Assault weapon bans

[Spendulus]

In America I know this guns are a very heated topic, and as an Australian I'm not sure I fully understand your reasons for wanting such high-powered rifles at home. For the most part Australia is a very safe country so it could just be that I am unaware of how different other countries are.

What I will say is, Australians were once allowed the same rifles. Laws changed after the 1996 Port Arthur Massacre which seems to have had a tremendous effect on mass gun violence in this country. The government of the time issued a Gun Buy-Back scheme, and removed over 631,000 guns from our suburbs. Touch wood, we haven't had a similar massacre since.

Any stats on this?  I live in Australia and can't remember significant amounts of violence before.  The Port Arthur thing seemed to be a one-off and was a good way for government to further monopolize the ownership of weapons (in it's own hands).  

But then Aussie's have this unreal belief in the government that I've never understood.  Every little thing now, people go running to the government for solutions.   Anyone would think that the Australian govt is the messiah.  It's has a very communist, cultist feel in this country.  

But your government was founded by criminals, and we are only finding out that ours are.

That's all long forgotten.  Today, Aussies are soft and want their govt to look after them.

Yeah I understand. 

Check out this - since the gun ban, Australia is #1 in crime victims.

http://www.captainsjournal.com/2012/07/23/do-gun-bans-reduce-violent-crime-ask-the-aussies-and-brits/

[hawkeye]

Check out this - since the gun ban, Australia is #1 in crime victims.

http://www.captainsjournal.com/2012/07/23/do-gun-bans-reduce-violent-crime-ask-the-aussies-and-brits/

Thanks.  That's pretty much what I would have expected.

[TheButterZone]

"Assault weapon" can be defined as a pinfire revolver, or fists and feet.

If a weapon can be used to defend innocent life without "collateral damage" (it can only strike the evildoer in its trajectory), then it must not be infringed, as it is needed to exercise the fundamental human right of self-defense.

[Rampion]

The cold hard fact is that in countries where guns are not easily purchasable (ie most of Europe) gun related deaths are negligible.

[TheButterZone]

http://reason.com/archives/2012/12/22/gun-restrictions-have-always-bred-defian

Even if there were no guns in a country except in the hands of non- criminal/evil/tyrannical/civil rights-violating law enforcement officers (impossible), then murders using all other weapons (including fists and feet) increase. There will always be criminal violence where there is no ultimate equalizer. Law enforcement cannot protect each individual at all times.

[Rampion]

http://reason.com/archives/2012/12/22/gun-restrictions-have-always-bred-defian

Even if there were no guns in a country except in the hands of non- criminal/evil/tyrannical/civil rights-violating law enforcement officers (impossible), then murders using all other weapons (including fists and feet) increase. There will always be criminal violence where there is no ultimate equalizer. Law enforcement cannot protect each individual at all times.

The amount of violent deaths of any type in developed countries where no firearms are easily at hand for a large amount of the population are ridiculous compared to those of the US.

Obviously crime exists in similar ratios, but its just less violent, there are less violent deaths per habitant. Thieves, burglars, and other "property criminals" (which are 99% of the criminals) are rarely armed (if at all), which makes a huge a difference. We also have plenty of people that goes nuts for no apparent reason, but its just they do not even know how to use or where to find a gun, and any other weapon is simply uneffective and definitely not as cool as an "assault rifle" when planning to cause as much death as possible.

The statement that school would be safer if teachers carried guns is complete madness, that is the kind of world you want your kids to grow up? The example of Israel speaks pretty much for itself, that's a fucking war zone, is to Israel to what you compare your country to?

You don't have to be a genius to realize that if you have firearms at hand, and they form part of your life, its more likely for you to use one of them at some point... While the thought wouldn't even cross your mind if you never would have seen one closely in your life. And no, a knife is something completely different, you use knifes every day in your kitchen, they have plenty of uses, while a handgun only use is to kill someone. The approach when dealing with both "tools" is completely different, in both a practical and philosophical way.

Banning is never an answer, violence is something that is rotten in culture and that needs to be eradicated by the society as a whole, but for sure the gun-loving fucktards that defend that more guns = less deaths are not helping at all.

[Spendulus]

.....the gun-loving fucktards that defend that more guns = less deaths are not helping at all.

