I feel like whoever first started bringing the term “assault weapon” to gun debates really killed the argument.
Admittedly, the only useful argument I’ve ever heard on the idea of grouping them has been the thought that they are purchased for their popularity and “coolness”, eg based on their appearance in some movie or video game, not specifically for their practical use of any civil kind. And, people who buy guns with no practical purpose in mind for them (as opposed to say, a person holding a restraining order expecting to defend themself) are more likely to end up letting them into an unsafe situation (by theft, jadedness, or pure accidents)
Still - not a strong argument, and I’d prefer it if we focused on how guns are used, not how black and tacticool they are.
I feel like whoever first started bringing the term “assault weapon” to gun debates really killed the argument
That would be the pro gun control side. They wanted to conflate assault rifles as in the actual military rifles, and the downgraded civilian semi-auto rifles. The distinction is important, look up the process it takes to purchase a machine gun in the US sometimes. They deliberately want a culture of ignorance around guns, because the goal is total disarmament, not effective regulation.
You can see the result in this thread and others. People will claim that someone can just walk into a Walmart and buy a machine gun. Politicians talk about banning “fully semi auto assault weapons”. The OP image and plenty of comments here mock the idea that someone should expect a base amount of knowledge in the subject before proposing new laws. Someone trying to define proposed regulation or correct a mistaken assumption about current laws is branded an “Ammosexual”.
I’d kindly ask you not to put words in my mouth. I am pro gun control. I am not pro total disarmament - logically, such a thing isn’t even at all practical, especially because it isn’t achieved in any of the countries we use for comparisons about “what works”.
People are constantly misinformed about tons of issues across the world, including journalists. Take your blame to them. Don’t use it as an illogical thread to make a different point.
It’s going to take 20-40 years to get into a comparable state to other first world countries. The difference is whether we start now or in 30 years. If we start in 30 years, it will take 50-70 years.
I don’t think a single one of the things you said would help curb gun violence or even school shootings at all. Your list is nice for everything else but how about addressing the glorification of guns and the shooters in the media? Maybe regulate the incitement of violence online and in the political discourse? How about blocking the radicalization of young men via dangerous conservative rhetoric online, eg. YouTube? Handle cases of bullying that go actively overlooked? Maybe intervene in child abuse and provide help for teenagers with poor mental health who feel ostracized? And the most important of all, block the easy access to these damn guns?
I bet someone better educated on this topic could come up with a better list. But my point is that you’re dying on this tired hill of “it’s not the guns” in this thread but you’re failing to hit the nail on the head on everything else while being condescending towards everyone else:
Because you’re not even interested in addressing the real issue (and fail to provide a reasonable, insightful solution) so long as nobody’s touching the damn guns. What you’re doing is akin to whataboutism. What the heck does insider trading in Congress have to do with anything?
I think the one part I agree with is the rifles vs handguns debate. In spite of their prominence in mass shootings, I think the thing we need to regulate more is handguns, not rifles. They’re used for concealed carry - for bringing death to another person’s home. Shotguns and rifles are more than adequate for home defense or hunting, and they’re much less practical to steal or transport.
I think it was Australia that even restricted personal gun purchases to that category of weapon.
It’s ironic because guns at the end of the day are a tool to enact the will of it’s user. Take the gun away, and you still have a problem to face.
All that guy is gonna do is find a gun illegally or something else to do what it is he is going to do. Mass shooters will steal box vans, people will go on knife stabbing sprees, police will become more oppressive as they have nothing to fear from the people anymore.
It’s funny that I tell people this all the time. I would say I lean more toward the left, but liberals think that if you aren’t 100% a liberal, you’re a conservative, and that’s why we will never experience the change we need to see in this country.
Ah yes, every country and their people is the same, including their culture and politics.
The US is a unique situation because unlike many of those other countries, the US continued to be incredibly saturated with guns and now we have firearms that are incredibly easy to access even outside of gun stores.
My argument ignored nothing, the US is not those countries, it’s the US. Your argument also ignores something else, that being that those countries don’t necessarily have lower murder rates than the US.
Too many guns causing issues is not a difficult problem to solve.
