead people is acceptable, they're dreaming. I mean I know not one single politician actually believe any of this gun law BS, it's all just for show, but still.
Re:Oops, they forgot something (Score:5, Insightful)
I never understood the basic inconsistently with gun supporters regarding magazine sizes or assault rifles. They claim that limiting magazine sizes or assault rifles would not be effective in stopping bad guys from slaughtering tons of people, but then they also demand unlimited magazine sizes and an unassailable right to buy assault rifles because they are required for effective personal defense. In other words, assault rifles are not that dangerous when you're talking about killing some schoolkids, but when talking about saving their own skin, then they need the extra killing power of an assault rifle.
More fundamentally, gun supporters tacitly assume that nothing should be done regarding guns unless it is a perfect solution, and that nothing should be done regarding guns until we have resolved all other more dangerous things, such as car deaths, swimming pools, and medical malpractice. That is just not how the world works.
Your argument is basically this: we shouldn't ban hand grenades or rocket propelled grenades because some asshole can always make some sarin or fly an airplane into a building using a box cutter.
You also argue that some asshole can be just as lethal with a machete. You forget that on the same day as the Newtown shooting, some asshole with a knife walked into a school in China and stabbed two dozen or so children. None of the children died. Furthermore, the asshole was subdued by teachers using chairs. Try to do that against a guy with an assault rifle; two teachers at Newtown tried, and they were both shot in the head.
Show me how any of the proposed laws (Score:5, Insightful)
Would have prevented Sandy Hook or Aurora?
The simple fact is politicians are going for low hanging fruit because they do not want to admit we live in a world with dysfunctional people and the money that could be spent to treat them does not buy sufficient votes for those in power.
Why can't we have rational gun control? (Score:5, Insightful)
Waaay back when, I hit the Bureau of Crime Statistics, the Dept of Justice, and the FBI websites to see all the data relating to violent crimes, gun crimes, and so on.
According to our own records, automatic or high-capacity weapons are used so infrequently to perpetrate crimes that they don't even have their own separate breakdown - they're sloshed into the 'other' bucket with weapons like 'talking billy bass animated fish sculpture'. The most popular weapon for crime appears to be cheap semiautomatic pistols. The cheaper the better.
If your goal is to reduce gun crime, it seems like focusing on automatic rifles and other scary-sounding guns is dumb. Even if they had the potential for greater harm, the smaller guns have actually realized their potential. Of course, if the goal is not just myopically focused on guns, and instead it's meant to reduce suffering, to save lives, and so on - why does no one look at the statistics that say there's more than twice the number of suicides by gun in a year than murders in the US? If we're going to spend money, why not focus on the sectors with the biggest benefits?
(as an amusing aside, check out the violent crime breakdowns by race. What if it was politically correct acknowledge the groups that are outliers by several orders of magnitude, and try to focus on fixing the cultural problems that cause it?).
Re:Why can't we have rational gun control? (Score:4, Informative)
We tried to manage gun sales by requiring background checks but the gun show exemption has been used to such an extent that forty percent of guns sold in the United States were sold without a background check. Good luck trying to get the NRA to support closing this loophole or to support a federal registry of guns.
Law and 3D printing will be on hell of a clash. (Score:4, Interesting)
Putting the gun debate aside for a moment...
I'm fascinated by what will happen when 3D printing manages to create its first illegal object. I don't think they've printed anything illegal yet, have they?
What will happen when they do? Authorities will have to crack down on 3D printing patterns, which will be impossible. Or perhaps the law (all laws?) will be rewritten so that possession of the object is illegal but possession of the digital design is permitted...which will make monitoring of 3D printer usage mandatory. This upcoming clash between object legality and post-scarcity technology will make the copyright wars look like a kindergarten brawl.
Real hidden issue (in humble non-citizen POV) (Score:4, Insightful)
Looking from outside in my opinion problem isn't with gun control. Problem is that civil war hasn't ended. South still things they can legimitely take back what they have lost during that war. They think 2nd admentment legally allows them to do that when they finally goes in official minority (now they have tweaked House of Represatives, but they will ran out of these tricks too). Therefore they are very touchy. No one wants to ban all arms. But there's arms who are really meant for utter destruction than real protection of your property or your pulse. But most people who oppose this are mostly freakishly obsessed with assault guns. If they could buy and shoot a tank - they would do it.
Just my two cents,
Peter.