Are you having fun making this stuff up?  Because the statistics do not seem to agree with you.

[Rampion]

.....the gun-loving fucktards that defend that more guns = less deaths are not helping at all.

Are you having fun making this stuff up?  Because the statistics do not seem to agree with you.

What statistics? I know for sure the number of violent deaths per year in the country where I live is less than 1 per each 100,000 habitants, and as much as half of them are domestic husband-wive disputes (passional crimes).

In most of Europe you would NEVER fear for your kid to be killed in the streets by a criminal or a psycho.

[TheButterZone]

.....the gun-loving fucktards that defend that more guns = less deaths are not helping at all.

Are you having fun making this stuff up?  Because the statistics do not seem to agree with you.

Yep. Was going to reply, but once someone rejects the pro-criminal/tyrannical government's own statistics (that it could just manipulate in favor of banning all self-defense entirely, as it is doing incrementally with each "gun control" law, but cannot without being called on the carpet by good people), there's no real point in replying. /ignore

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Norway_attacks

Enjoy your criminals' utopia, Europe.

[Spendulus]

.....the gun-loving fucktards that defend that more guns = less deaths are not helping at all.

Are you having fun making this stuff up?  Because the statistics do not seem to agree with you.

What statistics? I know for sure the number of violent deaths per year in the country where I live is less than 1 per each 100,000 habitants, and as much as half of them are domestic husband-wive disputes (passional crimes).

In most of Europe you would NEVER fear for your kid to be killed in the streets by a criminal or a psycho.

In the USA, states which have passed "concealed carry law" show a decrease in crime.  The reasons are somewhat obvious, Bad Guys act differently if they are worried there might be guns in the pockets of people they face.

Regarding your asserts re Europe, you seem to be trying to somehow generalize those to the USA.  But the USA is the exact opposite of a homogeneous culture.  I do not particularly believe that say, residents of a suburb in Boston face the same problems, issues and dangers that a resident of a suburb in El Paso does, with the border of Mexico 300 meters away and high levels of illegal activities close by. 

But you know best, clearly.  

So next time I talk with my friends in El Paso, I will have to relate this story to them of 'un hombre de Internet quien se dice ustedes solamente "gun-loving fucktards" '.

It'll be good for a laugh, right?

[Rampion]

.....the gun-loving fucktards that defend that more guns = less deaths are not helping at all.

Are you having fun making this stuff up?  Because the statistics do not seem to agree with you.

What statistics? I know for sure the number of violent deaths per year in the country where I live is less than 1 per each 100,000 habitants, and as much as half of them are domestic husband-wive disputes (passional crimes).

In most of Europe you would NEVER fear for your kid to be killed in the streets by a criminal or a psycho.

In the USA, states which have passed "concealed carry law" show a decrease in crime.  The reasons are somewhat obvious, Bad Guys act differently if they are worried there might be guns in the pockets of people they face.

Regarding your asserts re Europe, you seem to be trying to somehow generalize those to the USA.  But the USA is the exact opposite of a homogeneous culture.  I do not particularly believe that say, residents of a suburb in Boston face the same problems, issues and dangers that a resident of a suburb in El Paso does, with the border of Mexico 300 meters away and high levels of illegal activities close by.  

But you know best, clearly.  

So next time I talk with my friends in El Paso, I will have to relate this story to them of 'un hombre de Internet quien se dice ustedes solamente "gun-loving fucktards" '.

It'll be good for a laugh, right?

I know very well the USA is not a culturally homogenous country, while I also know very well that the parts of the world where kids grow up around guns are those with a higher ration of violent murders per inhabitant.

Its kinda ironic that "US libertarians" despise the Government, which strength resides precisely on the fact that eventually you will be forced to follow its laws at gunpoint, while those same "libertarians" praise those same guns like they are a symbol of individual freedoms. A blatant example of flawed logic.