Don’t necessarily have lower murder rates? The only ‘european’ country with a higher murder rate than than the USA is Russia. In fact the worst murder rate in europe in 2020 (year I’ve got the figures for) was held by Hungary, and even then it is half of what the USAs was.
Ah yes, telling people that that they can’t have guns, that’ll just make the guns disappear.
Tell me exactly how you think that it should be implemented? Every approach I’ve ever seen has so far been either extremely unrealistic or a massive violation of several amendments.
Aside from that, removing guns is not going to lower the death rate by very much in comparison to European countries for other reasons, such as affordable healthcare, livable average/minimum wages, the people in Europe tend to live a higher quality of life than people in the US.
If people want to kill, they are going to use the easiest tool in their arsenal to do so, guns just happen to be number one on that list. Regulating guns only hurts the people, not criminals. Having a gun doesn’t just make someone want to go out and kill people.
I want to make it very clear that I am not advocating for pro-gun anything, I am saying the issue lies with the many fundamental problems in the US. Living in the US today is incredibly stressful if you are not rich as shit, and it makes a lot of people crack.
That’s because legally speaking, it is not a machine gun.
Disbarring effectiveness from the conversation (although bumpfire is hilariously innacurate compared to true fully automatic fire), bumpfire also requires a degree of skill to actually pull off, even with a bump stock, as you have to manipulate the firearm in a way that it actually can continuously fire, something that would be very difficult to do in a stressful situation.
Bumpstocks also make semiautomatic fire much more difficult.
I should clarify that I’m not defending bumpstocks, I’m just saying that banning bumpstocks was a farce, especially since you can still bumpfire without them due to the existence of physics.
I would imagine bump stocks are actually less effective than regular aimed semiautomatic fire in just about every situation. That’s why bans like this are pointless. People don’t realize how fast a person can already shoot a semiautomatic rifle, while actually being able to properly aim at what they are trying to hit.
You can bump fire any gun without a bump stock or a trigger mechanism, on a lot of guns it’s stupid easy and you can do it without experience. It doesn’t turn it into a “fully automatic machine gun”. Someone with barely any firearm experience can take any pistol or rifle and be shown how to bump fire within like a minute. It has nothing to do with accessories, although things like those can make it a little easier.
I’m a big advocate for better gun control, but what you’re implying is just dishonest, even if unintentionally.
Posting that kind of stuff makes you sound like you have no idea what you’re talking about (the way you worded it just sounds cringey) which makes people less inclined to be influenced by what you say, and hurts support of gun regulation by convincing witnesses that everybody who likes gun control is misinformed.
“Everyone can kill people regardless of skill” seems much worse than 'only highly skilled people can". None of these shooters ever “spent their life training”.
It’s pretty easy to get guns in my country yet there’s still not much gun violence. Similarly a lot of the states with the most lax gun laws in the US have the least gun violence.
What are you on about? Care to put any other words in my mouth? There’s plenty of things you can say about me but literally nothing that you just said has any relevance to me at all. Thank you very much.
No. We just don’t want people trying to ban things they don’t have even a basic understanding of. When someone says “ban high capacity clipazines” it tells us they don’t even know what they are talking about.
I would be for a ban of semi auto weapons period. Bolt action is more than good enough for hunting or target shooting, heck even home defence, a shotgun is pump action but still highly effective.
Then how about in instances where it is unlikely for the vast majority of people in one of the most populated countries in the world to learn about something like guns and how they work, we just have a registry of firearms that are approved for use in the US. Manufacturers can form fill and submit new equipment to be on that list legalizing them to be sold to the public through authorized dealers and then we don’t ever have to worry about the broad sweeping bans on weapons that probably shouldn’t have been in the hands of the aforementioned underqualified, less than educated civilians. Especially in cases where those civilians may intend to do harm to other, less than educated civilians.
It should not be a requirement that I know how a weapon works to fear harm from that weapon. I should not have to know the difference between the pomel and the guard of a sword to be allowed to fear being cut apart by one. Telling people to educate themselves does nothing for your argument. All you are saying is “I’m smarter than you and you’re wrong.” And that’s just not helpful in cases where regardless of one’s education on the matter of guns, we still hold different views on which guns people should be allowed to carry.
