champu

Giving a strict legal definition to existing words is done all the time in legislation. Nothing new to see here. Get over it. My post was about how language is being used to lead the public's perception of the issue and about what is being proposed. More specifically how one side of the issue is doing a much better job at it.

Using existing language (and redefining it as needed when the actual legislation is written) that gun owners are willing to repeat is actually a genius move by the gun control crowd. They have most everyone on both sides of the issue speaking their modified language now. I think it would be a smart move to start calling the "assault weapon" ban the "ban on the part that goes up." I was watching the Daily Show the other day and Stewart was trying to make a point that the second amendment was written when people had muskets. And during the bit he said, "you can even have assault muskets if you want" and the graphics department had this ridiculous photoshopped thing up on the screen and my first thought was, "I wonder if he's aware that the ridiculous thing he just put up on the screen was banned in 1994 because it had a pistol grip and a bayonet mount."

So you'd have to ask them what they meant. As I said, precision in language is generally considered a good thing, unless you're trying to sell something. It turns out that the catchy, and not well-understood, name was useful both for selling firearms and for selling legislation to ban a bunch of random features deemed "scary" by the Brady campaign in an effort to affect as many firearms as they could get away with. I'm less concerned with the etymology of the term, though, and more concerned with the lack of interest ban proponents had/have (in 1994 and today in calling for its reinstatement) in the details of the term's definition. More recently the terms "military-style," "high-capacity," and "high-power" are getting a lot of publicity too. I think "military-style" is a stupid description for a firearm. At its core its toothless because it's "just a style" and you could use the same term about a hat or a memorandum, but on the other hand people hear "military" and think "military things are for the military!" "High-capacity" is arbitrarily defined and is a bit like a fast food place offering only regular, large, and extra large because "small" feels like you're not getting a lot for your money. If you think 11 rounds is high-capacity then you might also be interested in a t-shirt at a designer clothing store that's $399.99 $199.99 $99.99 omg! 75% off! amazing value! And "high-power" as many others have pointed out here has been misused into meaninglessness too. It's used as a generic pejorative without bother to try and answer the question "relative to what?"

Semantic BS. Precision in language is generally considered a good thing, unless you're trying to sell something. If you can't get public support for private sale background checks without "gun show loopholes" then maybe you shouldn't. If you can't get public support for banning types of stocks, barrel shrouds, or magazines over 10 rounds without calling them "assault weapons" or "high-capacity" then maybe you shouldn't.

Sounds like at least one of the incidents was at the check-in table where they were probably going to do just that. I think putting a loaded firearm into a case (let alone with the safety in the fire position) regardless of where you're taking it is asking for an accident.

I don't think that exactly counts as an average experience. Maybe mine isn't either... As davjohns pointed out, the "average experience" is kinda silly to talk about. On average, we all have a gun and we'll all almost never be shot by one... so what's all the arguing about?

Yep, no need for teachers. or police, or firemen. In what way(s) is a teacher more like a police officer or firefighter than is an accountant?

This is a good summary, and an important admission of gun control advocates (and really both sides of the argument's) viewpoint. It's all simply about who gets marginalized (and by who.) I don't have trouble with the idea of more background checks because I don't have problems passing background checks, but I have to admit that I'd be marginalizing people who "wrongfully fail" a background check. People who choose not to own a gun have no trouble with any law (as silly as the definitions it contains or ill-conceived the restrictions it imposes are) that reduces firearms in circulation because to them, any gun that's not theirs or the governments is either in the hands of a bad guy or just waiting to get into the hands of a bad guy, but they have to admit they are marginalizing any people who would own those firearms for any reason other than committing crimes. People against additional laws must admit that future victims of gun violence that would have been prevented by any new measures are being marginalized. But here's the thing about that last one in contrast to the first two... Society can dictate a lot of things about who wins and who loses and it's not often fair*, but Government shouldn't be so quick to. Just because life isn't fair* doesn't give the government carte blanche to make it more unfair* because Society calls for it. Look at Prop 8 in California. It's a case of government marginalizing a group of people because society called for it. Preventing crap like that is why we have a constitutional republic in the first place. Giving equal weight to people being marginalized by government action and people being marginalized by government inaction is a pretty serious assertion, and I hope you realize that. *fair is ill-defined, so I'll just call it any situation where all you have to say is "suck it up cupcake."

You can have as many reverse gears as you like, but no painting "This is the back of the car, officer." on the front of your car. hmm... are there legal precedents in place to preclude the interpretation of numbers in statutes as radices other than 10? "This is quite clearly a 10 round magazine."

