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Ted Cruz

7 (6.5%)

Rick Santorum

16 (14.8%)

Michelle Bachmann

13 (12%)

Chris Christie

23 (21.3%)

Rand Paul

49 (45.4%)

Total Members Voted: 107

[Bauglir]

omgsodeadly machine guns are for criminal use?

Because that's not what we're talking about.

It's not what I've been talking about. Sorry, that was a little overly rude of me.

[GrizzlyAdamz]

I think you two got mixed up.

Gav, were you responding to helgoland's 'hunting rifles are fine for urban insurgency'?



@bauglir,
ha, is that really their advert? 10 mins derping around looking for it and my no-longer-existent ADHD is kicking in.

[GavJ]

People are getting really upset about the mere fact that this company offers big scary (almost certainly legally licensed) guns to use on the range. Yet these types of guns kill far fewer people per gun though than handguns do, which nobody seems to be batting an eyelash at. I'm suggesting that's an odd set of priorities.

What's the confusion here?

[Mictlantecuhtli]

Lol, what? Who exactly? Make sure to provide examples of how we haven't had this circular debate about rifles, handguns, etc before and how people like me [especially RK and Salmon] don't care about handgun deaths.

[GrizzlyAdamz]

Mm, the stats for domestic murders are kinda besides the point. I think what we were talking about was 'legally selling the opportunity to fire weapons you're not qualified to = wtf?'. At least in this thread, (at least in the last page & a half).

On that subject though, well yeah. At least this way you're regulating it. Instead of heading over to Jethro's shack to shoot his sweet BFG under the radar, you've got a licensed commercial establishment with insurance that's supposed to be much, much safer & is also much, much easier than getting fully licensed yourself.

[Rolepgeek]

I don't see why it would be so bad to just go the Way of Australia.

They haven't had any mass shootings in over a decade.

On another note, the NRA frustrates me, because when something like 80+% of Americans are all for making guns require more background checks and more difficult to access on a whim, and nothing happens, you know they're responsible. Maybe not directly, but through funding of politicians.

I'd be curious, GavJ, in learning how many of those murders of each sort were during mass shootings(simply because logically it's easier to spray and pray with an assault rifle than a handgun).

Also in learning how shotgun murders there were, but whatever.

I figure that at most you need a hunting rifle, a shotgun, and maybe a handgun for self-defense. No reason to use automatic weaponry for self-defense or hunting. If you want to use them for target practice on a range or something, have the range keep them on hand for you to use.

Also, GavJ, there's some rather poor logic in your conclusion, there. From what I can see, Handgun=Rifle ratio remained more or less consistent through the years, about 1:1. Unless Assault Rifles started making up a vastly larger amount of the number of rifles than one would believe, with the source you gave stating that there were found to be about 1.5 million assault weapons(and assuming sub-machine guns and the like aren't included in that number, which they probably are...), compared to about 65 million rifles total, is a ratio of perhaps Found a source, here, that says 4 million.

4 million. Compared to 105 million. However, the number of murders from rifles:assault rifles and the total number of rifles:assault rifles will not be the same.

But all the same, the emotional impact from a mass shooting is a far cry from the one and two murders that take place in cities and whatnot. Both are tragic, but one captures the attention of the nation; the other, only the community.

Leaving all that aside, interesting link.

[GavJ]

I'm responding to these things

Murders:

GavJ, remember the Mumbai attacks? Machine guns and hand grenades, nothing else. Imagine how robbery shootouts or even drive-by shootings would look if .50 cals were readily availible.

Now you make me imagine how a typical annual shootout would look if a shooter have had a .50 cal machinegun... In a middle of populated street.

Daaaamn.

Regarding the range:

Actually, they have a number of belt-fed machine guns available, which boggles my mind:

M240 Bravo
Browning .50cal
M60E3
Bren gun
M249
PKM

They also offer an M203 grenade launcher. 

@Rolepgeek, the shotgun murder rate is about equal to rifles (all rifles), or about 1/20th that of handguns.

As for the number of assault rifles, I admit that is shockingly low compared to what I would expect. But it doesn't really tell us much, because the murders aren't split out by assault versus non-assault rifles. If the ratio of assault rifles is the same as the ratio of their murders, then it doesn't matter, it's still 20x more for handguns. BUT I wouldn't just trust guesses anymore as much as I might at something closer to 1/4 or 1/3 or whatever.

So I'll probably just lean more toward "nobody has any damn idea because we keep shitty records" and carry on with your regularly scheduled programming.

(Thought still keep in mind that no data also means no evidence that they ARE more or even equally dangerous, either.)

[Frumple]

Eh, just remember that "we keep shitty records" bit is in part because we've got folks that are actively and substantially undercutting any attempts to keep records. Damn hard to collect and collate data when parts or the whole of the data collection, collation, and retention, is illegal or utterly resource starved.

Always suggested to me that whatever data exists is not favorable to the NRA-style folks, but who can say?

[GrizzlyAdamz]

Using that source & motherjones-
Yeah, but there are far more single homicides going on around the clock, carried out by handguns.
Average gun deaths is 30k+. 2012, 151 victims of mass shootings.
But that's kinda null- even mass shootings are carried out, by and large, by handguns.
Further, their definition of a 'mass shooting' is 4 victims. Otherwise I'd say their criteria set is good, but the FBI's definition seems kinda weak there. Especially when, if you run the numbers, 'an average of 20 mass shootings a year!', '151 victims in 2012', you'll get an average of 7.5 victims.
There are a lot of 4-victim mass shootings clogging up their headline statistics.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[GavJ]

I think the main determiner of how many people a mass shooter kills is probably what flavor of crazy they are, not their weapon.