Freedom resides in individual respecting each other, and that needs to be taught, not enforced. And this is why I wrote "banning is not the answer". If you want to have social peace, you just do not fight violence in society with more violence, you fight it with education towards respect to human life. BTW, did you know that police in Germany only fired 85 bullets in all 2011, and killed only 6 people? That's an 80 million country, so its roughly 1 bullet fired by police per million inhabitants in a whole year. Why? They haven't got the need to fire more, most of the criminals are unarmed because they just do not need the guns. There is a deeper respect for human life, and while Germany is a country where there are 30 firearms per 100 habitants (which is very high for Europe standards), the vast majority of people never sees or touches one in their whole life.

You have a very big problem in the US, I don't deny that: but arming more people will just make it worse. I guess you "libertarians" should know that there is no "good" or "bad" people, no "sane" or "crazy" folks - people is normal until the moment they aren't, your own mind could flip out at a certain point because of external circumstances, and if you have a gun handy and you know how to use its just so much likely that you will end up using it.

I guess that living in a country where the average burglar has a gun and its mentally ready to fight for his life doesn't help at all. Well, maybe there is some work to be done to address THAT, instead of making it easier for criminals to arm themselves.

[Spendulus]

.....the gun-loving fucktards that defend that more guns = less deaths are not helping at all.

Are you having fun making this stuff up?  Because the statistics do not seem to agree with you.

What statistics? I know for sure the number of violent deaths per year in the country where I live is less than 1 per each 100,000 habitants, and as much as half of them are domestic husband-wive disputes (passional crimes).

In most of Europe you would NEVER fear for your kid to be killed in the streets by a criminal or a psycho.

In the USA, states which have passed "concealed carry law" show a decrease in crime.  The reasons are somewhat obvious, Bad Guys act differently if they are worried there might be guns in the pockets of people they face.

Regarding your asserts re Europe, you seem to be trying to somehow generalize those to the USA.  But the USA is the exact opposite of a homogeneous culture.  I do not particularly believe that say, residents of a suburb in Boston face the same problems, issues and dangers that a resident of a suburb in El Paso does, with the border of Mexico 300 meters away and high levels of illegal activities close by.  

But you know best, clearly.  

So next time I talk with my friends in El Paso, I will have to relate this story to them of 'un hombre de Internet quien se dice ustedes solamente "gun-loving fucktards" '.

It'll be good for a laugh, right?

I know very well the USA is not a culturally homogenous country, while I also know very well that the parts of the world where kids grow up around guns are those with a higher ration of violent murders per inhabitant.

Its kinda ironic that "US libertarians" despise the Government, which strength resides precisely on the fact that eventually you will be forced to follow its laws at gunpoint, while those same "libertarians" praise those same guns like they are a symbol of individual freedoms. A blatant example of flawed logic.

Freedom resides in individual respecting each other, and that needs to be taught, not enforced. And this is why I wrote "banning is not the answer". If you want to have social peace, you just do not fight violence in society with more violence, you fight it with education towards respect to human life. BTW, did you know that police in Germany only fired 85 bullets in all 2011, and killed only 6 people? That's an 80 million country, so its roughly 1 bullet fired by police per million inhabitants in a whole year. Why? They haven't got the need to fire more, most of the criminals are unarmed because they just do not need the guns. There is a deeper respect for human life, and while Germany is a country where there are 30 firearms per habitant (which is very high for Europe standards), the vast majority of people never sees or touches one in their whole life.

You have a very big problem in the US, I don't deny that: but arming more people will just make it worse. I guess you "libertarians" should know that there is no "good" or "bad" people, no "sane" or "crazy" folks - people is normal until the moment they aren't, your own mind could flip out at a certain point because of external circumstances, and if you have a gun handy and you know how to use its just so much likely that you will end up using it.

I guess that living in a country where the average burglar has a gun and its mentally ready to fight for his life doesn't help at all. Well, maybe there is some work to be done to address THAT, instead of making it easier for criminals to arm themselves.

It can be shown that you have used (falsely) broad generalization after broad generalization to imply causality, where in fact it is not existent.

In the US, there are good safeguards in the form of background checks today.  There are also wildly variant state laws.  ONE of the US States may be paralleled with a typical small European state, but not the entire USA.  I say this because not uncommonly laws on a subject such as firearms do not vary by province or district within a European country.

Anyway, your approach is statist - you appear to believe that some wise person in charge of policy can and should enact gun control for his subject population.  You seem to imply that this person/committee//entity would "know best."

