Communities around the U.S. have seen shootings carried out with weapons converted to fully automatic in recent years, fueled by a staggering increase in small pieces of metal or plastic made with a 3D printer or ordered online. Laws against machine guns date back to the bloody violence of Prohibition-era gangsters. But the proliferation of devices known by nicknames such as Glock switches, auto sears and chips has allowed people to transform legal semi-automatic weapons into even more dangerous guns, helping fuel gun violence, police and federal authorities said.
The (ATF) reported a 570% increase in the number of conversion devices collected by police departments between 2017 and 2021, the most recent data available.
The devices that can convert legal semi-automatic weapons can be made on a 3D printer in about 35 minutes or ordered from overseas online for less than $30. They’re also quick to install.
“It takes two or three seconds to put in some of these devices into a firearm to make that firearm into a machine gun instantly,” Dettelbach said.
Ultimately, guns are not very complicated machines. I’m making a semi-automatic rifle in my home office right now out of stuff you can get at a hardware store & some 3D printed parts, and I’m amazed at how simple it all is.
A lot of proposed gun control feels like trying to put the genie back in the bottle. Even states with hefty assault weapon bans like California and Maryland still have plenty of legal loopholes allowing people to own semi-automatic guns, and gun manufacturers are finding more all the time. I honestly think that anything short of straight up banning the sale of gunpowder will have a temporary at best effect on gun violence, and do less than nothing at worst.
The fact of the matter is that gun control bills at the federal level will cost a lot of political capital. A federal challenge to the 2nd amendment will rally conservatives in the same way that the recent overturning of Roe caused a surge for liberals. This is to say nothing about enforcement: it’s a common position among gun owners that they would simply refuse to comply with a gun confiscation / surrender, and I believe a significant chunk of them would follow through with that. See the recent ATF rules about pistol braces for an example of mass non-compliance.
So, we can fight the uphill battle of gun control for perhaps marginal returns, or we can try to address the things that drive people to violence in the first place. And I’m not just saying “muh mental health” either; we need to address housing costs, healthcare costs, education costs, wages stagnating behind inflation, broken-windows policing, the war on drugs, the mainstreaming of far-right propoganda, the decay of public schooling, white supremacy, queerphobia, misogyny, climate change & doomerism, corporate personhood, and a fuckload of other things making people angry and desparate and hopeless enough to kill people & themselves.
I firmly believe that addressing the material conditions that create killers will prevent more murders than any gun control bill, especially in the USA.
we need to address housing costs, healthcare costs, education costs, wages stagnating behind inflation, broken-windows policing, the war on drugs, the mainstreaming of far-right propoganda, the decay of public schooling, white supremacy, queerphobia, misogyny, climate change & doomerism, corporate personhood, and a fuckload of other things
This is basically what they’ve done in most European countries. Plus, they have very strict gun laws and no gun culture. All of that equals close to no gun violence.
Yeah but the violence we do see in europe is typically widely spread knife crime and chemical attacks on people. The most complicated and unique terrorist attacks I have ever seen happen on European soil.
I’ll take knife crime any day of the week over gun violence.
Can’t kill 60 and wound more than 400 from a hotel room window with a knife.
On the other hand I’d much rather get shot than stabbed or splashed with acid.
It’s not like the US doesn’t have all that on top of the gun violence.
'Course, the last time a dude threatened to stab me by pulling a knife on me, I threatened to shoot him by pulling out a gun on him in return, and he decided the best outcome for all would be to walk away.
He was right, I didn’t get stabbed, he didn’t get shot, and I was able to walk into the hell that was “pandemic Walmart” unscathed, as a direct result of me being armed.
So, what you’re saying is that Europe should just get a lot of guns to get rid of people threatening knife violence?
Dude, there’s a reason why the US has lots of gun violence. It’s because of the easy access to guns.
No guns = no gun violence.
Did everyone clap and called you my hero before you woke up?
I see this sentiment a lot, and I mean, realistically, would you? Getting splashed with acid mostly equates to a flesh wound, maybe with side effects like blindness, or muscular numbness. There’s necessary skin grafting and things of that nature, sure. But that kind of attack, generally, strikes me as having much less lethal potential compared to, say, a shooting or a stabbing. If you get a hole poked in your heart, you’re basically guaranteed dead within a minute, and if you get a hole poked in many of your major organs, arteries, veins, you could bleed out within the next couple minutes.
Compare that to an acid attack, which, granted, is extremely unpleasant as it burns away at your nerve endings, but would seem much less likely to be lethal, and has a much more straightforward path to recovery, in lots of cases.
The likelihood of dying making horrible injuries more bearable. Do I want to live a long life horribly disfigured with constant pain due to nerve damage, or just get shot and have it be done and over with?
As for stabbing, if they hit a vital area that would make it less unfortunate, but just the idea of getting stabbed is deeply unpleasant, whereas the emotional reaction to getting shot is “well, I should’ve moved out of the US”
Like once in a decade chemical attacks, as opposed to weekly school shootings? Tough decision eh?
Mostly talking about the regular acid attacks that happen mostly to women and children
I’m confused, I’m from Europe but live in Australia. I read about a mass shooting in the states pretty much every week. Often children as schools seem to be a prime target.
Can’t remember last time I heard of an acid attack in Europe. Got some source for this being a regular thing and an actual problem even remotely comparable to guns in the US?
The stabbing rate in the UK for example is lower than it is in the US per capita. So the idea knives replace guns doesn’t really seem to hold
Straight up false
I’m European and we don’t do near enough on like half of those points.
most
This is the truth, thanks for saying it.
honestly think that anything short of straight up banning the sale of gunpowder
There’s hand-loading, and I strongly suspect that gunpowder is not the hardest component to manufacture.
Potassium nitrate and sulfur.
Gunpowder is the easiest part. The casing will be the hardest as you need pretty tight tolerances, but anyone who cares could have 50 trash cans full of cases in a week for a lifetime of reloading.
And if you don’t have cases for reloading, you can always use a case less design, then it’s just a matter of sourcing the projectile.
Of course there is always black powder, ball and cap, etc.
I have heard it before that the hardest part is getting access to reliable chemical primers. But I think if you were looking at all available options on an equal footing, you’d probably be more likely to go with some sort of electronic ignition system, or something of that nature.
Guns are
hardereasier to manufacture than cartridges. Honestly, when civil war finally does break out it will be ammunition, not guns, that the government restricts access to because that’s way easier to control and way harder to manufacture. Reloading still needs brass and primers, and those are hard to make for anything outside of a shotgun.Edit: said exactly the opposite of what I intended to say.
I honestly think that anything short of straight up banning the sale of gunpowder will have > a temporary at best effect on gun violence, and do less than nothing at worst.
Even that won’t have an effect for long
https://youtube.com/@styropyro?si=pHDZxrbvONLxENCa
https://youtu.be/crBqplCIZoA?si=chovNs5707OHq7mU
Energy weapons may not be far enough along now to be of much practical use, but ban gunpowder and we will see what horrors are possible.
Also, while air rifles aren’t really as effective today as chemically-powered guns, they were used by militaries in the past, and if you increase the pellet size, they can put out quite a bit of energy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jTnrjVxtVo
That’s a 20mm pellet. The muzzle energy from that is about four times NATO 5.56, what a typical issue rifle will put out.
I honestly think that anything short of straight up banning the sale of gunpowder will have a temporary at best effect on gun violence, and do less than nothing at worst.
I don’t even think that would really help all that much. You would maybe increase the relative complexity required to build a gun, but I think you’d still get plenty of people who are able to utilize improvised home explosives in their homemade firearms designs. Of another variety, you’d also probably see a rapid influx and growth of the airgun market, which is already pretty far along in it’s ability to substitute and even outclass normal firearms, in some respects (mostly in cost, and consistent shot over shot accuracy, rather than in “combat efficacy”, depending on what you mean by that). I’m also sure you’d see designs that adapt more mundane forms of explosives. Propane strikes me as a particularly good candidate, but you could also probably just use normal gasoline as a propellant, hydrogen peroxide, H2O2, butane, you could probably even use wood gas.
I think there are too many machine shops in america to realistically stop america’s position globally as a firearms manufacturer, in a vacuum. As you say, you’d need to more combat the external factors going into it, rather than trying to kind of, try to make sweeping bans around it. Especially as those sweeping bans can be more selectively applied to particular communities, to increase their criminalization, as we’ve seen time after time.