...and in doing so he's got some of the makings of a decent metaphor to the assault weapons ban, but he is missing a step... The step missing in his jump is to assert that the features being talked about are surely only useful to someone intending to use the vehicle in an illegal way. That's why I proposed banning anything more than 3 forward gears. You only really need a couple gears to accelerate safely to any legal speed, and a cruising gear to get good gas milage on the freeway. Any additional gears are just used to accelerate/drive recklessly. CVTs technically have more than 3 gear ratios and electric motors are usually direct drive, but I reserve the right not to think my proposed law through. Banning wheels greater than 17" in diamater is because I've seen commericals for the Fast and Furious movies and all those cars looked like they had big rims and those people were all illegally street racing. But I'm not here to take all your cars... you can keep the ones you have, I'm just making it illegal to produce any vehicles with these features in the future. I think this will reduce street-racing related deaths.

Motor vehicles should be limited to gearboxes with no more than 3 forward gears and wheels no greater than 17 inches in diameter.

Mr.

Well, if they broke into the house, ransacked the place, tried to break open the safe for a while, gave up, and left without taking anything else, that would at least give credence to the hypothesis. Or if one of the guys has or used a computer the judge subpoenas, and the internet history includes the published maps... If they just admit that's what they did without other evidence then I'll have to assume they made a deal to say that in exchange for a lighter sentence so that the gun lobby has ammo to use against the liberal paper.

Thus far that's all it seems to be... I can't find an article that describes the circumstances under which one of the suspects was arrested and the other was at large. Caught in the act and the other got away? Left fingerprints and only one had priors? Was anything else taken or does it appear they went right for the safe?

Plenty of that on both sides. Absolutely true, both sides of the issue are arguing out of frustration. A problem in any wide-spread political debate like this is that people's attentions are naturally drawn to the biggest train-wreck of an argument on the other side, and soon everyone is talking in hyperbole. There are quite a few gun rights advocates that have gotten a lot of attention with their, "cold, dead hands," attitude, but there's a couple things from the gun control camp that I'd like to point out too. 1) "If not now, then when?" This, as many have noted is a pretty dangerous attitude. It's an acknowledgement that political will is driven by emotional responses and it's more important than doing the right thing and I'm at a loss as to why that is being touted in this case. You don't go grocery shopping when you haven't eaten all day, you don't drive after you've been drinking, and you don't pass legislation when you're crying. Callous? Sure. But what happened to cooler heads prevailing? 2) "We need to have a serious talk as a country [...about reinstating an assault weapons ban.]" Whether the person says the second part or not, It seems like it's always there. It's like the whack-a-mole of this debate. It's not the only thing that stricter gun control advocates bring to the discussion, but they'd do themselves a favor if they stop making it their starting point over and over again. /edited: A had a "that" that was supposed to be a "than" and it mangled the meaning of one of my sentences.

I`m pretty neutral on the gun debate but it amazes me that people are putting this much energy to save... assaults rifles. Because there are no 'assault rifles'. There are only rifles. The last attempt to define them eliminated such irrelevant things as bayonette lugs, pistol grips, flash suppressors and collapsible stocks. None of these were relevant to anything but the appearance and popularity. Calling it something ominous like 'assault rifle' is just an Information Operations campaign conducted against the population. When automatic weapons, sawed off shotguns, and silencers were regulated, it was because they were popular with gangsters. It wasn't because law abiding citizens were abusing them or ordinary citizens were being killed with them. They just got lots of play in the media. Same thing for 'assault rifles'. There is also the whole 'slippery slope' argument. I think a lot of firearm owners struggle to relate their issues with the "assault weapon" ban to ban advocates. It's a similar frustration that skydivers feel when the media reports that the guy with a 100 jumps who flew a Velo into the ground's "parachute failed to open," and the article gets a thousand comments of people saying, "serves him/her right for jumping from a perfectly good plane." From here we get yet another layer of frustration when we see some tandem student jump into the comments and write, "whatever man, I'm a skydiver, you gotta get out of bed and live life. wooo!" And you end up feeling overrun. Do I spend my energy trying to make more reasoned arguments only to get lost in the noise? Or do I try and convince the people "on my side" making bad arguments to shut the hell up because they're garnering all the attention and further entrenching the opposition?

That's a good point, and gives me an idea... Ban removable magazines that are between 21 and 49 rounds... Nut jobs who want to shoot up a public place will buy huge cumbersome magazines that jam 10 rounds in (there's your 10-round limit) and responsible people will just buy reliable 20-round magazines...

If that's one of the assumptions upon which your thoughts on gun control are based, then recognize you'll be up against differences of opinion. I don't think, by the way, the majority of people that would argue this point with you think that any such situation in America is imminent. What's happening in Syria is a pretty decent analog to what would happen if the US government turned on its populace and an insurgency resulted. There are quite a lot more people and firearms and quite a bit more land in the US. On the other hand, the US military is a bit more practiced at dealing with insurgencies than the Syrian military, so it's hard to guess how things would pan out exactly. The guns possessed by the populace may or may not factor into a power-drunk leader's decisions. Having to remain resourceful and having a long and difficult battle of attrition beats rolling over and dying though, imho.