Maybe there are not such "wise people."  Maybe they are fucking retards.  Maybe they are people who somehow in their pea brain figure "It's better that a hundred thousand more burglaries occur, and a hundred thousand women are raped this year, than that we let people have GUNS....and because I am one of the progressive wise elite, I shall thus rule."

I hold the opposite point of view, which is the individual, based on the circumstances he finds himself in, is best capable of making these decisions.  In the real world, there is always a mingling of both approaches.

What we know pretty well is that "gun control" isn't about guns, it's about control, period.  We know it's about making the state stronger, and the individual weaker.  No one would rationally argue with you about your philosophical argue about education instead of banning, etc.  Similarly, though, on the road and in the street we need to look at the world as it actually is, and deal with it.  In many cases, for many people this involves owning firearms.

[compro01]

1. Yes, American liberals are idiots and focus on trivial shit rather than meaningful characteristics.

2. 0% armed?  So an armed deputy at Columbine doesn't count?

3. Relevant point : The teachers hauling guns are IDF reservists, with all that entails.  They're not just handing out rifles to every random.  I suspect you'd get a few gigaohms of resistance towards sending every teacher in the country off to basic.

[Rampion]

.....the gun-loving fucktards that defend that more guns = less deaths are not helping at all.

Are you having fun making this stuff up?  Because the statistics do not seem to agree with you.

What statistics? I know for sure the number of violent deaths per year in the country where I live is less than 1 per each 100,000 habitants, and as much as half of them are domestic husband-wive disputes (passional crimes).

In most of Europe you would NEVER fear for your kid to be killed in the streets by a criminal or a psycho.

In the USA, states which have passed "concealed carry law" show a decrease in crime.  The reasons are somewhat obvious, Bad Guys act differently if they are worried there might be guns in the pockets of people they face.

Regarding your asserts re Europe, you seem to be trying to somehow generalize those to the USA.  But the USA is the exact opposite of a homogeneous culture.  I do not particularly believe that say, residents of a suburb in Boston face the same problems, issues and dangers that a resident of a suburb in El Paso does, with the border of Mexico 300 meters away and high levels of illegal activities close by.  

But you know best, clearly.  

So next time I talk with my friends in El Paso, I will have to relate this story to them of 'un hombre de Internet quien se dice ustedes solamente "gun-loving fucktards" '.

It'll be good for a laugh, right?

I know very well the USA is not a culturally homogenous country, while I also know very well that the parts of the world where kids grow up around guns are those with a higher ration of violent murders per inhabitant.

Its kinda ironic that "US libertarians" despise the Government, which strength resides precisely on the fact that eventually you will be forced to follow its laws at gunpoint, while those same "libertarians" praise those same guns like they are a symbol of individual freedoms. A blatant example of flawed logic.

Freedom resides in individual respecting each other, and that needs to be taught, not enforced. And this is why I wrote "banning is not the answer". If you want to have social peace, you just do not fight violence in society with more violence, you fight it with education towards respect to human life. BTW, did you know that police in Germany only fired 85 bullets in all 2011, and killed only 6 people? That's an 80 million country, so its roughly 1 bullet fired by police per million inhabitants in a whole year. Why? They haven't got the need to fire more, most of the criminals are unarmed because they just do not need the guns. There is a deeper respect for human life, and while Germany is a country where there are 30 firearms per habitant (which is very high for Europe standards), the vast majority of people never sees or touches one in their whole life.

You have a very big problem in the US, I don't deny that: but arming more people will just make it worse. I guess you "libertarians" should know that there is no "good" or "bad" people, no "sane" or "crazy" folks - people is normal until the moment they aren't, your own mind could flip out at a certain point because of external circumstances, and if you have a gun handy and you know how to use its just so much likely that you will end up using it.

I guess that living in a country where the average burglar has a gun and its mentally ready to fight for his life doesn't help at all. Well, maybe there is some work to be done to address THAT, instead of making it easier for criminals to arm themselves.

It can be shown that you have used (falsely) broad generalization after broad generalization to imply causality, where in fact it is not existent.

In the US, there are good safeguards in the form of background checks today.  There are also wildly variant state laws.  ONE of the US States may be paralleled with a typical small European state, but not the entire USA.  I say this because not uncommonly laws on a subject such as firearms do not vary by province or district within a European country.