I do not care if it’s a clip or a magazine or if it’s bump-fire or fully automatic or machine automatic. You know the intention of people’s words when they are concerned about these matters and want legal restrictions put in place. It should not be accessible to civilians to fire 10s of bullets a second.
Preventing mass shootings from happening is a matter of restricted and monitored access. There are hundreds of countries where gun violence is a non-issue. Why is it an issue here? How do we be more like countries where it is not an issue? What steps can we take to not fear for our lives? I don’t like having to look over my shoulder when I go out.
It’s not semantics. When legislation is being written, it has to be very specific. If you can’t even get the definition correct, how are you going to be expected to accurately write laws about it? It’s even worse when the general population is pressuring their representatives to write laws on something they also know nothing about. There is a very clear distinction between semi-automatic and automatic. To say otherwise, you are absolutely clueless or intentionally being dishonest.
There is nothing wrong with being conversant in proper terminology.
“These people” aren’t the only ones who play semantic games: if you have ever wondered, then been punched in the taint, about what any of the letters in lgbtqia+ mean you will understand how ridiculous people of any ideology get about using the “right words”.
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My favorite from them is “define assault weapon.” My definition is “who the fuck cares? Let’s regulate all guns.”
I feel like whoever first started bringing the term “assault weapon” to gun debates really killed the argument.
Admittedly, the only useful argument I’ve ever heard on the idea of grouping them has been the thought that they are purchased for their popularity and “coolness”, eg based on their appearance in some movie or video game, not specifically for their practical use of any civil kind. And, people who buy guns with no practical purpose in mind for them (as opposed to say, a person holding a restraining order expecting to defend themself) are more likely to end up letting them into an unsafe situation (by theft, jadedness, or pure accidents)
Still - not a strong argument, and I’d prefer it if we focused on how guns are used, not how black and tacticool they are.
That would be the pro gun control side. They wanted to conflate assault rifles as in the actual military rifles, and the downgraded civilian semi-auto rifles. The distinction is important, look up the process it takes to purchase a machine gun in the US sometimes. They deliberately want a culture of ignorance around guns, because the goal is total disarmament, not effective regulation.
You can see the result in this thread and others. People will claim that someone can just walk into a Walmart and buy a machine gun. Politicians talk about banning “fully semi auto assault weapons”. The OP image and plenty of comments here mock the idea that someone should expect a base amount of knowledge in the subject before proposing new laws. Someone trying to define proposed regulation or correct a mistaken assumption about current laws is branded an “Ammosexual”.
I’d kindly ask you not to put words in my mouth. I am pro gun control. I am not pro total disarmament - logically, such a thing isn’t even at all practical, especially because it isn’t achieved in any of the countries we use for comparisons about “what works”.
People are constantly misinformed about tons of issues across the world, including journalists. Take your blame to them. Don’t use it as an illogical thread to make a different point.
What part of my reply made you think that I was talking about you in particular?
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So no more mass shooting? Thanks, chief.
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Or you do a gun buyback program like Australia did. Then make firearms illegal without a license and a reason.
Then, like all other first world countries, you literally see murder plummeting.
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It’s going to take 20-40 years to get into a comparable state to other first world countries. The difference is whether we start now or in 30 years. If we start in 30 years, it will take 50-70 years.
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Murder rates have been dropping in the US for decades, mass shootings are a small but high profile problem
I don’t think a single one of the things you said would help curb gun violence or even school shootings at all. Your list is nice for everything else but how about addressing the glorification of guns and the shooters in the media? Maybe regulate the incitement of violence online and in the political discourse? How about blocking the radicalization of young men via dangerous conservative rhetoric online, eg. YouTube? Handle cases of bullying that go actively overlooked? Maybe intervene in child abuse and provide help for teenagers with poor mental health who feel ostracized? And the most important of all, block the easy access to these damn guns?
I bet someone better educated on this topic could come up with a better list. But my point is that you’re dying on this tired hill of “it’s not the guns” in this thread but you’re failing to hit the nail on the head on everything else while being condescending towards everyone else:
Because you’re not even interested in addressing the real issue (and fail to provide a reasonable, insightful solution) so long as nobody’s touching the damn guns. What you’re doing is akin to whataboutism. What the heck does insider trading in Congress have to do with anything?