There are a lot of reasons before the presense of guns amongst the populace that the US military is not attacking the people of the US, but insurgencies like the Taliban in Afghanistan and the rebel forces in Syria fighting against Assad even as you wrote that kinda make you sound like an ass.

I obviously don't know with whom you spend most of your time, but there's probably an awful lot of selection bias in that observation. I definitely observe the same thing, but then I mostly hang around people who only have kids when they specifically plan to.

In my books, the common sense is that NOBODY needs to have a gun. Not an assault weapon, a rifle, nor a pistol! Law enforcement, yes, military, yes. That's about it. That's COMMON sense. Unfortunately, "common sense" just means "anything I believe that I wished everyone else believed too, without me having to convince them." The stance presented here is an important one for gun rights advocates to understand though. There are people who, no matter how much violence or crime there is out there, all the way from "none" to "what you would think the US was like from watching television news," will always choose not to own a gun. So it doesn't matter to them what ratio of firearms are in the hands of law-abiding people : in the hands of criminals. It also doesn't matter to them how any new law introduced affects that balance for better or for worse; they want less guns period. (so don't expect arguments about criminals not obeying any new gun restrictions to be heard or appreciated.) They are not saying, however, that they think guns themselves are evil or that guns are responsible for violence by themselves, they are simply saying that by their own choice, they know that their only possible interaction with a firearm will be at the disadventagous end of it. So given a steadfast choice not to own firearms, the rational, selfish choice is to eliminate as many firearms as possible. (so don't expect arguments about guns simply being tools to be heard or appreciated.) So my argument (which I hope would at least be heard, if not appreciated) is that Pandora's box is open and there are firearms out there. The initial choice not to own a firearm is a personal one and you need to understand that not everyone is necessarily in your position to make that same choice. If you can understand that, then you can understand that your viewpoint that any firearm qty reduction is a good thing isn't nearly as altruistic as you make it out to be.

If this person was not aware their OASDI withholding was going to return to 6.2% (i.e. where it was in 2010) and could not figure out what happened with a few seconds of googling, then they shouldn't be making guarantees about their understanding of how much what taxes hurt whom. That said, seeing this paraded around as a big shock, "to the libs" is silly. It's a shock to anyone who can't be bothered to learn what the numbers on their paystub mean and who probably think getting a big tax refund is like getting a bonus. I'm not sure financial illiteracy correlates highly with political party.

While I agree, I think, with the point you are trying to make (see post #23) the comparison to a SAM is not an exact one as you claim, even in the context of their argument. We've discussed, and I think established, previously that whether the firearm uses 10 round magazines or 30 round magazines has little bearing on how capable the firearm is of killing a large number of people. So to suggest that magazines with more than 10 rounds suddenly make any firearm more purpose-built to kill a lot of people is irrational. A SAM fires a guided projectile. This does make it suddenly more purpose built to take down aircraft over some other things that are legal/attainable such as very large model rockets.

The 1994 ban went after a lot more than simply high-capacity magazines. It contained a lot of specifics that went after form rather than function. Many people are advocating reinstating a ban on assault weapons as a result of the recent mass shootings, and gun rights advocates are assuming that means BOHICA with the ill-informed list of stuff from 1994. Some of the tangents in this thread have gone off talking about these features. That was my point in post #19, unless gun control advocates (or those that are simply "control-curious") say, "Look, we're sorry about the 1994 thing, we banned a bunch of features that have fuck-all to do with guns being used in crimes, and if some new law comes about it won't look like that last one," then you're going to induce vomiting if you try to talk about an "assault weapons" ban. That said... 10 rounds... As people have mentioned, changing magazines doesn't take very long. Even if you made the number something like 5 (and you eventually eroded away magazines larger than 5) you could just carry a sidearm and if someone tried to come at you or threw something at you while you were reloading and knocked the magazine out of your hand, you could just draw your sidearm and fall back a bit. In California, and I'm paraphrasing here, you can have detachable magazines but detaching it has to involve using a tool. The idea is that you can still use the weapons at the range and in competitions but in a firefight situation using a tool is supposed to slow you down. Problem with that is, if you can use a tool to get the magazine off, you are about 3 seconds worth of modification away from having a, now technically illegal, firearm that doesn't need a tool. But at that point you're off on your shooting spree so who cares how illegal your gun is? So from here the bans get more Draconian... no detachable magazines... limiting capacity of fixed magazine firearms... now you're touching most firearms out there past present and future... and then maybe you can keep mass shootings down to ten or so victims per incident... ...but they're still going to happen.

What? No.