The Second Amendment

[pgrmdave]

If I am correct, there are three main reasons to shoot a gun:

 

1 - for hunting/target shooting

2 - for self-defence

3 - for an aggressive action

 

Of these reasons - two of them are to hurt people. If we were to be able to eliminate the third, we could eliminate the second reason. Thus we are left with hunting and target shooting, activities which require different weapons than the second two (you don't go hunting with a pistol, usually, nor an M16). I think that the question should be more along the lines of how can we help eliminate, or at least reduce, the third reason, rather than going with M.A.D.ness.

[Buffy]

(you don't go hunting with a pistol, usually, nor an M16)

Depends on what you're hunting, and I can attest that an M-16 is quite effective on deer, (although it would not have much of an effect on an elephant: the rounds are too small). On the other hand, its not much "sport" to do so: check out AMC tonight: they're running "The Man With The Golden Gun" which is all about this definition of "hunting" and "sport", with the conclusion that only wimps and bad shots would use big guns to hunt anything...

 

Cheers,

Buffy

[nemo]

Of these reasons - two of them are to hurt people.

I'd suggest that eliminating the third would still leave the second for response to aggressive action of any kind with any weapon.

 

you don't go hunting with a pistol, usually

You might not, but there are a number of people who do. Ironically, the best ammunition for defense against a bear is also the ammunition that people point to as being designed solely for killing people. While I'll be using a rifle to hunt elk, I'll have my .45 on my hip at all times, with the most effective ammunition available loaded and ready to go.

 

Sorry for straying off topic with the mention of the 4th; I'd agree that it is nearly impossible to discuss one amendment in a vacuum. Additionally, I'm really not in favor of every nut in the country toting anti-aircraft weaponry, but I feel that effective enforcement of existing laws is a better solution than what is often knee-jerk legislation. To rehash the existing metaphor, most vehicles are capable of speeds well in excess of 100 miles per hour. Most states' speed limits are well below that rate of speed. Rather than make performance automobiles illegal, states have used enforcement of speed limits to deter speeding. Murder is illegal whether it is done with a handgun or a temporarily elevated grand piano. Assault is illegal regardless of whether a handgun was used or someone was stabbed with a frozen swordfish (when used in that manner, it is also considered a deadly weapon). At some point the teenage lunatics in this country will realize that the techniques currently being used by Iraqi insurgents would be pretty effective in their high school, with a lot less risk of getting themselves killed in the process. Synthetic fertilizer is already regulated to reduce the opportunity of acquiring a truck full of the stuff if you don't have a farm, but you don't need that quantity to load up a few lockers.

 

I know. The horse is dead. Perhaps I'm leaning on one side, but I'm sharing at least part of Irish's fence (I'm just a bit more annoyingly vocal).

 

Thanks for the feedback - this has been an enjoyable thread.

[Turtle]

___Hunting by pistol is regulated state-by-state & predicated on the basis of foot-pounds of energy at a given distance. Here, the only off-the-shelf pistol/ammo combo I know of that is legal for hunting big game is the .44 Auto-Mag. The gun legislation in this case is in protection of the animals from underpowered firearms likely to injure but not kill.

[Turtle]

___Another example of wordplay in regard to the second ammendment is the term "arms". It doesn't say "guns", or "firearms", just arms. So what about swords, throwing stars, dirks, slings, atlatls, etc.?

___In the US currently under Federal Law, a black-powder "gun" - whether pistol or rifle - is not considered a "firearm". Anyone - felon or otherwise - may legally purchase & own a cap & ball black-powder gun. The Walker .44 cap & ball revolver is still one of the most powerful of handguns & readily available to all at the local GI Joes. In the hands of an expert, it's rate of fire can exceed the Colt .45 semi-auto pistol. The Lemat pistol is one of my favorites having a .44 cal cylinder & a .50 caliber seperate barrel; mon dieu! :eek_big:

[nkt]

Turtle, from the way you say that, I have to assume you don't use BP firearms very often!