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I think the one part I agree with is the rifles vs handguns debate. In spite of their prominence in mass shootings, I think the thing we need to regulate more is handguns, not rifles. They’re used for concealed carry - for bringing death to another person’s home. Shotguns and rifles are more than adequate for home defense or hunting, and they’re much less practical to steal or transport.
I think it was Australia that even restricted personal gun purchases to that category of weapon.
Wait, what?!? Nuance? GTFO of my guns bad echo chamber with your actually achievable solutions that I would normally otherwise support wholeheartedly!
Because fix society hard, blame gunz instead.
It’s ironic because guns at the end of the day are a tool to enact the will of it’s user. Take the gun away, and you still have a problem to face.
All that guy is gonna do is find a gun illegally or something else to do what it is he is going to do. Mass shooters will steal box vans, people will go on knife stabbing sprees, police will become more oppressive as they have nothing to fear from the people anymore.
It’s funny that I tell people this all the time. I would say I lean more toward the left, but liberals think that if you aren’t 100% a liberal, you’re a conservative, and that’s why we will never experience the change we need to see in this country.
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Your argument ignores the effectiveness of gun control in almost every other western nation.
Ah yes, every country and their people is the same, including their culture and politics.
The US is a unique situation because unlike many of those other countries, the US continued to be incredibly saturated with guns and now we have firearms that are incredibly easy to access even outside of gun stores.
My argument ignored nothing, the US is not those countries, it’s the US. Your argument also ignores something else, that being that those countries don’t necessarily have lower murder rates than the US.
Too many guns causing issues is not a difficult problem to solve.
Don’t necessarily have lower murder rates? The only ‘european’ country with a higher murder rate than than the USA is Russia. In fact the worst murder rate in europe in 2020 (year I’ve got the figures for) was held by Hungary, and even then it is half of what the USAs was.
Ah yes, telling people that that they can’t have guns, that’ll just make the guns disappear.
Tell me exactly how you think that it should be implemented? Every approach I’ve ever seen has so far been either extremely unrealistic or a massive violation of several amendments.
Aside from that, removing guns is not going to lower the death rate by very much in comparison to European countries for other reasons, such as affordable healthcare, livable average/minimum wages, the people in Europe tend to live a higher quality of life than people in the US.
If people want to kill, they are going to use the easiest tool in their arsenal to do so, guns just happen to be number one on that list. Regulating guns only hurts the people, not criminals. Having a gun doesn’t just make someone want to go out and kill people.
I want to make it very clear that I am not advocating for pro-gun anything, I am saying the issue lies with the many fundamental problems in the US. Living in the US today is incredibly stressful if you are not rich as shit, and it makes a lot of people crack.
Man you Americans just live in constant fear eh?
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That’s because legally speaking, it is not a machine gun.
Disbarring effectiveness from the conversation (although bumpfire is hilariously innacurate compared to true fully automatic fire), bumpfire also requires a degree of skill to actually pull off, even with a bump stock, as you have to manipulate the firearm in a way that it actually can continuously fire, something that would be very difficult to do in a stressful situation.
Bumpstocks also make semiautomatic fire much more difficult.
I should clarify that I’m not defending bumpstocks, I’m just saying that banning bumpstocks was a farce, especially since you can still bumpfire without them due to the existence of physics.
I would imagine bump stocks are actually less effective than regular aimed semiautomatic fire in just about every situation. That’s why bans like this are pointless. People don’t realize how fast a person can already shoot a semiautomatic rifle, while actually being able to properly aim at what they are trying to hit.
You can bump fire any gun without a bump stock or a trigger mechanism, on a lot of guns it’s stupid easy and you can do it without experience. It doesn’t turn it into a “fully automatic machine gun”. Someone with barely any firearm experience can take any pistol or rifle and be shown how to bump fire within like a minute. It has nothing to do with accessories, although things like those can make it a little easier.
I’m a big advocate for better gun control, but what you’re implying is just dishonest, even if unintentionally.
Posting that kind of stuff makes you sound like you have no idea what you’re talking about (the way you worded it just sounds cringey) which makes people less inclined to be influenced by what you say, and hurts support of gun regulation by convincing witnesses that everybody who likes gun control is misinformed.