The caveat I would place around that, is that handguns are a pretty terrible suicide vector, I think it’s something like half of all gun deaths are suicides. Of suicides generally, about a third will never try again, and it’s a spur of the moment decision, and about a third will repetitively try over and over, with the remainder falling somewhere in the middle of multiple attempts. So preventing guns from falling into those, at least third, of hands, could be a good form of regulation. Though, that point is somewhat unrelated to the conversation at hand, here, I just think it’s a pretty good point I don’t hear people bring up a lot.
Frankly even if the bans did work, people wouldn’t want them. The US does not care about gun violence because the people in power are pandering most to people unaffected by it since they’re who vote in the primaries. The US cannot and will not address its gun violence in the near future and it will not address the fundamental needs of its people if conservative leaders continue to get elected.
Basically, the US is probably screwed and is due for increased violence one way or another. Especially since we’re all allowed to own a deadly weapon and yet a good portion of us aren’t even literate.
This is to say nothing about enforcement: it’s a common position among gun owners that they would simply refuse to comply with a gun confiscation / surrender, and I believe a significant chunk of them would follow through with that. See the recent ATF rules about pistol braces for an example of mass non-compliance.
Then they need to be arrested. Noone should be trusted with guns and other dangerous weapons or machines if they deliberately break the laws surrounding the ownership of them. We don’t let people drive after they lost their licencse.
The estimates for the number of pistol braces out there ranged from 3 million on the low end, to 40 million on the high end. During the grace period to register braced firearms as SBRs without having to pay the tax stamp, the ATF received 255,162 applications to do so.
Even if we take the low number & account for folks destroying or converting their firearms, we can reasonably estimate a rate of non-compliance in the hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions. There is a very real possibility that arresting all those people would literally double the already ludicrous US prison population overnight. In a country that already has a worryingly militarized police force, I cannot imagine the mass arrest of millions of armed people will reduce gun violence.
To that point, the people like to cite Australia’s gun “buyback” program as a success…they only got about 20% of the guns. Now, you and I both know American compliance would be lower than that, but let’s use that number for a second and apply it anyway. With 600,000,000 guns in this country, we’d get 120,000,000 guns taken leaving 480,000,000 guns. Whooooo.
Furthermore, while gun owners have dropped, guns per person has increased, and there’s a burgeoning black market run by organized crime created by this ban. There also have been mass shootings since port arthur, and more mass killings without guns than that, too. Sure, they have “less than the US,” but the success of that program is vastly overstated.
20% of 600,000,00 is 120,000,000, not 1,200,000!
Ah shit I done misplaced a comma! Let me fix that, thanks!
Logged gun ownership has dropped. You can still buy a gun off the grey market and never fill out a 4473
Afaik Australia does not have ATF form 4473.
I thought you were talking about America in the second half of your post. Gotta go back to reading comprehension class I guess
Ah lol it happens!
I understood “not surrendering” as Police shows up and demands to be handed over the braced gun, to be met with a closed door or at gunpoint.
If people need to be told to hand it over, but comply then, i guess it can be handled with a fine. I still stand by this being a clear indication of being unfit for gun ownership though.
Any officer enforcing this would be killed and most cops would just outright refuse to enforce it anyway. There’s a logistical problem of how this would even be done.
I lived in a town with maybe five cops for it and the three surrounding towns. Cops would to on several hour patrols, so if you called 911 at the wrong time it could take an hour for the police to actually show up. They knew about meth cooks in the area and they left them alone because the cops knew they would wind up dead and no one would ever find them.
Now, the whole population of the area was a few thousand people and most of them were armed. Now, if they couldn’t deal with the meth cooks that no one liked, how exactly would they deal with the big chunk of the population that includes small business owners, members of the city council, and maybe the mayor?
This sounds like a case for a crackdown by the federal police then. And even more of a reason to take illegal weapons from people, who are willing to murder police officers with it.
What you describe is practically half an insurrection already. And this sounds like the kind of area, from where exactly that could happen with enough methed up MAGAhats. So instead of the 2A helping people to protect themselves from a hostile and unlawful government it will help hostile and unlawful people to establish an undemocratic regime and abolish the constitutional order.
Lol, yeah, the FBI that’s been cracking down on the left for 100 years while ignoring the Klan? That’s who you’re taking about? They would rather join the insurrection. Who do you think these cops are?
They already won. That’s the point.
I still stand by this being a clear indication of being unfit for gun ownership though.
I appreciate that you’ve been a good faith interlocutor so far, but I wanna push back on this just a little more.
The current rules governing SBRs in the United States were established in the 1930s in anticipation of an outright ban on handguns. The thought was that “sawed-off” or short-barreled rifles would be a way for people to circumvent the ban. And, because the law enforcement thinking at the time was distinctly classist, the mechanism for keeping these guns out of the hands of criminals was not an outright ban but a ludicrously high tax, in the neighborhood of $4500 in today’s money.
But that ban on pistols never materialized. So now, we’re left with a nearly 100 year old vestigial law that doesn’t really serve much of a purpose: short-barreled rifles aren’t any more deadly than full-length rifles (they tend to fire the same bullet louder and slower), and they aren’t any more concealable than handguns. There really isn’t an obvious public good that is served by these laws, and their enforcement gives away that the ATF understands that on some level: basically no one is ever charged for just having an unregistered SBR, it’s almost always a rider-on to a different crime
or an excuse for a cop to fuck you up if they don’t like you.Enter pistol braces. Ostensibly, they are a device that assists shooters that have lost the use of one of their hands to stabilize an AR pistol with the forearm of their one good hand (and to be clear, they serve that purpose well). However, some people notice that they happen to be shaped in a way that provides a lot of the function that a stock would, and begin using them on AR pistols as a way of getting the ergonomics and aesthetics of an SBR without paying the additional tax and waiting months for approval.
And for a really long time, the ATF was okay with this. Pistol braces were specifically allowed. That was, until a few years ago, the ATF decided to… Change their mind? “Re-interpret” existing rules was I think what officially happened. No new laws were passed, no democratic process took place, and no clear and present danger was being addressed. They just kinda decided “Hey these are illegal now, you have X days to comply”.
Does aquiescing to that “interpretation change” have anything to do with being a responsible gun owner? To my mind, whether someone complies with that or not says more about their obideience to authority / fear of consequences than it does their responsibility or danger to society. There is no inherent moral good to following the law, and history is filled with responsible people who flout pointless or harmful laws.
short-barreled rifles aren’t any more deadly than full-length rifles (they tend to fire the same bullet louder and slower), and they aren’t any more concealable than handguns.
You know, I would push back on this a little bit. It’s not really a necessity that they’re more lethal than rifles, and more concealable than handguns, they can still do plenty of damage while occupying the middle category.
Handgun cartridges usually travel at below the necessary 2100 fps required to create permanent hydrostatic wound cavities, which means they need more shots on target to do a similar amount of damage. Unlike sawed off shotguns (which I think are registered as destructive devices? idk), which tend to be unwieldy to fire, especially at range, an SBR can be fitted with a suppressor, and has the potential to fire hotter and lighter loads capable of defeating level 3+ body armor, unlike a handgun. Probably not at the same time as a suppressor would be used, but, dealer’s choice, I guess. All of this is in a package that can potentially be carried, somewhat easily, in a large to mid-sized coat along with spare magazines. Unlike a normal rifle, which might require something like a larger trench coat, or poncho, or what have you. SBRs are also going to be much more usable at range compared to your conventional handgun, it’s sort of along the lines of an advanced PDW in that respect, with maybe a slightly larger form factor.
So, if we’re kind of, thinking about the possible attack vectors that this could be used for, I think it’s understandable why federal law enforcement might be a little bit more concerned about this, compared to long rifles, handguns, or shotguns, which occupy more distinct niches that are perhaps a little bit easier to safeguard against with conventional tactics. No comment on the pistol brace thing, that was kinda stupid, but the SBR ban doesn’t make absolutely no sense, as long as you’re evaluating it from a very particular perspective.
the SBR ban doesn’t make absolutely no sense, as long as you’re evaluating it from a very particular perspective.
A perspective that can’t see bullpups, apparently
In the early 1900’s Roosevelt sent federal officers to try to assess and deal with a form of slavery called “peonage” that was pervasive in the South. These officers were shot at and ultimately chased out. Roosevelt gave up on enforcing the law.
The US government has failed multiple times to enforce laws that law enforcement agreed with. Overwhelmingly, law enforcement does not agree with outright firearm bans. Why do you believe that firearm owners could be arrested for refusing to give up firearms? Like, from a logistical perspective, how would that work exactly?
Why every time someone is trying to explain to americans that what you have is not normal, is fixable, and it has been fixed somewhere else there’s always some bullshit excuse like once in the 1900 hundreds their one thing happened once so there is no possible solution.