Re:Magazine, Not Clip (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Good point. That is to say, you and every other Slashdork is all gung-ho about "technology misuse" when it comes to, say, pirated software or movie or music distribution or breaking DRM, but when it comes to printing a sodding plastic box, we get "omfg, technology misuse" and Slashdot turns into a cesspool of whiny moralising dweebs.
Re:Technology Misuse (Score:5, Funny)
Isn't it time we banned these 3d assault printers?
Re:Almost no one is killed by "assault weapons" (Score:4, Insightful)
That's why Columbine was an epic failure, right? And why the so-called 'green on blue' attacks on NATO servicemen aren't even close to being a weekly occurrence?
Re:Almost no one is killed by "assault weapons" (Score:5, Interesting)
On April 20, Harris was equipped with a 12-gauge Savage-Springfield 67H pump-action shotgun, (which he discharged a total of 25 times) and a Hi-Point 995 Carbine 9 mm carbine with thirteen 10-round magazines, which he fired a total of 96 times.
A Jefferson County Sheriff's Deputy, Neil Gardner, was assigned to the high school as a full-time uniformed and armed school resource officer. Gardner usually ate lunch with students in the cafeteria, but on April 20 he was eating lunch in his patrol car at the northwest corner of the campus, watching students in the Smokers' Pit in Clement Park. the single officer was NOT IN THE SCHOOL.
At 11:22, the custodian called Deputy Gardner on the school radio, requesting assistance in the Senior parking lot. The only paved route took him around the school to the east and south on Pierce Street, where, at 11:23 he heard on his police radio that a female was down, struck by a car, he assumed. He turned on his lights and siren. While exiting his patrol car in the Senior lot at 11:24, he heard another call on the school radio, "Neil, there's a shooter in the school".[23] Harris, at the West Entrance, immediately fired his rifle at Gardner, who was sixty yards away.[23] Gardner returned fire with his service pistol.[31] He was not wearing his prescription eyeglasses, and was unable to hit the shooters.
Thus, five minutes after the shooting started, and two minutes after the first radio call, Gardner was engaged in a gun fight with the student shooters. There were already two dead and ten wounded. Harris fired ten shots and Gardner fired four, before Harris ducked back into the building. No one was hit. Gardner reported on his police radio, "Shots in the building. I need someone in the south lot with me."
The officer did not enter the building.
They did NOT have an officer there as a guard. They had a resource officer that was there to bust unarmed kids for pot. If teachers were allowed to have concealed carry at school and allowed to carry at school after special training, it would have ended earlier with a lot fewer lost lives.
Please don't let facts get in the way of your rambling incoherent rant though..
Re:Almost no one is killed by "assault weapons" (Score:5, Informative)
My primary point was a response to the
"You know how you stop a bad guy with a gun?
A good guy with a gun. Anything else is handwaving bullshit."
talking point: Columbine had an armed guard, who was apparently not all that useful.
The term 'green-on-blue attack' refers to the (quite common) situations where an aghan security force member will launch a surprise attack on NATO military personnel with which he is supposed to be working. Again, it turns out to not be that difficult to kill a few armed, trained, soldiers if you just wait for their backs to be turned.
More broadly, the relationship to magazine capacity is one of time: Given enough time to muster a response, the cops do show up in overwhelming numbers and either kill the shooter or cause them to kill themselves This means that the main question is how efficient they can be during the time that they have.
Re:Almost no one is killed by "assault weapons" (Score:5, Informative)
You're wrong.
"However, a timeline of the events assembled by the Jefferson County Sheriff's Department and published by CNN proves just the opposite. The armed guard, Jefferson County Sheriff's Deputy Neil Gardner, was able to engage the killers, keeping them from shooting more victims, and he personally saved dozens of students."
http://www.examiner.com/article/fact-check-columbine-high-s-armed-guard-saved-student-lives [examiner.com]
Re:Almost no one is killed by "assault weapons" (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow. Saving "dozens of lives" is turned into "didn't help too much."
THAT is what is wrong with this debate. One side is insisting that ALL killing be stopped no matter what. They conveniently leave out the part the in order to keep everyone perfectly safe they will have to perfectly monitor (as in constant and unescapable) everyone as well.
Re:Almost no one is killed by "assault weapons" (Score:4, Insightful)
I would like to see documented cases where an otherwise-innocent civilian with no connection to the military, to law enforcement, or to private security needed more than ten rounds, or was harmed for running out of ammunition over ten rounds...
Re:Almost no one is killed by "assault weapons" (Score:4, Insightful)
I would like to see documented cases where an otherwise-innocent civilian with no connection to the military, to law enforcement, or to private security needed more than ten rounds, or was harmed for running out of ammunition over ten rounds...