Anyway, your approach is statist - you appear to believe that some wise person in charge of policy can and should enact gun control for his subject population.  You seem to imply that this person/committee//entity would "know best."

Maybe there are not such "wise people."  Maybe they are fucking retards.  Maybe they are people who somehow in their pea brain figure "It's better that a hundred thousand more burglaries occur, and a hundred thousand women are raped this year, than that we let people have GUNS....and because I am one of the progressive wise elite, I shall thus rule."

I hold the opposite point of view, which is the individual, based on the circumstances he finds himself in, is best capable of making these decisions.  In the real world, there is always a mingling of both approaches.

What we know pretty well is that "gun control" isn't about guns, it's about control, period.  We know it's about making the state stronger, and the individual weaker.  No one would rationally argue with you about your philosophical argue about education instead of banning, etc.  Similarly, though, on the road and in the street we need to look at the world as it actually is, and deal with it.  In many cases, for many people this involves owning firearms.

No, my position is not statist at all. I don't believe in state, precisely because I don't like armed thugs forcing you to follow their rules at gunpoint.

Let me say it clearly: I do not think guns should be banned so the state has the exclusive monopoly on violence. Never. But saying that more guns = less violence is false, is a dangerous simplification that only leads to more violence - and this is a practical truth and not a philosophical approach.

I think the solution starts in the individual and his choices: In my case, I can guarantee you that I will never live in a country/area where there is a real threat that a random criminal carries a firearm, unless I'm obliged to by force majeure circumstances. I've been grown in countries where most of criminality is made by petty thefts (or white collar criminals, eg. corruption, etc.), and where you feel safe anytime, everywhere. I wouldn't want my kids to grow up in a place where carrying a gun is normal, like some areas in the US: do you know why? Because all this "love" for firearms is precisely what makes the USA one of the most violent countries in the world. You speak about rapists, like there is evil people around every corner... Well, how many rape episodes do you have in your area per year? In the country where I am now is pretty high for Europe standards, 4 rapes per year each 100,000 inhabitants (and like everywhere else the vast majority of rapes are not reported). It's high because its quite a "macho-driven" society. But, as usual, more than half of them are committed by a combination of family member+a relative+a close friend, the kind of guys that doesn't assault you on the street anyway, and that probably the victim wouldn't shot in any case. Summing up: not exactly a lot to fear for the average woman walking down the street by night in Berlin downtown, at least in most of Europe women's enemies are usually inside their own house, or very close to it.

But still, there is this mentality in the US where it seems that you are living in the wild west and you need to defend yourself. Defend your property, defend your family, defend your life. From what, for fucks sake? I think what you need to defend yourself and your society from is that obsession with guns and violence. There is some special olympics shit going on with the so-called "libertarians"... Just check that stupid gif in the post above. They compare the US with Israel, which is occupied territory and a warzone (*facepalm*), and where there are still school shooting episodes, even if rarer than it he US. Why don't those guys compare the US with Italy, Belgium, Spain, Greece.... Where no one is armed in schools, and no school shooting has ever happened? That should be the model, doesn't it?

[Peter Lambert]

Does "assault weapon" mean anything that can be used as a weapon to assault another person?  Like baseball bats, 2x4s, steak knives, cars, steel pipes, odd objects d'art, folding chairs, fertilizer, fire arms, etc?  Sounds extreme to ban all of those things.  Maybe we should just outlaw murder and assault.

Oh yeah? Sure its for self defense. What if someone gets an assault rifle for the purpose of "self defense" and then uses that to kill someone? Sure other people with guns might kill the aggressor. But what if that guy already killed someone? Just one person. What if that person was you? Or one of your family members?

And that stupid argument that says we need to outlaw every other thing that could kill or harm people (i.e. gravity, knives, bats) if we ban assault weapons. Just think this way. If you were going to kill a bunch of kids in a school, what would be your weapon of choice? A knife? A shotgun? A pistol? A piece of wood? Maybe something that can spit out the most projectiles per second? i.e. An assault rifle?