Europe doesn’t have that. Australia had a problem with gun culture and it was fixed after one mass shooting that shocked the country. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/15/it-took-one-massacre-how-australia-made-gun-control-happen-after-port-arthur
I totally expect someone to come up with but but but US is different, because of the above: bullshit excuses. And because I post that story a lot when gun restrictions are discussed. Yes the US is different, start thinking about a similar solution, you sent a fucking man on the moon in the 1960, you can do this too.
Fixing US gun violence is trivial from a policy perspective. You tax bullets at an extremely high rate while also creating a social welfare system like Europe. This restricts the ability to execute violence while also addressing some of the biggest causes. But it’s impossible to implement that because right wing terrorism is the point.
Right wing terrorism isn’t a problem with America. It is America. It’s how the system is supposed to work. It is the point.
Right wing terrorism keeps people traumatized. It ensures that anyone proposing a social safety net would be murdered. It is the extrajudicial extension of the oligarchy that controls America. What the government can’t do, right wing death squads do instead.
If you stop mass shootings, you will destroy America. It isn’t being stopped because it is intentional. It isn’t being stopped because both parties, and, more importantly, the oligarchs who control them, benefit from it.
If you think you can stop gun violence in the US, you fundamentally do not understand what the US is. The KKK has been deeply involved at all layers of government across the US for generations. Today Aryan Brotherhood infiltrates police departments across the nation. The violence is the reality of America, the thing you think is America is just a facade.
America is colonial white supremacy maintained through terror, where guns are the primary tool of that terror. America is not normal, it’s a two party dictatorship pretending to be a democracy. America is the problem, it cannot fix the problem anymore than Nazi Germany could have fixed their antisemitism problem.
Here you go. Another person that tells me it cannot be fixed, just it is for a new and different reason/excuse this time. I’ll add you to the list, I also have a new excuse now!
Ok, so you, who have absolutely no context on the situation, keep being told that you’re wrong by people who have context on the situation, and your responses is to record all the ways you’re told you’re wrong so you can gloat about how you keep getting told you’re wrong by the ignorant people who actually have lived their entire lives in the place you know nothing about? Cool.
It’s kind of like you’re listening to the 5 blind people describe an elephant over the phone and you’re like, “I have a cat, therefore you also have a cat. You need cat litter and everything you’re saying is dumb.”
America for Europeans is either Hollywood, major cities, or Europe with rednecks. You fundamentally do not understand the context. You keep comparing to Europe and Austrian, but those models don’t work. Europe enclosed the commons generations earlier. It’s not possible for Europeans to comprehend America.
I’ve driven for 6 hours straight with the radio on scan and not even found a signal in more than one part of the US. There are vast areas of nothing with no law and no possibility of control. The vast majority of the US is unpopulated. The closest analog would be Australia or Canada.
Except that Austria and Canada never had an economy that relied on chattel slavery enforced by “organized milita.” That’s what the “well regulated milita” is in the second amendment, it’s slavers. Slavery and genocide are essential to the US in a way they aren’t in any developed country. If you want to compare the US to something, you need to look at Brazil.
The US is more like a developing nation or a dictatorship than a democracy the way you think about it.
Americans have all heard the same things over and over again. Your arguments are old and bring nothing new. So what is it exactly you’re trying to do here? What is the point if first hand information will change your articles of faith? Are you just trying to feel superior? Because coming in to a place, knowing nothing about it, and telling people they’re doing everything wrong is a pretty old school European thing to do and it really isn’t convincing anyone.
Ok, so you, who have absolutely no context on the situation, keep being told that you’re wrong by people who have context on the situation, and your responses is to record all the ways you’re told you’re wrong so you can gloat about how you keep getting told you’re wrong by the ignorant people who actually have lived their entire lives in the place you know nothing about? Cool.
Pretty much. And it’s bullshit excuses conflicting with each others, so yeah pretty fun. You guys have no idea what you are talking about, keep making up different convoluted reasons.
All while ignoring the obvious one gets ignored. It’s the fucking guns, the sooner you get onto it, the sooner you sort out this mess.
Or keep thinking that it just can’t be solved and spent time on lemmy philosophising why it can’t. Fine with me either way I’m pretty safe.
Sure yeah, THAT’S the problem
Right now the Second Amendment is untouchable to regulate and expanding its coverage.
The problem is the convert to automatic things and not the motivation to kill a bunch of people that has been apparently increasing and almost always carried out with legal and far too easily available non-converted semiautomatic weapons.
It is the scary looking things.
Edit: added text in italics since I left out an obvious detail
The problem is
the convert to automatic things and notthe motivation to kill a bunch of peopleDon’t know where you’re going with the rest of your comment, but that part is the sine qua non of our violence problem.
Without the prevalence of guns, the motivation isn’t as much of an issue. Prevalence of guns isn’t a huge deal if there is a low motivation to use them to murder people. Both are necessary for the issue to be as bad as it is in the U.S.
Without the prevalence of guns, the motivation isn’t as much of an issue
I think the normalization of murderous intent, (and how it manifests itself in lesser forms of violence) is a much bigger problem than murder.
I think that suicide is twice as large a problem as homicide.
I think suicidal ideation (and how it manifests in depression and self harm) is a much bigger problem than suicide itself.
I don’t think anyone with the motivation to murder or kill themselves is “cured” of that disease by taking away the guns. I think it masks the symptom, while the disease festers and grows.
I think we need to deal with the social/cultural issues long before we ban every object that can be used by a sufficiently motivated person to cause harm.
Can we not do both? Metaphorically - and literally - stem the bleeding? Sure, people will switch to knives, trucks, whatever else. However, as countries who have heavily regulated firearm ownership recently, like Australia, have shown, violent crime goes down significantly once it becomes much harder to access firearms. Some of this does actually boil down to psychology - there’s a heavily-studied mental disconnect between pulling a trigger to shoot at a human being, vs physically assaulting a human being with a knife or blunt object with intent to kill. This says nothing of the fact that knife wounds, blunt force trauma, whatever, are all MUCH easier to deal with on a medical level, and the fact that you can’t stab or beat 30+ people to death in a short span of time the way you can shoot people with a semiautomatic, magazine-fed rifle.
This says nothing of the fact that knife wounds, blunt force trauma, whatever, are all MUCH easier to deal with on a medical level, and the fact that you can’t stab or beat 30+ people to death in a short span of time the way you can shoot people with a semiautomatic, magazine-fed rifle.
Taking guns affects gun crimes.
Addressing the societal/cultural/economic issues affects guns, knives, bombs, cars, bludgeons, and barehanded crimes.
Knives are used to kill three times more often than rifles. For ever 100 rifle killings, there are another 300 knife killings. Consider these 400 crimes, and take all the rifles. All of them. Assume 100% effectiveness: all rifle crimes are eliminated, and none of the rifle-criminals switch to knives. Best case scenario, 25% effectiveness; 300 of those 400 are dead.
Now, focus on the socioeconomic conditions that lead people to kill. Focus on the murderous intent. Your social/cultural approach only needs to have 25% effectiveness to achieve the same result. When we target the whole of the problem, we don’t even have to be very good at it to achieve phenomenal results.
To answer your question, yes, we can do something useless and pointless, and address the societal issues, and work the actual problem.
What we can’t do is just the useless, pointless something, without addressing the social issues, and expect anything to actually improve.
We must enact universal healthcare. We must fundamentally address economic disparity with a punitively high top-tier tax rate like we had until the 1970’s and 80’s. We must address food insecurity, housing insecurity.
We must soften or eliminate criminal sanctions for non-violent offenses, and we must throw away the key for habitual violent offenders, a
before we ban every object that can be used by a sufficiently motivated person to cause harm.
Just guns, you don’t hear about mass bludgeoning with candelabra. It’s always guns, no need to bring in what aboutism, the US has one problem when it comes to murderous intent, and it’s guns.
Sure let’s work on mental health too, but keep your eyes on the ball, it’s the guns.
Did I say mental health? It’s not mental health. It’s socioeconomic despair. It’s a societal issue, a cultural issue.
You want to see a strong correlation with violence? Look at age of motherhood. The mean age of women when they have their first child.
Australia and Europe commonly wait until they are in their 30’s to have children. The average child in these areas is raised by mature, economically stable adults. Murder rates in these areas are a tiny fraction of the world rate.
Compare to Central and South America, where the average mother is 18 to 22, and the murder rates are large multiples of the world rate.
The correlation holds true across nations, across regions, across cities, across demographics. If you know the age of a motherhood in a given area, you can predict the homicide rate in that area. If you know the homicide rate, you can predict the age of motherhood.