Not to go all Godwin on you, but I'm sure there are plenty of cases in Nazi Germany, Russia, China, etc. And that ties in better with the Second Amendment better than self defense arguments anyway.
Re:Almost no one is killed by "assault weapons" (Score:5, Insightful)
If law enforcement or private security need them, then society in general needs them. Not everyone can afford private security, and law enforcement is many minutes away in most places.
You cannot argue that an item is simultaneously required for police use but unnecessary for the individual. If there are people in society that are threatening enough that the police force needs assault rifles, then individuals need access to the same weapons to effectively defend themselves and their family.
The only way I would accept an assault weapon ban is if the police were held to the same restrictions.
Re:Almost no one is killed by "assault weapons" (Score:4, Informative)
Hey - next time I'm trapped in a mass shooting incident, I'll be sure to wait til he stops shooting to make an attempt to save my sorry ass. That's a great idea you've got there! /sarcasm
Which part of "multiple weapons" does your idea apply to? And, which part of "multiple magazines" would it apply to? You DO realize that the mass murder nuts are NOT toting six-shooters? Almost exclusively, they carry semi-automatic weapons. Such weapons use quick changing magazines. Push the little slidey thing, the empty mag falls, and you slam the next mag into place, pull the trigger and "BOOM". This takes - ohhhhh - maybe three seconds if the shooter is slow. In a confined space, with a monster .45 hammering your skull with each report, you won't even perceive any time between the next-to-the-last shot from the previous mag, and the next shot after he changes mags. If he actually FIRES the last shot before swapping out, THEN you'll hear a lull in the big booms.
Oh - the multiple weapons. Guy comes in carrying three rifles, two pistols, and a shotgun? He's going to empty one and drop it, empty the next and drop it, etc. No "reloading time" at all. When he gets down to one or two weapons, THEN he'll start swapping magazines out.
As evidenced by several shooting now, a determined nutcase can mow dozens down before anyone can do anything, UNLESS THERE IS AN ARMED CITIZEN READY TO CONFRONT HIM!!!
That citizen can be a cop, a teacher, a veteran, a housewife, a passerby - anyone at all.
Be smart - get a gun, and learn how to use it. Learn WHEN to use it. And, use it effectively.
Re:Almost no one is killed by "assault weapons" (Score:5, Insightful)
A quick search has not revealed any successful incidents of civilians stopping mass-shootings with their own guns. Off-duty police and military have, but I can't find evidence of civilians without military or police training doing it.
Because those are the people most likely to run towards gun fire (former military myself). But despite the fact that I am well-trained in firearms, I still have to go through the same buying process as any other civilian. The CCW process is identical for us, as it is for civilians. Law Enforcement is another story, as current/former cops can get CCW's without a problem. But nobody is talking about exceptions for LE/military, they are talking about blanket bans on cosmetic features of firearms. In 1995, former military could not purchase 30-round clips or AR-15s, despite the fact that they knew exactly how to use/store them.
I'm fine with preventing Joe Psychopath from having a gun. But don't take them away from those of us with experience and the capability to handle them with care and respect.
Re:Almost no one is killed by "assault weapons" (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not a firearms enthusiast, but I know how to load and fire a bolt-action rifle, and how to load and fire a revolver. I find target shooting to be entertaining, and have considered concealed carry before, but haven't found a specific need to carry. I look at it that without firearms enthusiasts in the debate, even I may lose the rights that I have enjoyed if those who go off-the-deep-end keep representing the side of firearms enthusiasts.
Re:Almost no one is killed by "assault weapons" (Score:4, Insightful)
A: Regulated meant disciplined in 1780s America.
B: Mexico and Brazil have virtually no legal civilian gun ownership and their murder rates (including those with firearms) are orders of magnitude higher than ours.
C: States and Cities in the US with strict gun control regimes are some of the most dangerous places to be in this country. The stats you are swallowing whole include suicides in them to make the rural areas look dangerous.
D: You know nothing about this topic and are simply seeking information to confirm your biases.
Good day to you sir.
Re:Almost no one is killed by "assault weapons" (Score:5, Insightful)
You can also stop a high percentage of the bad guys from getting guns in the first place. This isn't a pipe dream - most of the developed world has something on the order of 100x fewer gun homicides.
Of course, assault rifles are objectively not a big problem. Handguns are. But the path of least resistance for Obama is to score some easy points by going after the big easy target. And because he's going after something that isn't a problem, it gives the other side an easy out as well. Everyone wins, ain't politics great? Oh, sure, we still have something like 8000 handgun homicides at the end, but whatever.
