[Politics]The Right to Arm Bears in a Crowded Theater

[Koumei]

Why the hell are pro-guns so hyperbolic?

They're all fucking nuts. I mean, consider other things that we tend to be assholes about on the Den (ie everything). We go stupid over some things, then agree on other things, and sometimes make sense. Gun nuts make no sense on anything and are basically always wrong about everything. It's practically a mental illness at this point.

yet he's been the NRA's public enemy #1 before he was ever elected.

Duh, he is:
1. A Democrat
2. Black

[K]

It's sometimes shocking how people who like to call on the constitution to support their claims know so little about the constitution.

It's because they've turned the Constitution into a religious document.

Religious thought is opposed to verifiable facts about things. History, science, morality... whatever. This means that any time religious thinking is applied to something by someone, you can guarantee that they don't understand fundamental facts about the thing.

For them, the flipside is that religious thinking gives the illusion of absolute understanding and absolute authority. Religion makes ignorance a win condition.

This is also why religious thinkers have an unshakable belief in the need to have their opinion taken seriously. Telling them something like "hey, you aren't a climate scientist and your opinion on climate change should be valued like the gibberings of drunk chimps," or "your opinion on what constitutes treason is meaningless because you aren't in the government and your thoughts on crimes against the government are meaningless," is as deep an insult as you can strike at the core of their worldview.

[Maxus]

I'll give it a try sometime and report the results.

[...You Lost Me]

More on assault weapons.

Their formatting is really nice.

[DSMatticus]

More on assault weapons.

Their formatting is really nice.

Their content is really stupid and/or outright lies. It's a propaganda piece.

I did find it amusing that they pointed out that only a small fraction of crimes used guns banned in the AWB, and then argued that when that failed to significantly influence gun crimes it was because bans are, by their nature, ineffective. As opposed to the obvious tautology they themself set up: ineffective bans are ineffective.

They accidentally made a very successful argument for why any gun ban that doesn't cover fast-reloading semiautomatics will still allow people to execute successful murder sprees, though. But that's not news, and they weren't trying to do that.

[Shrapnel]

I literally could not tell the differance between the AR-15 and the M4A1 they showed in the thing. They look nearly identical to me.

[DSMatticus]

There are two primary differences:
1) The M4A1 has a switch on the side the puts it into a fully automatic fire mode.
2) The U.S. Armed Forces prefer guns more like the AR-15 than they do the M4A1, so despite that link's repeated assertions that fully automatic fire capability is what makes something a military weapon, the actual military does not want fully automatic weapons because they found that fully automatic fire made their soldiers worse at hitting and killing things. According to that link, the weapons our military uses are not military weapons. Joke about conservative stupidity goes here.

Here are the U.S. Army's big three rifles:
M16A2 (not fully automatic)
M16A4 (not fully automatic)
M4 Carbine (not fully automatic)

Edit: Let me add to that a bit with some explanation. Putting lots of bullets into the air very quickly is not about hitting more things or killing the things you do hit harder. It is about putting more bullets in the air, accompanied by loud bullet noises, so that people are afraid to move lest they move into the trajectory of such a bullet. It is about suppressive fire. The primary purpose of suppressive fire is to deny opponents the ability to properly engage you. Completely unsurprisingly, that is not an issue when your goal is to murder as much of the civilian populace as you can, because those civilians are not trying to engage you. The lack of automatic fire does not make a weapon less deadly, because automatic fire isn't about killing things - it is about tactical control.

[name_here]

I think that most of the military rifles these days use two or three shot burst modes.

Oh, they also said that the AR-15 functions in the same way as a ranch rifle and shotgun. It's hard to tell, but I think the pictures were of non-semiautomatic guns.

[DSMatticus]

I think that most of the military rifles these days use two or three shot burst modes.

All three Two of the three of the rifles I mentioned do. Combat is not like a murder spree in a public place - targets are not numerous and do not frequently expose themself, so maximizing the odds that your bullets will hit and disable a target given limited opportunities on limited targets is pretty reasonable, given you'll have plentiful time to reload. The exact reverse is true for a murder spree, where opportunities and targets are abundant for a limited time and reloading is time you're spending not shooting people before everyone has escaped/police show up.

Oh, they also said that the AR-15 functions in the same way as a ranch rifle and shotgun. It's hard to tell, but I think the pictures were of non-semiautomatic guns.

Those could have easily been semiautomatic, even if those specific ones weren't, so there's no point not conceding it. More importantly, they were definitely small capacity, slow-reloading weapons, which makes the dishonesty in their comparison obvious.

[Koumei]

I'm still not sure what constitutes an "assault" weapon. I'd love to think that an assault weapon is something you use for assaulting people (a baseball bat for instance) and a murder weapon is what you use for murdering people ("police have not yet found a murder weapon"). But that's obviously false. And I think I recall someone explaining that there is a technical classification of assault rifles that does not mesh 100% with the media term "assault weapons" much like the police mean "drugs" when they say "narcotics", not the medical term (which only covers opiates).

Is it simply about whether or not it's automatic?