Contrast with guns, where the nation with by far the highest access to guns in the world has a homicide rate well below the world average. The rural areas of that nation have near universal gun ownership, yet the violence is clustered in impoverished areas, where the majority of the population doesn’t actually have guns.
Turns out it’s not actually the guns. It is the motivations of the people carrying them. When those people are figuratively beaten into submission, living paycheck to paycheck with no legitimate prospects, no way to get ahead, saddled with debt, no equity… Violence is not a gun problem. It’s not a mental health problem. Violence is what happens when you systematically subjugate people, and some of them decide they don’t need to obey. Violence is a socioeconomic problem. It is a cultural problem. More specifically, it is a problem of corporate culture, where people do everything they can to take everything they can from everyone they can, and give back as little as they can to as few as they can.
We need universal healthcare. We need to eliminate food insecurity. We need to eliminate housing insecurity.
We need to restore the protections we had against 19th century robber barons. Specifically, we need to reinstate a confiscatory top-tier tax rate. The only people that businessmen hate paying more than workers is the IRS. A confiscatory tax rate forces them to choose between the two.
We need to kill the concept of “renting”. We need to create a owner-occupant credit against residential property taxes, to hold them where they are, or lower them slightly for anyone living in their own properties. A “landlord” who wants that tax credit will have to issue a “land contract” (rent-to-own arrangement, recorded with the county) or a private mortgage to secure the occupant’s credit against that property’s taxes. The occupant will then be paying a fixed rate for the duration of the contract, and will be earning equity.
It is much more feasible to fix those three factors than to enact any form of gun control, and any of those factors will reduce violent crime far more than even a total confiscation could ever hope to achieve.
Yes, without guns it is slightly harder to kill people. Now, how do you plan to take their guns when they can make them in a day on a 3d printer?
Bruh this was already hashed out in his post. Not even a comment, literally in the
post you responded tooriginal post.
Why not both?
That is what I’m saying, it is both motivation and the already easily available semiautomatic guns that are the problem. The scary automatic conversions are a distraction because they sound and look scary, even though they are used in very few mass shootings.
Just like silencers and the ‘assault weapons’ baloney that didn’t address the majority of gun deaths which are caused by pistols even after suicides are excluded.
Gotcha, last sentence sounded a little bit pro-gun though hence my response. I still think the ease of access is the main issue, by far. I would probably be dead if I was american as I could’ve easily got a cheap 9mm to off myself during the worse times. It was easier to reach out than to buy a glock and I seriously think it saved my life.
“It is the scary looking things.” Sounds pro gun?
Weird.
Kinda dismisses the real criticism people have with guns yeah. They are not advocating against them simply because “they look scary”.
This reads like pig-induced hysterics.
I’m not anti-gun myself, but there are far better arguments for the anti-gun crowd to use than this.
Calling a modified handgun a machine gun is some pretty impressive hyperbole, yeah.
I mean it’s a gun that fires continuously with a single trigger pull. How is that not a machine gun? Yeah it’s a machine pistol that’ll spend a clip in 3 seconds, but it’s still a machine gun.
A machine gun, traditionally, is a fully automatic firearm in a rifle format.
Think light machine guns (M249, PKM) or a sub-machine gun (MP5, P90)
A machine pistol isn’t technically a “machine gun” despite the name. In fact, the classification of machine pistols is a debated topic even now.
In many places, they are classified as any other pistol. In others, they considered a form of PDW or Personal Defense Weapon.
But, PDW can sometimes refer to a specific class of SMG like the P90. Basically, a compact firearm with a cartridge around 6mm or so. Which the P90 fires a 5.7mm round.
Its complicated. And we should not be painting all firearms with the same brush.
I’m glad there’s at least one person standing up for the fair and humane treatment of murder weapons.
Can you have a normal debate without resorting to ridiculous attacks like this? Grow up.
An automatic rifle in full-auto will spend its magazine just as fast. Which is why burst mode exists.
It’s an automatic pistol…
“Machine” doesn’t mean automatic, lol.
Just use words for what they are instead of trying to replace them for shock value.
I don’t expect you to do this, though.
Are raspberry Pis not computers because they’re tiny?
Are small electric cars not cars because they can only carry two people?
Are cube satellites not satellites because they’re tiny?
If I’m being fired at rapidly, I’ll be saying “help, someone is shooting at me with a machine gun!” It would be funny if someone popped in and said “ackshually…”
It’s crazy the mental gymnastics the anti-gun crowd puts them through, but it’s another reason not to take them seriously.
Who said I was anti-gun lol?
Do you really think that if everyone learns precise technical gun terms that gun control arguments will change?
No, but it means there can be a discussion where each side is able to communicate effectively.
Words have meaning. If we are to have a stark discussion, at the beginning we need to come to agreement on what words mean so that either side does not misunderstand each other.
Adapting your own language to your audience is a thing. It’s like if you speak to room of professionals, you will use the common professional language. Yet speaking to the general public you will use a language that is generally understood.
But trying to force the general public to understand professional language should be a lesson in futility.
The onus is on you to understand and speak to your audience. Don’t blame them for your lack in that.
*onus
“Ownness” is also a word, but refers to the sense of self, rather than possession, and doesn’t fit in this context.
It’s important to call things what they are. I know of magazine capacity laws written so poorly they dont even touch belt fed weapons and for the low low price of 1500 bucks you can convert the AR you already have into a belt fed weapon and constantly fire rounds until you run out of belt or the guns melts. And that’s just a part called the upper reciever which legally is not a gun. You can get it shipped online no questions asked, no checks required. Knowing what you’re talking about makes a difference. This is how loopholes get made.
It would certainly help.
What is the point in making up terms for firearms that have never been used for them even by the military?
It only serves to muddy the waters and scare people.
I’m pretty sure the massive amount of gun violence is what scares people, not terms that aren’t used by the military.
In fact, from what I’ve seen, the people who really care about technical terms are the ones who want to find them to get around gun regulations or stop them from happening in the first place.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been told that there’s no such thing as an assault weapon when there was an assault weapon ban in law, meaning there clearly is whether or not some people don’t accept that as a technically valid term.
The term “assault weapon” is being used by people who know nothing about firearms to refer to anything that isn’t an old bolt action these days.
Its meaningless
It’s an automatic pistol…
“Machine” doesn’t mean automatic, lol.
So this is the problem of knowing the actual jargon vs the natural language people use.
Jargon is often prescriptive and needs to be taught. A word means a specific thing because people who know the subject well use it to describe that thing.
But natural language doesn’t work that way. You’ll note that the dictionary definition for “machine gun” includes “broadly: an automatic weapon.” Dictionaries have to be “descriptive,” because they’re helping someone understand what an average person means when they say a phrase.
There are countless examples of words beginning to mean other things in natural language. My pet peeve example is the fact that “podium,” a word containing the root meaning “foot” that is clearly about a raised platform one stands on, in the dictionary contains “see lectern.” Because a fuckload of people (especially in North America) call lecterns “podiums.”
Anyway my point here is that the average person considers any automatic weapon a “machine gun.” That may not be the technical definition of “machine gun,” but it is the natural definition. So when people use it to describe an automatic handgun they aren’t doing this for “shock value,” they’re doing it because they don’t know any better and because to them, that’s what the word they’re using means.
Gasoline generators don’t generate gasoline.
The comparison I use for these conversion devices is it’s like putting high-octane fuel in a dodge caravan and calling it an F1 racer.
Nobody is saying that putting “faster” bullets into a gun makes it fully automatic (or a machine gun) so your example is silly at best.
This is about 3D printables that fundamentally change the speed at which a gun chamber/clip can be emptied.
Do better.
a gun chamber/clip
I’ve seen so many people get absurdly upset if you misnomer the place in the gun where the bullets go.
Incidentally, these same people hate pronouns.
Gun owner, pedant, and father of a trans man here. Did you just make a bigoted assumption?
It’s a shibboleth.
The distinction is simple, straightforward, widely taught, broadly known. Using it correctly is an immediate indication that one has acquired some very basic knowledge of the subject matter. Using it incorrectly is an immediate indication that they have not.
If someone with a gun calls it a “clip”, I am immediately wary. They haven’t learned very much about guns, and certainly not from responsible instructors. They might have a gun in their possession, but they haven’t proved they are gun owners. Until I can determine their skill level, I won’t be turning my back on them.
A “magazine” charges the firearm; a “clip” charges the magazine.
That’s it. That’s the distinction. A magazine puts ammunition into the action of the gun, where it is fed into the chamber and fired. A clip is used to put ammunition into the magazine, where it waits to be fed into the action.
It is one tiny little factoid about guns that immediately demonstrates the speaker’s familiarity - or ignorance - of the subject matter. It is a shortcut toward determining their credibility.