Re:Almost no one is killed by "assault weapons" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Almost no one is killed by "assault weapons" (Score:5, Insightful)
You know how you stop a bad guy with a gun?
A good guy with a gun.
Excellent. Now all we need is a way to tell the two guys apart before the shooting starts.
Re:Blood is on the NRA Hands (Score:4, Interesting)
And yesterday, the news reported a woman who, along with her two children, was hiding in the attic because a guy broke in with a crowbar. When he began to enter the attic, she shot him. It's very likely that if she had any weapon other than a gun, she would not have been able to stop him.
Of course, a gun being used properly isn't sensationalist for you.
Source: http://www.wsbtv.com/news/news/local/woman-hiding-kids-shoots-intruder/nTm7s/ [wsbtv.com]
Re:Blood is on the NRA Hands (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh yeah,
Well another woman was killed by her own AR-15 assault rifle, and then had her gun used to murder 20 children.
28 people were killed by guns yesterday, and most of them probably didn't deserve to die.
28 more will die tomorrow. And the next day. Just like every day for the past decade.
Anecdotes prove nothing. Statistics should be analyzed intelligently and acted upon.
28 gun deaths per day is a steep price for our society's inability to distinguish between anecdotes and statistics.
Re:Blood is on the NRA Hands (Score:5, Insightful)
28 gun deaths per day is a steep price for our society's inability to distinguish between anecdotes and statistics.
28 gun deaths per day is a cheap price for our society's continued freedom from government tyranny. That's what the second amendment is about. Not self defense, not hunting, not skeet shooting. Protection from tyranny. It's a recognized right for the people to possess the means to revolt should they choose.
Re:Blood is on the NRA Hands (Score:5, Insightful)
So how do you explain the current government tyranny? According to you there should be none.
Re:Blood is on the NRA Hands (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a lot of bad stuff going on in the world right now, including here in the US, but very little falls under the formal realm of tyranny. When the Army sets fire to your home because your neighbor is printing magazine clips from a 3D printer, you have the right to start calling it tyranny.
Re:Blood is on the NRA Hands (Score:4, Interesting)
28 gun deaths per day is a steep price for our society's inability to distinguish between anecdotes and statistics.
28 gun deaths per day is a cheap price for our society's continued freedom from government tyranny. That's what the second amendment is about. Not self defense, not hunting, not skeet shooting. Protection from tyranny. It's a recognized right for the people to possess the means to revolt should they choose.
"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
The 2nd Amendment was written in a time when people had muskets in order to enable a well-regulated militia to defend themselves from colonial powers and attacks by native Americans, not the federal government. The militia kept their muskets locked up in an armory away from home until they were needed. We still have that, it's called the National Guard. Go sign up if you want to, but you don't get to bring your service rifle home with you.
Re:Blood is on the NRA Hands (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems that the logical extension of your stance on the 2nd amendment would beg the following questions. Since we didn't have the internet back then does that mean that the 1st amendment shouldn't apply to speech on the internet? I mean, come now, no way they saw that coming and frankly they could have never expected radical, potentially dangerous ideas to be able to spread so quickly. For that matter, since we didn't have automobiles does that mean that the 4th amendment shouldn't apply to your new SUV or, if you're lucky enough to have one, your own airplane? I mean, how could they gave intended to cover those things when they didn't even exist?
As a rule we take for granted and get all "up in arms" when the man infringes on one of the other rights protected (not granted - protected) by the constitution. We PAINSTAKINGLY point out how everything new is actually old (there is nothing new under the sun) and that the constitutionally protected rights should extend to this or that situation. But guns get different treatment and the 2nd amendment is treated differently. Why? And does it actually make sense to treat it differently or is it a purely emotional subject?
Re:Blood is on the NRA Hands (Score:4, Interesting)
The militia kept their muskets locked up in an armory away from home until they were needed. We still have that, it's called the National Guard. Go sign up if you want to, but you don't get to bring your service rifle home with you.
You're wrong on several points there. Historically it was common for local militia members to be expected to furnish their own weapon.
And the current militia is:
10 USC 311 - Militia: composition and classes [cornell.edu]
Chicago, Detroit and New York (Score:5, Informative)
Three cities with the toughest gun laws in the country, and among the highest rates of gun violence. Analyze that.
Places where reasonable "shall-issue" concealed carry licenses are available have seen large decreases in gun violence. Analyze that too.
But that doesn't fit the narrative.
And to "fix" that, you want to take away the rights of every law-abiding citizen in America to defend themselves.