Then you’ll have no issue with banning bumpstocks then eh? And other mechanisms that move this from skill based to technology based?
No. Because the whole point of guns is to equalize people regardless of skill. Normal people can’t spend their lives training, terrorists can.
“Everyone can kill people regardless of skill” seems much worse than 'only highly skilled people can". None of these shooters ever “spent their life training”.
Skill means people with resources and able-bodied. If you want to further centralize lethal power in the hands of those people that is your choice.
If only it were my choice.
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Look man, I just want less gun violence in this country. And my solution is to ban guns. If you have a better idea I’m all ears.
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These aren’t actual solutions. Taking aways all guns is a concrete step. We need concrete steps from the gun loving crowd.
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So yea, you have no ideas then? Cool. What a turd.
It’s pretty easy to get guns in my country yet there’s still not much gun violence. Similarly a lot of the states with the most lax gun laws in the US have the least gun violence.
Can’t bump a single action six shooter. Sorry pal.
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What are you on about? Care to put any other words in my mouth? There’s plenty of things you can say about me but literally nothing that you just said has any relevance to me at all. Thank you very much.
A lot of the comments written to him were hostile, he may of thought you were as well.
No. We just don’t want people trying to ban things they don’t have even a basic understanding of. When someone says “ban high capacity clipazines” it tells us they don’t even know what they are talking about.
But it’s irrelevant, people just don’t want violent murderers to have the ability to fire large volumes of bullets at them first thing in the morning.
FFS, let us get a cup of coffee first!
If you really feel so strongly about it, you would educate yourselves the small amount required to even talk about what you’re trying to ban.
I would be for a ban of semi auto weapons period. Bolt action is more than good enough for hunting or target shooting, heck even home defence, a shotgun is pump action but still highly effective.
The number one reason that I own guns is to protect my circle from the government gone tyrannical.
You are gonna defend yourself against Abrams tanks, Apache helicopters and predator drones with a rifle?
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Yeah, what are you going to defend yourself with? Thoughts and prayers?
Then how about in instances where it is unlikely for the vast majority of people in one of the most populated countries in the world to learn about something like guns and how they work, we just have a registry of firearms that are approved for use in the US. Manufacturers can form fill and submit new equipment to be on that list legalizing them to be sold to the public through authorized dealers and then we don’t ever have to worry about the broad sweeping bans on weapons that probably shouldn’t have been in the hands of the aforementioned underqualified, less than educated civilians. Especially in cases where those civilians may intend to do harm to other, less than educated civilians.
It should not be a requirement that I know how a weapon works to fear harm from that weapon. I should not have to know the difference between the pomel and the guard of a sword to be allowed to fear being cut apart by one. Telling people to educate themselves does nothing for your argument. All you are saying is “I’m smarter than you and you’re wrong.” And that’s just not helpful in cases where regardless of one’s education on the matter of guns, we still hold different views on which guns people should be allowed to carry.
I do not care if it’s a clip or a magazine or if it’s bump-fire or fully automatic or machine automatic. You know the intention of people’s words when they are concerned about these matters and want legal restrictions put in place. It should not be accessible to civilians to fire 10s of bullets a second.
Preventing mass shootings from happening is a matter of restricted and monitored access. There are hundreds of countries where gun violence is a non-issue. Why is it an issue here? How do we be more like countries where it is not an issue? What steps can we take to not fear for our lives? I don’t like having to look over my shoulder when I go out.
Seems you don’t understand the comment. You can fear all you like. But the uneducated should have no say in what should be banned.
< votes for anti-abortion politicians
It’s all just Kabuki. Doesn’t matter the side.
It’s not semantics. When legislation is being written, it has to be very specific. If you can’t even get the definition correct, how are you going to be expected to accurately write laws about it? It’s even worse when the general population is pressuring their representatives to write laws on something they also know nothing about. There is a very clear distinction between semi-automatic and automatic. To say otherwise, you are absolutely clueless or intentionally being dishonest.
There is nothing wrong with being conversant in proper terminology.
“These people” aren’t the only ones who play semantic games: if you have ever wondered, then been punched in the taint, about what any of the letters in lgbtqia+ mean you will understand how ridiculous people of any ideology get about using the “right words”.