“Machine” doesn’t mean automatic, lol.
Machines are devices that leverage physical forces to some desirable effect. Strictly speaking, all guns are machine guns
It’s not an anti-gun argument.
The theory is that you CAN’T regulate guns because people will just 3D print inferior copies.
Ding ding. "3d printers must be regulated for safety and copyright protection "
Go to home depot and you can make a pipe shotgun that doesn’t even require welding to make. A lot of fully 3d printed guns are 9mm. If you havent shot both cartridges I cannot explain the difference between 9mm and a shotgun slug. Maybe it will suffice to say the bulletproof vests that stop 9mm, when hit with a shotgun slug often result in broken ribs, punctured lungs, and general chest cave ins. Your 3d printed gun will undoubtedly have better rate of fire but in terms of accuracy and level of destruction, the shotgun will compete just fine.
Also the 3d printed gun will probably be of questionable durability, and if you think ya can have a 3d printed barrel id love to see ya fire it more than once.
No they use metal barrels but people figured out how to ECM rifle them at home too.
I know, but some people are ignorant of the material sciences and think plastic can be used for the barrel.
Ding ding. "3d printers must be regulated for safety and copyright protection "
But that’s impossible, not figuratively, but literally. 3d printers are devices designed for hobbiest-hackers you can’t put copy protection or drm controls on a device like that, it won’t work. If any legislation were passed to make that happen, there will be open source alternative firmware for these devices the very next day, months before the legislation would even take effect.
That is in other words, a waste of effort. The genie is out of the bottle and it can’t be put back in. The question is what will we do now that it’s out.
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And yet we’re seeing a drop in gun related deaths after it spiked during the pandemic:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6b/1999-_Gun-related_deaths_USA.png
It’s too early to call this a trend, but assuming home conversion to full auto is getting common, it has not yet correlated with a rise in gun deaths.
I don’t think it will for an important reason: full auto actually sucks. Most people don’t know how to use it and tend to spray bullets while hitting nothing. Even the AR15, which has relatively low recoil, is not very accurate when you hold down the trigger like that.
One exception is the 2017 Las Vegas shooting (which was a bump stock, but effectively the same end result). He was shooting into a large crowd where every bullet was all but guaranteed to hit someone. Most mass shootings aren’t like that.
The way the military uses full auto isn’t necessarily to hit anyone, either. It’s to force the enemy to keep their heads down so your side can maneuver into a better position. That’s not how a lone mass shooter would operate. They don’t have a team where that tactic makes sense.
If I was told correct info I think even the armed forces dont like full auto outside of specific use cases like mounted guns with hundreds to thousnads of rounds in boxes and for supressing fired from rifles with detachable mags. If you really wanted to mow through a crowd for some ungodly reason a semi auto (not pump) shotgun with buckshot shells and a detachable mag would work as well as full auto rifle in an intermediate cartridge.
The way the military uses full auto isn’t necessarily to hit anyone, either. It’s to force the enemy to keep their heads down so your side can maneuver into a better position
The military from what I heard doesn’t. They use burst mode to improve the chance of hitting something, but not waste too much too easily.
It depends
Not all weapons have a burst mode. Often though, militaries prefer controlled bursts of full auto, but it depends on the role and weapons system. Machine gunners are more likely to go full hog than a rifleman for example, but that’s assuming that all soldiers do the most optimal choice in any given situation, which just isn’t true.
I’m not sure what your point is. So what if gun deaths are down since the pandemic? Viewing the chart you submitted as evidence we can pretty much just trace a continuation of the trajectory in gun deaths straight to where they would have been from before the pandemic to after - so they’re still trending upward overall. Also, the article doesn’t postulate an increase in gun deaths, just that modded guns are likely being used in crimes.
Who cares what the military does? These aren’t military users, and they’re using automatic fire to spray bullets in gang turf wars or whatever. They’re not known for taking the time to aim, and are just fine with taking out little kids or bystanders.
Overall, I have no idea what you’re trying to prove except “Look over there!!” and your points ramble all over the place.
Fact is that if more bullets fly probability says more people are gonna get hit. Maybe not today, but tomorrow.
Guns with conversion devices have been used in several mass shootings, including one that left four dead at a Sweet Sixteen party in Alabama last year and another that left six people dead at a bar district in Sacramento, California, in 2022. In Houston, police officer William Jeffrey died in 2021 after being shot with a converted gun while serving a warrant. In cities such as Indianapolis, police have seized them every week.
So again, not sure what you sound like you’re tying to minimize or dismiss. Full auto isn’t a problem? I can assure you that you’d feel differently if you were downrange in a shopping mall and someone decided to fire one up.
Overall, I have no idea what you’re trying to prove except “Look over there!!” and your points ramble all over the place.
I’m not the person you’re talking to, but this sentence makes you an imbecile saying that if somebody’s smarter than you, it’s their problem.
You might consider that if you just discard opinions of people competent in the subject, such as military and, well, usual gun nuts, the end result is not worth much.
The conclusion is that mass shooting deaths would actually go down if we just let people use full auto. It’s a counterintuitive result, but it’s all there.
/s? Because if not that’s the biggest line of horseshit I’ve ever heard in my life. What do you plan on doing, allowing only Imperial Stormtroopers access to guns? SMH…don’t bother replying.
Yes, there are fewer gun related deaths. But there are more mass shootings and guns have become the # 1 killer of children and teens. Source
this is false, this stat deliberately counts 18 and 19 year olds as “children” and purposefully includes gang related violence. great example of using statistics to sell a story.
how many gang members are going to surrender their firearms after a ban?
Where did you find that? Because the info states … “Of the 6,192 children and teenagers under 18 who were shot in 2023, more than 1,600 died.”
your source links to this source of data, which only goes up to 2021. The table clearly states they’re counting 15 - 19 year olds.
that 6,192 number appears to come from the gunviolencearchive site, but I don’t see any source for their data other than claims that “suicide data provided by CDC”
further, a simple search of the claim “guns number one cause of death in children” will find a lot of valid critiques of this claim.
No it doesn’t. For the stats on kids it uses this source from 2024.
yes I know, I mentioned that in my comment. can you tell me where on that page it indicates their source of data?
Here …
Gun violence is a symptom of socioeconomic inequality and a lack of mental health care. We could ban all guns today and while I’m sure there would be a reduction in violent events, people wanting to cause harm would switch to bladed weapons (see knife crime in the UK and axe attacks in China).
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And even if he were right, when was the last time you heard of someone in the UK stabbing a hundred people at a concert, or thirty kids in an elementary school?
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There’s been at least one organized mass stabbing in China, I don’t think everyone died but over a hundred people were stabbed by a half dozen or so attackers.
So a “half-dozen” people organized to do with knives what one American could do with a gun?
Something that in the us is called a “Tuesday”, we might add.
Yes, guns are obviously much more dangerous
Cool. There are over 600 mass shootings in the U.S. every year.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/mass-shootings-days-2023-database-shows/story?id=96609874
That wasn’t a rebuttal, I’m pointing out how challenging it is that multiple people need knives in order to hit the numbers a single a shooter can. It’s exceptionally rare.
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Yeah no it’s not. You’re try to compare a place with social safety nets to a country that doesn’t have any.
Trying to compare the EU to the USA for anything gun wise is pointless.
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Gun control works as surely as antibiotics do.
If there’s one thing the last four years have taught us, it’s that there’s an overwhelming number of Americans who disagree with both sides of that analogy.
Antibiotics? You mean vaccines. Two very different things. If anything, those Americans are into antibiotics too much to the point that they thought taking them would stop COVID.
If Trump told them to never take antibiotics, they’d throw them all out that day.
Lol no it’s not. The UK has no where near what we have when it comes to civ gun ownership. There are more guns in civ hands than all armies combined basically. When Australia did their forced buyback they had a 60% turn in rate…they had 1mil in civ hands at that time. Do you know what 40% is of 450 million firearms? Still more than all other nations that allow their citizens to even look at a firearm.
We have a very small sub set of people who commit gun violence. Do you think they’ll be the ones to turn them in? No. Because most legally cannot own them now.
Gun control works great if you have safety nets already in place so people don’t turn to crime to survive.
Also the NRA can fuck off… it’s always hilarious when you think you’re arguing with some Republican NRA dipshit.
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What bullshit did I spew? The NRA just says mental health and gun control doesn’t work. You listed a link to fucking Harvard which is known to directly make studies to say what they want. This isn’t news.
I’ve stated that safety nets in countries with less crime in general isn’t because they have less guns. It’s because their citizens are taken care of. Are you really going to sit there and say this isn’t true?