Re:Blood is on the NRA Hands (Score:5, Insightful)
I've looked at the statistics, unfortunately most of the studies on defensive gun use were done back in the 1990's and many are 20 years old at this point. The National Crime Victimization Survey circa 1993 was the lowest of the lot citing an estimated 108,000 Defensive Gun Uses per year. The Kleck studies put that number higher at between 650k - and 2.5M per year. The Kleck piece is Gary, Kleck and Marc Gertz, "Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevelance and Nature of Self-Defense with a Gun", Journal of
Criminal Law and Criminology 1995, Vol. 86 No. 1
If you don't like the Kleck study(s) for whatever reason he the National Insitute of Justice that came up with 1.5M defensive uses of firearms per year: Philip J. Cook and Jens Ludwig, "Guns in America: National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms," NIJ Research in Brief (May 1997).
The flip side of those studies being that old now is there are all of critical reviews of their data and methodology at this point.
Even if we take the lowest number of defensive gun uses at an average of 108,000 per years, the number of times a firearm was used to stop a crime was still over 3 times the total number of gun deaths. And depending on the defition of defensive gun use, oftentimes "using a firearm" means drawing and presenting the gun is enough to stop the crime or potential crime without a shot being fired.
An incident that happened to me a couple years ago. It was a hot muggy July day and I was sitting in city traffic. I had the windows rolled down as my car was old and starting to overheat so I wasn't running A/C. Some guy opened my car door, got in, and started to tell me where to drive until he looked over and saw the barrel of the revolver I had on me at the time. His eyes got large and he promptly got out of my car and walked off. To this day I have no idea why he got in my car. Did he mean me harm? I don't know. All I know is that I didn't know him, he wasn't supposed to be there, and my revolver ended the situation and no shots were fired.
Now if you want to look at statistics consider this: violent crime in the US has dropped over 50% of it's 1992 levels. The reasons are likely many, many factors. I'm sure economy, more forrms of electronic entertainment, more people allowed to carry concealed all factor into that. The violent crime rate last year for England and Wales was 4x that of the US. In fact it was almost TWICE the the 1992 US rate of violent crime.
If you break down the homicide rates in the US, as the Justice Statistics has, with the latest report I found being from 2008, amoung whites, the murder rate is a little higher at around 1.6/100k, but still within the same rates as most of Western Europe. But amoung the black population it was 8.6/100k and 8.2/100k in the hispanic population increasing the overall homicide rate in the US to around 4 - 5/100k. Sucide rates didn't look much different between the US and Europe. Yes more people used guns to commit sucicide, but it suggests that if guns were not used they would have found another way.
Personally the 28 guns deaths vs the 100 or more crimes that were prevented by guns per day is a price that I can live with.
Stupid anecdotes are a waste of time (Score:5, Insightful)
With a question like this, anecdotes are pretty much worthless, just a way of distracting people from thinking rationally about the real issues of risk and benefit. For every anecdote of somebody whose life or the life of a loved one was saved because a gun was in the house, there is another anecdote of somebody who died in an accidental shooting or shot a loved one by mistake. There are examples of people who survived an auto accident only because they were thrown from the car, but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't fasten your seat belt--we know that because we have actual statistics that show that [I]on the average[/I], seat belts save lives.
So if you want to make a real case, forget the anecdotes and cite some real numbers.
Gun research blocked by political pressure (Score:4, Informative)
There's more that one way to approach a question. Different states have very different gun laws. So one could compare rates of victimization for various types of crimes (with appropriate statistical adjustment for demographic factors). One could look at rates of accidental gun injuries and "friendly fire" shootings. There have been efforts to research these issues using the same sort of sophisticated epidemiology that has been developed to assess disease risk and drug safety. Unfortunately such research has been largely blocked by political pressure from the gun lobby [jamanetwork.com]. Apparently, they feel that their interests are best served if we keep arguing about stupid anecdotes instead of real science.
Re:It's also impossible to prevent fermting alcoho (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet there are numerous restrictions and bans on them. Or using alcohol. Is there any law which is going to stop a person who is bound and determined to drink and drive?
The real reason for laws and regulations isn't absolute prohibition or removal, just reduction.
You're talking about laws that reduce poor judgment or carelessness. They enforce proper action in good-hearted people. But murder is different. It requires evil intent. There are already laws against murder. Once someone decides that (mass)murder is their goal, there aren't a whole lot of laws that will stop them. Maybe serve as a bar by which to judge and punish the murderer, yes, but precious few laws create an environment which will stop them.