If your goal is to kill people, take a look at the Colorado movie theatre shooting. He started with a shotgun and then switched to a rifle. Most of the deaths were caused by the shotgun even though he shot many more shots with the rifle. So maybe we should ban shotguns because they are much deadlier!

The stupid thing about these laws is the rather arbitrary method in which they mark some guns as 'OK' and some guns as 'not OK'. For instance, most assault weapon bans put an AK on the bad list, but the SKS* would still be legal. Automatic AK's would already be covered under machine gun regulations, so let's compare the semi-auto version with the SKS. They fire the same round, the SKS is generally slightly more accurate, well practiced gunmen can fire 100 rounds out of either gun in about the same length of time, but the AK has a removable magazine and a pistol grip while the SKS has a fixed magazine and no pistol grip so the AK gets banned but not the SKS, all based on cosmetics. The same thing happens with the AR and the Ruger mini-14, the mini-14 looks nicer so it is allowed, even though it has the exact same functionality.

* For this discussion I am considering the factory configuration of most SKS versions; you can buy an aftermarket stock with a pistol grip and swap the fixed mag for a removable one which would put the rifle under the same category as the AK.

[FirstAscent]

1. Yes, American liberals are idiots and focus on trivial shit rather than meaningful characteristics.

2. 0% armed?  So an armed deputy at Columbine doesn't count?

3. Relevant point : The teachers hauling guns are IDF reservists, with all that entails.  They're not just handing out rifles to every random.  I suspect you'd get a few gigaohms of resistance towards sending every teacher in the country off to basic.

You see the guns in those pictures? There's 300 million of them in this country. That's the problem.

[Peter Lambert]

You see the guns in those pictures? There's 300 million of them in this country. That's the problem.

Problem because there is not one for everybody so some people have to share?

[Spendulus]

...........this mentality in the US where it seems that you are living in the wild west and you need to defend yourself. Defend your property, defend your family, defend your life. From what, for fucks sake? I think what you need to defend yourself and your society from is that obsession with guns and violence. There is some special olympics shit going on with the so-called "libertarians"... Just check that stupid gif in the post above. They compare the US with Israel, which is occupied territory and a warzone (*facepalm*), and where there are still school shooting episodes, even if rarer than it he US. Why don't those guys compare the US with Italy, Belgium, Spain, Greece.... Where no one is armed in schools, and no school shooting has ever happened? That should be the model, doesn't it?

Some of us in the USA live pretty close to war zones.  The US / Mexican border.

I mentioned El Paso earlier.  Juarez is the Mexican city across the border, basically the two are one society with a border in the middle.

So you REALLY WANT to talk about violence?

I don't think so.

Google Juarez+women+murder, please

Then report back.

[FirstAscent]

You see the guns in those pictures? There's 300 million of them in this country. That's the problem.

Problem because there is not one for everybody so some people have to share?

300 million is about enough for everyone to own a gun. See your failure to identify that?

Think of the people who voluntarily don't have a gun. They're unlikely to go get one. Now think of the people who have more than one gun. They're likely to go get more. And they keep upgrading, selling, etc.

Now, when a gun gets stolen, where did it come from? One of those who don't own guns nor want guns? No. It got stolen from one of those who own guns.

Now, when a gun is sold from one to another, where did the gun come from? One of those who don't own guns nor want guns? No. It came from one of those who own guns.

Now, what does the person who just had his gun stolen do? What does the person who just sold his gun do? He goes out buys another.

What conclusions can we draw from this? Avid gun owners are allowing guns to get into the hands of criminals. How wonderful.

[Peter Lambert]

We also have plenty of people that goes nuts for no apparent reason, but its just they do not even know how to use or where to find a gun, and any other weapon is simply uneffective and definitely not as cool as an "assault rifle" when planning to cause as much death as possible.

9/11 terrorists used boxcutters to hijack planes and kill thousands. Boston Marathon was hit by a bomb. There was a guy who got mad and drove his pickup truck into a crowd killing tens of people.

There are lots of ways to kill/hurt many people without using an assault riffle.

Oh, and actual assault riffles are already highly regulated under machine gun regulations, so very few mass shootings are done with assault riffles. That is why they had to invent the new category "assault weapon" to ban, which is essentially just "rifle which looks scary".