 

I shoot them quite often (weekly-ish) and would do so more often if they weren't so fussy and needed to be cleaned so carefully all the time. Even modern stainless steels rust when you use real blackpowder, and in a short time in damp air. Same day or early next day cleaning is essential.

 

A rare week it is when a series of six shots gets out of the BP pistols without at least one malfunction. Yes, the balls are big and slow, but compared to a s/a 1911, there is just no comparison. If a 1911 or a Glock failed once in every 100 rounds, you would be up in arms. If a BP revolver did the same, you would be thinking a miracle had happened. Caps fall off, jam, fired caps jam, loading/reloading takes an age, the springs are weak and rubbish even on the new builds, and on the older designs they are a waste of space! Yes, they will always fire (if kept nice and dry) eventually. But the key to that is "eventually!".

 

BP guns are so fussy and hard to get to behave properly, that they are the ONLY pistols allowed in the UK to the "common people" - those who give height, weight, eye colour, references, countersigned photos, home interviews with police, install safes, give address details for the last five years, aliases (including unmarried names), access to medical records and must be members of a gun club for at least six months before application, "good reason"s for each and every firearm and ammunition type and quantity, and pay a fee - as they have never been used in a crime in the past 100 years.

 

In case you are wondering, policemen, security clearances, judges, MPs and magistrates don't go through such serious vetting. Yet we aren't trusted with a bullet over allowance, nor buying another gun of the same type as one already held, even if we sell or swap them, without a formal notification and change to the certificate by the police, and payment of a fee (if increasing the number of firearms held.)

 

(See above for the list of Section 5 things that will still get you jail time, even with this insanely hard to procure license, too!)

 

I assure you that I could beat anyone with a Walker in a contest using a 1911, if I had the 1911. First to ten shots, easy. Better penetration, range, & accuracy. On a wet day, the Walker would never fire a seventh shot unless the owner was carrying a handgrenade in the form of a pre-loaded and capped cylinder! :) Even then, time would still be on the metallic cartridges side.

 

Yes, something like a LeMat would be quite good, but the fact they died out in a few years once the paper then metallic cartridge was perfected is quite clear. Higher power, higher accuracy and higher velocity combine with far, far faster reload times and greater safety. And I've heard reliability is not the LeMat's strong point, especially if you use the shotgun barrel.

[Buffy]

Another example of wordplay in regard to the second ammendment is the term "arms"....

Well of course, and until now, I've withheld my favorite, but I can no longer:

 

I strongly support the right to arm bears.

 

Cheers,

Buffy

[Turtle]

Turtle, from the way you say that, I have to assume you don't use BP firearms very often!

 

___I put 100's of rounds through a 36 caliber Navy reproduction over 20 years until the cylinder pin worked loose in the brass frame. I used Pyrodex primarily, a black powder substitute. A funny story about that is they made Pyrodex when I bought the gun kit in the early '80's, then it was unavailable because the guy with the patent & his factory sort of blew up. Guys were calling it a collectors item while the patent right was in probate. Readily available again now & for the last 10 years at least.

___A few misfires, but I carried the gun in a holster regularly while prospecting in wet Pacific NW forests & found it reliable. I regularly reloaded 5 in the 6 shot cylinder & kept it around for home protection; they still fired months later.

___If I ever get another it will be a .44 with an extra cylinder or two & target sights.

___I meant more however to point up the absurd differentiation in law over hear; as the commision of a crime using a "firearm" carries a stiffer penalty, using a black powder gun (legally not a "firearm") in the same circumstance is the lesser crime of using a "dangerous weapon". Plus, as I say, anyone can buy one with none of the checks required for a "modern" handgun; no ID, no questions, no waiting.

___I too support the right to arm bears! :)

[IrishEyes]

I strongly support the right to arm bears.

YIKES!

Can you guys please not mention the "B" word until late October, when nemo has safely returned from his testosterone-fest...ummm, I mean "elk hunt"????? I've been a little nervous since our neighbor told us about his first hunt, which included being chased by a huge bear through a very quiet meadow. I'm just not all that comfortable with the thought of my dearly beloved out there wandering the ridges with a bunch of bears... :)

[nemo]

...with a bunch of bears...