Suicides…guns do not magically make people more prone to suicide, this is and has always been false. Japan is one of the strictest countries on the planet for access to firearms. Yet they have a suicide rate that is far greater than ours. Are you suggesting their miniscule amount of suicides is related to their access to firearms?
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Here’s the company America is in, worldwide, for the right to own guns.
The Czech Republic does as well. Mexico doesn’t really count, it’s basically impossible to get a firearm as a civ and the cartels have basically all the weapons
Trying to compare the EU to the USA for anything gun wise is pointless.
Actually, to that point, EU v US is a better comparison than “a country the size of Michigan” v US.
If somebody is going to try and kill me, I’d prefer they at least break a sweat in doing so.
Also there is empirical evidence that people are less “empathic” the further away they are from you. Shooting someone is psychologically much easier than stabbing someone.
It can be a nervous sweat if it needs to be.
Which leads to hundreds/thousands of people not dying every year due to being shot.
Even if it’s only one life saved, that’s great. But can’t we want to fix the systemic problems that lead to gun violence as well? It also fixes a lot of other bad things that don’t lead to gun violence, like homelessness, depression, preventable deaths, inadequate health care, etc.
What I’m saying is that guns aren’t the problem. They make the problem worse. I’d like to see us try to fix both instead of a half measure of different gun laws.
We can do both.
You’re not completely wrong. But (1) guns make it sooo much easier to cause a lot of harm, and (2) a gun gives you so much more confidence than a knife. Also: you can run from a knife, you can’t run from a gun
you can run from a knife, you can’t run from a gun
Ahh, not handicapable, I see.
But unintended ableism aside, you’d also be surprised, if you can get upwards of 25yrd away from the shooter, they probably can’t hit you for shit (doubly so if they have a glock switch, they reduce accuracy). Most criminals don’t train at all, much less for distance.
You are a bit delulu hmmm?
No, there’s a reason most people who get shot, especially with handguns, are closer than 75ft: it’s harder than you think. To me it’s delusional how many people seem to think aim assist is real.
I wasn’t referring to that, I’m aware of the inverse square law.
I guess I miss interpreted your previous comment for pro-gun, my bad.
A knife battle sounds kinda better. I’ll have a greater chance to survive and some bad-ass scars.
The loser of a knife fight dies in the parking lot, the winner dies in the ambulance.
Buddy of mine (alright, coworker, but he was cool) decided to try and break up a bar fight one night, one of the guys ended up slicing his stomach right the fuck open. Like REALLY open. Was fucking wild, dude spent a long time in the hospital and never came back to work, but I did hear he was doing better so he at least did live.
Still though, point is, knife attacks are a lot more brutal than those who advocate for knives think.
Keep thinking that. Meanwhile most people here wouldn’t be able to fight off someone with a knife.
It takes size and muscle, shooting the attacker takes a single trigger pull.
You may not like to hear it, but guns aren’t going anywhere. Maybe if we stop making out gun owners to be some raging lunatics. Then they may be more likely to give them up.
This is all pointless anyway.
Knife crime in UK is still lower than knife crime in US. You’ve been drinking some weird kool-aid without faxt checking.
Sounds like I should stay strapped so I don’t get poked
Its more like there are already hundreds of millions of guns in the US. Criminal element and the scum of society would keep theirs while the law abiding surrender theirs. Society would get worse and less safe.
But the so-called law abiding didn’t surrender their altered guns, did they?
I’d say its a symptom of our police and justice system being completely ineffective at cleaning up our cities and locking away violent offenders to keep them out of society. They’re more interested in milking the taxpayers for stupid shit that doesn’t require any effort like traffic tickets or massive amounts of overtime for doing nothing. There’s too many violent people out there and no one is doing anything to neutralize the threat to law abiding society.
🤡
Pure and unadulterated bullshit.
(Also the US has more knife crime than the UK as well).
I totally agree. The anti-gun crowd is just a bunch of useful idiots who refuse to tackle problems at their roots.
They’re also usually city-folk who don’t understand that people living in rural America only have guns to defend themselves. No cop is going to protect their farmhouse from robbers, lol.
So the pro gun in the US are just farmers that need to defend their farmhouse from robbers? You might want to sit down and think who the useful idiot is here.
Not too long ago here on Lemmy, someone told me that we need guns to protect ourselves from attacks by bears, mountain lions and rattlesnakes. Even in cities. They showed me a link about a bear harmlessly roaming around some suburb as proof of this necessity.
My pointing out that there have been 180 fatal bear attacks in all of North America since the 18th century, and many of those were bears in captivity, didn’t help.
What’s funny is that I don’t ever see any “sensible” gun owners telling these people to stop helping.
Maybe, just maybe guns are actually the problem.
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You know they’re not illegal in the majority of states, right? The main thing limiting access is cost, but even then it’s no more than a used car. Yeah, you have to go through the NFA, but that’s hardly more difficult than a normal NICS check, just pay the $200 and wait for the okay.
Eh, even Mac10s are going for 12k USD or so, nowadays, and that’s not exactly the most quality of fully automatic guns. They are a little closer to the price for a new car, I guess.
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Yes please!
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Gosh, I mean what could guns NOT fix?!??
I dunno, throw more guns in, I guess…
Guns can not fix the darkness I feel. Yet. I’ll keep buying them until they do.
gun thread, lemme hit you with some easy unsourced stats real quick.
About a third of all people who attempt suicide will never attempt it again, about a third will attempt it pretty repetitively, and about a third fall somewhere in the middle, where they engage in multiple attempts, but stop after the 5th or whatever. This is to say that suicide is mostly a spur of the moment decision and most people who attempt suicide aren’t completely committed to it as a course of action. It’s mostly a decision that’s made as a result of being kind of fed up and believing you have no other options in your life, it’s not a conscientious, committed kind of philosophical position, most of the time. I think there’s some sort of minor study about a bridge in, I wanna say canada, where they set up a net underneath one bridge, and another bridge about 20 minutes away didn’t have a net set up underneath it. Still, the suicides went down by about the amount you would expect to see, had you just eliminated all the suicides taking place on the bridge with the net. The people committing suicide weren’t willing to drive about 20 minutes to dive off of a different bridge, it was just something they sort of did in the moment.
So, that’s all a pretty good indication that limiting gun access to the suicidal would be a relatively helpful thing to do. The most counterargument I’ve heard against this is that, regardless of that, we should still have free access to guns, and they shouldn’t be regulated by the government, because our right to guns trumps everyone else’s right to not be successful in killing themselves. I don’t think I need to tell you that this is a kind of disgusting viewpoint.
I think we can also probably say that the same would be true of gun crime broadly. There are multiple factors going into gun crime, like housing prices, redlining, drug trafficking, mental illness, sure. One of these factors is also guns. Taking away any of these factors, including guns, not just lead to a reduction in gun crime, but would probably lead to a reduction in crime overall. A reduction in crime overall with no substitution in the form of increased knife violence or other forms of violence or crime.
It’s much harder to secure your illegally owned high value property, in drugs, if it is more expensive and harder to access a gun. If it’s more expensive, that eats into your profit margins. This alone would probably cut down on violent gun crime, and drug related violent crime more broadly.
I also feel like I’m taking crazy pills whenever people talk about how if you limited access to guns, people would just switch over to knives, and knives would be equally as effective. No they wouldn’t! You have to be extremely fit and trained properly to wield a knife effectively, and even then, two or three people can easily overwhelm you and jump on top of you. People can more easily outrun you. If you wanted to try and make the leap from one technology to the other, I would think people would compare guns more to IEDs, since there’s obviously more of a similarity there in terms of effectiveness, but obviously it’s much harder to secure your drugs with IEDs, or to rob someone with a pipe bomb.
The most compelling argument against gun regulations, and especially more extreme gun regulations, is that it’s really hard to get them passed, and especially at the federal level, which is what would really cut down on their trafficking. You also have a problem with law enforcement, since most law enforcement, and probably federal law enforcement, wouldn’t really be willing or effective in stripping americans of most of their guns. You’d probably see more success with something like limiting ammunition sales or gun manufacturing, but you’d obviously expect to get lobbied against pretty hard, and, at least if you were to limit gun manufacturing, you’d only expect to see results on that maybe 10+ years down the line, in decades, and, depending on how that was passed, you might just see it get repealed before you could see anything from it.
Of course, the caveat with all of that is that most americans are actually perfectly willing to conform to, and vote for, reasonable restrictions on guns. This includes universal background checks, mental health checks, wait periods, obviously limiting things like automatic capabilities and magazine size (though to what extent this limits unlawful use, I’m not quite sure). Probably at the farther end I’d guess americans might vote for requiring licensing from gun owners, and secure handling and transportation, like most european countries, which might limit unlawful use by limiting theft.