Also, cracked had an interesting article: the video games are linked to the shootings, but not as a cause: they're both effects of a society that worships gun violence. Your country was settled partly thanks to guns. Your freedom from Britain was won with guns*. America has one of the last remaining empires thanks to guys with guns. Even people who disapprove of the various wars still look at the actual dudes with guns as heroes. So the violent games are a symptom of the problem of "this is a country full of people who think guns and shooting are AWESOME".

*Ignoring the bit where they withdrew to go give Napoleon a good slapping, not because America was too much for them.

[John Magnum]

That article was annoying because it dove into this "Of course we rightly worship our soldiers as quasi-divine warrior-poets, protecting our freedoms and making the hard sacrifices we don't have to. But is it possible we worship them SLIGHTLY too much?" thing that acted as though everyone universally and naturally engages in the SUPPORT THE TROOPS mythologizing.

The troops of ours which are not outright massacring Afghanis and indulging in evil shitty whims are defending precisely fuck-all of our liberties. There are many perfectly okay members of our armed forces, but it's annoying to hear the suggestion that even if you think America's last decade of wars are illegitimate and counterproductive wastes of lives and money, it's impossible to treat the individual soldiers with anything but reverence.

[Prak]

But, as my increasingly libertarian father pointed out:

I've seen competition shooters reload single shot pump action shotguns, like, really fast! There are competitions where they start with two shells in hand, and they reload really fast! So low magazine capacities don't matter!

(not a direct quote, I don't remember, and didn't write it down)

Oh, also conservative tautology "criminals don't obey the laws." By which logic, why the fuck have any laws? I mean, criminals just break laws, so why have them at all?

[Whatever]

When owning a gun is retarded, only retards will own guns.

[Prak]

I'm so tired of arguing this that I'm very tempted to say "fuck it! make everything legal, I no longer care!" and hope that darwinism weeds out the idiots...

[Whatever]

Oh, it wasn't a rhetorical question? Here are some reasons to have laws:

1) Normative functions (ie, creating norms). Laws tell people what to do, and, oddly enough, most people then go on to do those things. This can be simple things like "don't commit crimes," "drive on the correct side of the street," "follow through on the things you promise to do" but any kind of law can be normative.

Normative functions are valuable both because they teach people what social norms are, and because they help create an expectation in society that people will follow those norms.

2) Deterrent functions. The law can also get people to stop doing things we don't like. This is one reason why many legal systems start out as a list of crimes and their associated punishments. If you restrict or ban undesirable behavior with threats of punishment, fewer people will engage in undesirable behavior.

3) Justice functions. We get upset when people do things that we think are unfair or evil, and those feelings go away when we see the bad people punished, or the good people given back what they lost. We also want people to have rights, and to have those rights protected. Having a legal system helps people act fairly because it promotes fairness in society.

4) Organizational functions. Laws are a big part of living in a complex society. You don't need to arrest anyone to get a benefit from zoning laws, for example.


At the highest level, the legal system is just how we mediate disputes between: everyone. Because otherwise society would be completely unmanageable. Not necessarily that we'd have rampant crime, but there would be no way to resolve any disagreement, no matter how small. You can have a small town that runs basically on community norms, but if you want to scale that up, you need laws.

[DSMatticus]

@Koumei: an assault rifle is a rifle with both semiautomatic AND (burst OR fully automatic) fire modes. A rifle is bigger than things that are smaller than a rifle, and smaller than things that are bigger than a rifle. If that sounds handwavey, it is. There are weapons that genuinely blur the line.

An assault weapon is a weapon that is at least capable of semiautomatic fire (broader than assault rifles) with enough military-esque features to make it seem scarier than a handgun. The term exists because when Americans see a civilian AR-15, they think "that is a military grade weapon and you could probably use it to kill a lot of people," and when they see a handgun they think, "that's just a handgun. We have way bigger guns than that. There's no way it could kill as many people." So they can be convinced to ban military grade weapons, but not to ban handguns. But the reality is that the size of rifles translates primarily into extra effective range - most civilian shootings occur at close quarters, and a handgun with an extended clip is exactly as scary as a civilian AR-15 (but way more concealable).

The public supports a ban on military grade weapons more than they support a ban on handguns, so the goal of pro-gun propaganda is to convince you that as many guns as possible are like handguns (or even less intimidating weapons, like hunting shotguns or hunting rifles). And they usually do this by talking about how civilian guns are semiautomatic, and military guns are automatic. Now, the truth is (as I've already discussed) most modern assault rifles are not capable of fully automatic fire. But they are capable of burst fire, and gun advocates conflate burst fire (which is used in the same way and for the same purpose as semiautomatic fire) as automatic fire (which is used in a totally different way for a totally different purpose). This lets them look at these three weapons:
1) Civilian AR-15 (semiautomatic only, not in military use)
2) M16A1 (semiautomatic, fully automatic, not in military use)
3) M16A4 (semiautomatic, burst fire, in military use)
and say that the civilian AR-15 is not at all like a military weapon, and just another "harmless" gun people "like", like hunting shotguns or handguns. Sometimes, they even get greedy and argue that guns like the M16A4 are nothing like a military weapon, because it is not capable of fully automatic fire and military weapons are totally capable of fully automatic fire even though they frequently aren't (because they trust that your perception of military firearms will be based on action films instead of knowledge of what firearms the military actually uses).