A cold, psychopathic robot for some reason trying to murder as many people as efficiently as possible with a simple semi auto handgun and a single clip is probably going to be much much bloodier than a drugged out emotional trainwreck barely seeing straight and unloading 500 rounds vaguely in one direction.

But this is getting overly depressing to talk about so I'm gonna go back to binging on dr who episodes.

[mainiac]

A cold, psychopathic robot for some reason trying to murder as many people as efficiently as possible with a simple semi auto handgun and a single clip is probably going to be much much bloodier than a drugged out emotional trainwreck barely seeing straight and unloading 500 rounds vaguely in one direction.

Yes serial killers would be more deadly if the typical serial killer was a logical robot with a great degree of foresight and not a erratic individual of slightly below average intellect, very poor ability to understand people and notably lacking in impulse control and long-term planning.

What's a hypothetical serial killing robot got to do with mass murderers though?

[Sergarr]

which makes it actually a quite reasonable weapon type to consider for a "protecting against an unjust military" conception of the 2nd amendment.

There is no way that the weaponry available to the general population is going to be able to hold off the government. It's an outdated concept that has no practical application, only catering to that big old gun fetish.

Not entirely. Sure, they might not be able to take out a tyrannical government entirely.

But tyranny isn't really about who's at the top, it's about who's at the bottom. You can't run a totalitarian regime if your bureaucrats and secret policemen are being shot up all the time.

Hunting rifles are perfectly sufficient for that. Urban insurgency lives off of mobility - what good would a heavy machine gun do?

Few people are advocating for ready access to heavy machine guns. The .50 caliber weapon that kicked off this tanget was a .50 caliber semiautomatic rifle. The (extremely common) confusion likely arises from the name of the cartridge, which is designated .50 caliber Browning Machine Gun to differentiate from other 12.7mm ammunition.

Not sure if we're talking about the guns available at Bullets and Burgers or just in general circulation, but they do advertise access to an M2 Browning .50 cal machine gun. The fully-automatic kind, which should NOT be available to the civilian market, as far as I'm aware.

Actually, they have a number of belt-fed machine guns available, which boggles my mind:

M240 Bravo
Browning .50cal
M60E3
Bren gun
M249
PKM

They also offer an M203 grenade launcher. 

Now I know where we should invade in case of "not enough weapons".

[Strife26]

Eh, just remember that "we keep shitty records" bit is in part because we've got folks that are actively and substantially undercutting any attempts to keep records. Damn hard to collect and collate data when parts or the whole of the data collection, collation, and retention, is illegal or utterly resource starved.

Always suggested to me that whatever data exists is not favorable to the NRA-style folks, but who can say?

It's actually more on line with the misguided by more somewhat reasonable utter mistrust of the government keeping records on gun owners, I'd bet a fair amount of money.

[RedKing]

People are getting really upset about the mere fact that this company offers big scary (almost certainly legally licensed) guns to use on the range. Yet these types of guns kill far fewer people per gun though than handguns do, which nobody seems to be batting an eyelash at. I'm suggesting that's an odd set of priorities.

What's the confusion here?

I'm sorry, but that's a bullshit distraction argument, and its gets trotted out every time there's an incident with an assault rifle (or in this case, with an SMG).

By the same logic, there were probably ZERO deaths by rocket-propelled grenade in the CONUS last year (barring Army training accidents), therefore we shouldn't care if RPG's were legal.


Some background, for those who might not be aware -- I spent five years working as a contractor with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (or as the gun nuts affectionately call them, "the jackbooted Nazi stormtroopers"). Every time there was a multiple-victim shooting incident in this country, I knew about it usually before the media did and had a much more personal view. There are certain incidents that are burned into my memory, certain days that really, REALLY sucked far worse than you can imagine.

Tucson.
Aurora.
Newtown. (ESPECIALLY Newtown, because my own daughter had just started kindergarten that fall.)

And in the aftermath, there was always a wave of public outrage, of "how could this happen?", of "something HAS to change". And every time, I got my hopes up that this time, it would change. It had to change.

It never changes.

The public gets it out of their system and goes back to watching reality TV or following who a Kardashian is fucking now.
The apologists come out on cue to obfuscate and distract and make excuses.
The pundits and the diehards intimidate and berate opponents into silence.
Half-assed legislation gets dithered about in committee, then killed by right-wingers to much self-congratulatory applause and a paycheck from the NRA, and they can go back to their primary voters (because let's face it, Congressional districts are so gerrymandered that only the primaries matter anymore) and tout that they stopped the big, bad government from stealing their treasured guns.

And don't even get me started on the ridiculous legislative handcuffs placed on the BATF when it comes to record-keeping. Tracing a firearm recovered by local police requires a process that is positively Kafka-esque in its absurdity and complexity, because the Bureau is forbidden from modernizing and digitizing the process.


I enjoyed working for the Bureau, but seeing how big the problem was and how little of a dent they could make, and how huge and active the roadblocks were....it drained me. If there was a little island I could move me and mine to, I would and the rest of you could do whatever the fuck you want. But there isn't.

[Sergarr]

#shootingapologists #assaultriflesforeveryone #thisdoesnthappeninrussia