I think also lots of gun owners are straight delulu when it comes to how effective their gun might be. They come up with lots of little hypotheticals and heuristics to try and train for, but in a gunfight, it is usually the person who shoots first who wins, the person who has the element of surprise. If you’re getting robbed at gunpoint, you’ve already lost. You almost have to wield your gun like a lunatic, brandishing it at people for intimidation, in order for it to be an effective form of self-defense (this is illegal in most places). There’s also the idea that open carry can prevent crime, but that it might also mark you as an easier, higher priority target, so I’m kind of skeptical of it. Maybe it’s better for home invasions or something, but that’s not a particularly high likelihood anyways, and you have problems with wall penetration and such. Most home robbers are going to want to hit your place when you’re not in it anyways.
I’m a gun owner who carries a firearm. I think different people and areas have different needs.
There are no children in my household, fist off. If there were I wouldn’t have guns and ammo in the same house. It’s just not safe. If a child comes to my house, the ammo goes to the car.
But I live over 30 minutes from the nearest police station. We have firearms for defense from predators, invasive animals (e.g. hogs), etc… Yeah, they could be used against people, but that’s not really something we’re worried about. We don’t even lock our doors.
That being said, I do carry in town. I also have a spare set of clothing, full set of mechanics tools, a fire extinguisher, first aid kit, and an AED in the van. I like to be prepared wherever I go, and other than the AED all of those tools have come in handy in an emergency.
I don’t like going into details about the time I had to pull my gun because I hate how right-wing nut jobs seem to celebrate the fact that I needed one as justification for all the other hateful things they do. Suffice to say I was being assaulted and the gun ended the situation without me having to shoot the assailant.
Yeah - I don’t carry the toolbox or fire exringuisher my body, but a handgun is almost never necessary in a few minutes. And of course if someone breaks into my van and steals my impact wrench it’s annoying. If they steal a gun that’s much more serious.
I think we have some major work to do to cut back on violence, and some gun reforms are part of the answer. The things that I think would have a lot of impact on gun crime with minimal impact on lawful gun ownership are improving NICS and opening it up for civilian use. Right now if I want to sell a gun to a friend or relative I can’t run a check to see if they’re legally allowed to own one. This would also be the first step towards universal background checks.
But background checks aren’t enough. There need to be record-keeping laws for individual sales that are no different than those from a dealer. The idea is kill straw purchases while improving traceability, which is the biggest issue we have with the current system.
What we have now is half of a brilliant compromise. A federal gun registry is a red line that gun owners will not cross. It’s the most important necessary precursor to mass firearm confiscation, and it’s a hard no. The fight over that is why it took so damn long to get background checks in the first place.
But we want to be able to trace guns used in crimes, so we require manufacturers and dealers to track the sales. If a gun is used in a crime, law enforcement can get a warrant and go to the manufacturer who can look it up and point them to the distributor who can point them to the retailer who can point them to the buyer. It’s a system that allows any specific gun to be tracked, while preventing the government from having a registry.
The problem is that record ends at the first sale. The buyer can sell, trade, or gift that gun without a background check and without keeping a record. It’s the major way that guns illegal in a given state get there.
It also eliminates the “gun show loophole” which is a very misleading name, since it’s actually just a “private sale loophole.” Licensed dealers are still required to do a background check and 4473 for gun show sales.
Waiting periods don’t do much. Someone wanting to commit suicide can rent a gun at the range more easily, and it happens more than you think. The federal waiting period from the 80s was simply a placeholder until NICS got up and running that gave more time for background checks.
One issue that needs resolving is NICS needs to finish background checks. There are 3 standard results when running a background check: Approve, Deny, and Delay. Approve and Deny are self-explanatory. Delays occur when there’s a partial match. Since NICS just uses 3 items (name, date of birth, and state of birth) for the check partial matches can occur, especially if the buyer has a common name - it’s especially common with Hispanic last names since there’s a lot of Raul Hernandezes out there.
When there’s a delay, the gun can be sold without a response in 3 days, though more and more stores are instituting a policy that it needs an approval before the sale. This is because most Denys are initially a Delay, and sometimes (rarely) it takes a week.
But the rub is half the time NICS simply doesn’t follow up on a Delay, or they do it in 6 weeks. Any firearm transaction must be finished within 30 days of the initial background check, so if they take 6 weeks a new background check has to be started. I had a friend named David Jones who couldn’t purchase a gun from lots of dealers because NICS always took longer than 30 days to respond.
And finally the biggest issue with NICS - Identity Verification. NICS needs to be able to verify that a person exists. Right now a fake or mispelled name (whether the misspelling is in the database or on the 4473) will work 100% of the time since all it checks against is a blacklist. A $50 fake ID shouldn’t allow someone to buy a gun.
Totally correct and a pretty good solution, I wish more gun owners were as responsible as you sound, and I wish we could take more steps towards a reality in which they are. Realistically, I don’t really want to eliminate guns altogether, I like guns perfectly fine, they’re great plinking devices, they’re great for controlling the populations of invasive species, they’re mechanically, and sometimes historically, fascinating devices. What I prefer more is just a world in which those are the roles that guns take, rather than guns having like, such a fucked up pretense of reality, a pretense of utility, in self-defense. Rather than being an economic engine of political fearmongering. Mostly, I find this type of shit to be incredibly annoying, because my small town is constantly flooded with people who wholeheartedly believe the militarized self-defense chaff around this stuff, but have also never been to any large city in america, and are totally incurious about what the root causes of crime might be. Their concern for the world stops at the end of their fingertips, anything out of reach for them. Anything that doesn’t directly intersect or connect to them, is something they don’t give a shit about at all. It’s myopic, it’s selfish, it’s a mentality that is not conducive to a good society, much less, a society at all. That’s it, that’s my little spiel on that.
I didn’t think much about gun rentals at ranges, that’s a pretty good point. It is still probably the case that waiting periods, I suspect, would cut down on suicides for the same reason I stated previously, right, making guns harder to access for the suicidal will cut down on, not necessarily even suicide attempts, but suicide lethality. Being able to walk into any walmart in the 40’s and blow your brains out with a shotgun for probably less than 20 bucks is kind of, a very convenient method of suicide. It’s like the suicide booth from futurama, almost. Still, the point is taken well, and it’s probably a better point for more stringent precautions at rental ranges to prevent such outcomes. I don’t really know what those would end up looking like. I’d imagine a lot of those generally would end up falling into the middle and latter categories anyways, of suicide, and I would assume they’d be more due to things like ptsd and stuff like that.
I’d also imagine a lot of that is just from NICS being kind of an underfunded thing, but a more thoroughly automated and more publicly accessible database would be a pretty good solution to that, I would think. I’d also think that, more than being totally publicly accessible, it would probably need to be accessible more to local law enforcement and local government, and maybe between private parties if it were verified by credentials, more for protection of personal privacy. Sort of in the same way that buying a used car works out, in lots of states. God damn if that isn’t super inconvenient when you buy a car from the 1970’s with the original title, though. Certainly there’s quite a lot of room for improvement with NICS, but yeah, it’s very hard to kind of, push in any direction, in that respect, because it’s hard to move away from the propaganda about whatever you might pass being a violation of personal freedom and privacy and yadda yadda ya.
A lot of ranges now have a rule that non-members cannot rent a gun unless they are with someone else or brought a gun of their own specifically because of suicides.
My local range still had an incident where a guy brought his new neighbor to the range for some “guy bonding” just so he could shoot himself. Someone who puts that much effort into it is probably pretty committed, but also fuck him for using his neighbor like that and putting everyone at the range through the trauma of someone shooting themselves in the head. Dude survived, though.
As for privacy, I think there’s a solution. Someone should be able to run a background check on themselves in NICS and when it’s approved it can generate a kind of “redemption” code that they can share with others for 30 days (the maximum time a NICS check is good for). Then the seller can run that code and name in combination to verify they’re an approved buyer.
It’s like 2FA for background checks.
What frustrates me endlessly is that so many people who understand the industry refuse to acknowledge its dangers, while so many of the most powerful anti-gun people simply don’t know anything about the firearms they’re trying to regulate. So we end up with either nothing changing at all, or idiotic laws that are actively harmful.
In California, all newly-designed handguns are required to have a feature that literally doesn’t exist. The guns are supposed to stamp their serial numbers on the primers. No new gun has been added to the California approved handgun list in over a decade because if it, which is why some guns that have been redesigned to improve safety and prevent accidental discharge are illegal, where the old pistols that may fire when rattled are still being sold new.