[Meikle641]

For the record, the ranch rifle mention is the Ruger Mini-14, a semi-auto rifle that uses detachable box magazines (aka 'clips'), and can have anything from 5, 10, 20, or 30 rounds in a magazine.

The shotgun they showed is a SA-80 Weatherby shotgun (Not to be confused with the SA80 assault rifle in use by the British military), which is also semi-auto. This shotgun has a 4 round magazine out of the factory, which is a bit low, but extended tubes are be purchased which will presumably push it as far as 6 or 7 shots.

So yeah, the slideshow wasn't wrong on that, and the magazine capacities are about average for their categories, on average.

[Grek]

Didn't Omninegro get banned last year some time?

[Korgan0]

I don't believe so; like npc310, he just stopped posting. You might be thinking of Mr. GC.

[RobbyPants]

Didn't Omninegro get banned last year some time?

I think he wanted his account removed or locked, or something, and he later started posting under a (slightly) different user name. My understanding was the choice was his; he wasn't banned.

[Sir Neil]

I'm still not sure what constitutes an "assault" weapon.

Any gun that Democrats thought was scary in the early 90's. To wit, "An assault weapon has a detachable magazine, in conjunction with one, two, or more other features such as a pistol grip, a folding stock, a flash suppressor, or a bayonet lug." It is also usually black.

An assault rifle is a small caliber burst capable rifle.

The 1968 NFA made a distinction between regular weapons and restricted weapons. The AR is a regular weapon, like a hunting rifle, because the line was drawn at barrel length (16=/< inches) and automatic fire. (Which was defined as firing more than one bullet per trigger pull.)

@Shrapnel
The AR has a 16 inch barrel and is semiautomatic. The M4 has a 14 inch barrel and is automatic.

[Cynic]

The current stupidity that Obama signed 23 EOs on gun control has really been straining my ability to keep out of online political discussion. I kinda broke the rule by posting under my wife's facebook account by just providing sources debunking shit without providing any opinion.

I am confused though over the differentiation between Executive orders, Executive actions, presidential memorandums.

The legality of any of these, I accept because of precedence in US history. I just want to know the difference and the areas where these things actually work.

[Ted the Flayer]

I'm still not sure what constitutes an "assault" weapon.

Any gun that Democrats thought was scary in the early 90's. To wit, "An assault weapon has a detachable magazine, in conjunction with one, two, or more other features such as a pistol grip, a folding stock, a flash suppressor, or a bayonet lug." It is also usually black.

Basically. Although I like Koumei's definition better, having a gun that would hold up as a melee weapon too would be immensely useful.

[Grek]

Executive orders are anything that the President orders the executive branch to do. Examples include Truman ordering that all steel mills in the US be placed under government ownership (this got overturned pretty quickly), Eisenhower ordering public schools to desegregate and Bush Jr. establishing the Office of Homeland Security. It can be used to do anything that the President is empowered to do by the Constitution or to clarify how the executive branch is to implement a law passed by Congress.

Executive actions are any actions that the executive branch takes. This includes stuff ordered by executive orders, but also stuff ordered by various executive branch members that aren't the President. The CIA Director, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Office of the Inspector General in the Department of Housing and Urban Development or even people as far down the totem pole as the head of your local United States Postal Service office.

Presidential memorandums are a regular memorandum (aka a memo, like you get from your boss regarding not stealing people's lunches out of the office fridge) except it was made by the President. It's basically an announcement the President wants to make to the executive branch.

[Whatever]

I am confused though over the differentiation between Executive orders, Executive actions, presidential memorandums.

The legality of any of these, I accept because of precedence in US history. I just want to know the difference and the areas where these things actually work.

Okay, the basic structure of the Federal Government is as follows (heavily simplified):
Congress passes laws
President executes laws
Courts evaluate laws

The President's main powers are:
1) Commander in Chief
2) makes treaties
3) appoints superior officers (high level positions) and judges
4) "he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed"

The President is in charge of the Executive branch of the government, which includes most federal agencies. His job includes being their boss, and making sure they do all the stuff that Congress passed as laws.

So when Congress creates the ATF and gives it a certain amount of discretion in how it regulates and monitors Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, that discretion ultimately rests in the President.

So the President can issue Executive Orders that have the full force of law, as they fall either under the discretionary power vested in him by the Congress, or directly under his Executive power in the constitution.

Executive actions refers more generally to "stuff the Executive Branch does" and can include administrative orders and directives.

Presidential Memoranda are just the President saying stuff, usually directed internally at the government (public statements are Presidential Proclamations, typically, such as the Emancipation Proclamation). These can be required by a statute or can be just because he feels like it, but they typically don't have the legal force of something like an Executive Order.