New Jersey had a law mandating that once a major gun manufacturer released a handgun that had electronic smart features to prevent unauthorized people from firing the gun that any gun without that feature would be illegal to sell. So, New Jersey basically prevented those guns from being developed by telling manufacturers their sales would tank on every other model if they ever tried.
On the other side, Texas started permitless carry. I live in Texas and that shit is idiotic. I keep my handgun license current because people should be trained if they’re gonna carry. When I took my first LCH class, there was a woman who couldn’t hit the silhouette target frame (2’x4’) at 3 yards. She obviously failed the test, but now she’s allowed to carry without a license. That’s incredibly stupid.
So… What’s your plan for any of those scenarios where someone wants more than just to run off with your phone/wallet/car?
(Keeping in mind the that cops have zero obligation to stop a crime in progress if there’s any potential risk to them, leading to scenarios like this: https://youtu.be/jAfUI_hETy0 )
Edit: to be clear I’m NOT denying any of what you said, just want to know “and then what” from a person who so passionately tries to convince others that the idea of armed self defense is wrong and not worth considering.
I’m not the person you’re replying to, but: there are defense tools that are simultaneously less lethal than firearms, while actually more effective than firearms for self defense.
Elaborate, please.
There are lots of situations where fire arms aren’t good for defense.
They need to be aimed.
They need to be loaded.
They are not allowed in some places/They have specific transportation requirements which preclude them from bring brought to some places.
They can kill/ grievously wound uninvolved people.
They aren’t effective for summoning help.
Someone wielding one in self defense can be reasonably misidentified as an aggressor.
Not every defence device has these deficiencies.
Not every defence device has these deficiencies.
So which do you propose?
Pepper spray can deal permanent damage to one’s sight and sense of smell, and affects everyone nearby.
A shocker can kill a person with heart problems.
A traumatic pistol may just not be enough, it’s like a device to punch a person in effect.
A knife requires training and won’t help against a stronger attacker likely.
I didn’t mean to suggest that there was something without any of those drawbacks, so I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear about that.
I’m not going to propose a one size fits all solution.
But I think people should consider the situations they are most likely to find themselves in, and make considered decisions.
I don’t think guns are likely to be the best choice very often.
Can you name viable alternatives, and what’s your personal plan?
Copying my reply to someone else because much of it is relevant here too.
I didn’t mean to suggest that there was something without any of those drawbacks, so I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear about that.
I’m not going to propose a one size fits all solution.
But I think people should consider the situations they are most likely to find themselves in, and make considered decisions.
I don’t think guns are likely to be the best choice very often.
I’m not that interested in discussing what I do personally for safety, because every situation is unique.
My question is for someone passionately arguing against keeping a gun for self defense, with the implication being it’s law, and so regardless of training and care and personal circumstances.
The pro-gun crowd doesn’t just blanket recommend guns for everyone in every situation either, so my question is specifically about how those worst case defensive scenarios are envisioned by people who eschew the idea of personally owning guns.
Probably not shoot them in the back, I’d imagine? If I hit them, then that’s some poor fucker who might be dead cause of me, and if they’re robbing me I’d expect them to not have medical coverage so secondary effects might also fuck them over even harder. It’s easier for me to just take the L on my phone, wallet, or, I guess car? But I’m kinda not seeing carjacking that I might notice as much. In any case, it’s easier for me to just use my car insurance, if they happen to destroy my car or it becomes unrecoverable, goes to a chop shop, what have you, it’s easier for me to get a new government ID, and freeze my credit card and get a new one, and buy a new cheap-ass phone. And maybe be out the 20 bucks in my wallet, which is why you shouldn’t carry large amounts of cash.
It’s much easier for me to just, confront the problem through these secondary inconveniences that it causes me, rather than trying to like, “pull a hero”, and shoot someone in the back. I’m not particularly educated on the intricacies of state-by-state self defense law, either, right, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if it was unjustified to shoot someone in the back.
I’m also not totally unconvinced of the idea of armed self-defense, right, it can be totally viable in certain situations.
Say, someone is robbing a store with a gun, and their attention is on the cashier, and not on you, or, say, you’re outside, right. Now you’re totally free to pull your firearm and engage your off-duty brazilian police officer fantasy, for sure. That’s, debatably, a useful scenario for a gun. Maybe a more useful scenario might be an in-progress rape, or assault, or something to that effect, though I’d imagine that most gun owners would not be proficient enough with their weapon to cleanly hit one person wrestling or engaged with another person at any more significant distance, and maybe at close distances depending on the shooter and how engaged the two people are. That’s on the shooter, though, that’s why regular training is necessary (even better if it’s baked in as a requirement of ownership, as I said). I think in these cases it’s probably somewhat likely that even the presence of the gun itself could serve to dissuade further engagement, which is a valuable function for it to serve beyond shooting.
So basically, for property crime, it’s easier to just deal with the property crime as it has occurred, since usually nobody’s been hurt. With interpersonal violent crime, it’s still a very highly contextually dependent solution, rather than a kind of, one-size-fits-all solution that everyone makes it out to be.
I would say, if people are super concerned about self-defense, they’d probably want to take some first aid classes, they’d probably want good cardio, they’d probably want to carry pepper spray and maybe more easily know where medical supplies are located, or otherwise have some easily accessible to them within about a minute. They also might want to take some sort of martial arts class, which might also be good for their cardio, and good for fitness in general. Knives are not a good idea, since they remain dangerous and unpredictable, even with training, and guns aren’t all that useful in a grappling scenario (and could also potentially injure you), or when you’ve not seen them coming. I could be persuaded on the position of a taser.
I’m also not going to discount the idea that someone might get a gun and still brandish it as a form of intimidation, illegally, in order to accomplish other goals, right, the law isn’t, total morality, it’s just not a good idea to do for the vast majority of people. I think the black panthers standing outside the california state capitol is an effective form of protest, and is especially effective given their smaller numbers. It’s more efficient, in some ways, than a mass march.
I can also imagine scenarios where people live in circumstances where the police and law won’t help them (lots of people), and would probably find it necessary to stay strapped up, if for nothing else than the fact that it’s kind of just another minor tool at their disposal. I dunno, there’s maybe something to be said there of possession of a gun, again, marking you as a threat, not only to criminals, but to police, but I’ve also seen lots of body cam footage where police just shoot a guy regardless. Because of an acorn, maybe. So, I’m not sure it matters too much.
Basically my problem with guns is that they rely too much on the ability of the end user to correctly discern the situation at hand before they begin to use them. Oh, is this person about to stab me, pull a gun on me, whatever? It’s usually pretty much impossible to know. If it’s impossible to know, it’s usually not a good idea to pull a gun on someone, and it’s usually a much, much worse idea to shoot someone. You’ve just shortcutted the logical chain of events, there, right? Like the guy in the video says, there are plenty of instances where crazy drugged up homeless people on the new york subway walk around screaming obscenities, even saying stuff like “you’re going to die”, and shit like that, and they never do anything at all. Certainly, me personally, I find it to be a more moral position, getting stabbed to death, or getting hospitalized and treated by my shitty medical provider, rather than choke, maybe more probably, strangle, someone to death, because they were making a ruckus.
I wonder how quickly can the Glock switch be destroyed, like after using it. It’s just plastic/filament, right?
Good. If a beligerent has one of these we can at least do something about it, as opposed to “legal” weapons of mass murder.
America is the land of mad max.
It will only get worse as batteries improve and printed rail guns become trivial to make and difficult to detect.
So cool, always wanted one. They are not very energy-effective though.
Are semi-automatic 3d printed guns legal in the US?
In most states. It’s no different than doing it with a mill legally.
Yes, although iirc you are required By law to embed a metal plate for your serial number.
Also on a practical level, you need metal parts of the thing falls apart pretty immediately. 3d printed gun parts can be useful, but 3d printed guns are basically tech demos at this point.
By federal law, you are not required to serialize it (unless you plan to sell it, but if you do that too often then you’re a manufacturer and need a license). Some states may require serialization for homemade firearms.
For personal use, yes. You are required to add some metal to it though I believe.
You have to have a metal barrel for it to function. You might get a single shot of .22lr with a printed barrel.
You’re probably right. The ones I’m aware of were single shot with a chunk of metal in the grip.
That’s “the liberator.” They’ve come a long way.
So a criminal about to get involved in a very high risk situation is going to depend on 3D printed parts for the only thing that could possible help him get the thing done…what happened to Joe schmoe? Oh his Prusa didn’t print correctly so he go shot by the popo… 🤔 Sounds controversial.
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