I said a bunch of BEERS. See - I'll be perfectly safe :)

[Buffy]

I said a bunch of BEERS. See - I'll be perfectly safe :)

Just make sure you leave the beers where the bears can get them and you'll be fine! 3 or 4 cases of 16oz Budwiser cans (they have trouble with church keys on the bottles) should work fine for the week...

 

Grrcheers,

Buffy

[GAHD]

Several American counties - including one in Jeb Bush's Florida - legislated that anybody passing basic gun safety instruction should be issued a concealed carry permit on request. The only apparent effect of such radical lawmaking was the local disappearance of almost all petty crime, rape, and gang activities.

I know what Unca Al thinks, but I ask everyone else to ask themselves: why didn't that happen in Miami?...Wanna know what'll happen to the crime rate if anyone can have a license to *carry* Tec-9s?...Will the criminals change their M.O. from yelling "gimme the money or I'll shoot" to simply "Bam! Bam! Bam!" and rifle your pockets and cash register?...

That's one way to look at it, but the way I see things: If criminal runs into a store then opens up on the storekeeper and EVERYONE in that store is licenced to carry a semi or fully automatic weapon, chances are more than few of the customers/clerks will have them too. Shure lives will be lost, but I'm pritty shure the dumbass who walked in and opened up is going to be in that bodycount. Darwinism applys here, I think that's what UA was getting at when he said:

Support evolution - shoot back.

Just make shure you've got good aim.

 

I'm a firm beliver that anybody, anywhere, should be allowed to carry whatever form of weapon they prefer. Sooner or later all the exciteable people will get an ounce or more in their skull and the world will be better off.

The main reasoning I see people have for any controll on weaponry is that they might not have as good an aim or as big a gun as the competition. I tend to think that competion wouldn't be much of an issue when there's a differnt person with a gun every 5-50' (urban environment).

Governments LIKE the populace to be defenceless and scared: it gives them more time to figure out ways to screw them out of their cash. Police LIKE people who don't have weapons: they can ticket, cuff, and even shoot civies without much chance that the civillian will fight back.

 

Canada also banns and legislatesweaponry: many weapons are illegal but they're still floating around if you have the motivation to look: criminals(anyone who refuses to comply with government law/orders) are usually the only ones with that motivation.

Don't forget the real lesson of 1984: You'll even help BeeBee to break you once he's done with you, and you won't even know it's happening.

[Buffy]

If criminal runs into a store then opens up on the storekeeper and EVERYONE in that store is licenced to carry a semi or fully automatic weapon, chances are more than few of the customers/clerks will have them too. Shure lives will be lost, but I'm pritty shure the dumbass who walked in and opened up is going to be in that bodycount. Darwinism applys here, I think that's what UA was getting at when he said: "Support evolution - shoot back."

This is the theory. Be careful of the assumptions you make about how it would work in the real world! Uncle Al is right, but you're forgetting the consequences: LOTS of blood in the streets. Some counter examples have been posted about small towns in Florida or Israel where both the Jews and the Palestinians have strong familial groups, and both of these situations provide a couple of key ingredients that conveniently get ignored:

• Strong familial ties or small town everyone-knows-everyone societies have *much* lower crime rates, period. If there was a statistical decrease in that rural county, be sure that it wasn't that the crooks chose not to commit crime, they just moved to the next county! That's hardly solving the problem, and using examples like these to solve the general problem are completely misleading...
  
• There's an assumption throughout the argument that there is *logic* involved in all crime, when in fact most violent crimes are crimes of *passion*. Just last week a guy in Vallejo, CA was gunned down in the middle of downtown by a gang member. The guy was photographed and caught immediately. His reason for killing the other guy is that he was wearing something that was red that was the color of the rival gang. The dead guy never belonged to a gang. The gang member did not do *anything* intelligent insofar as covering his tracks or "thinking twice" about what he was doing, and he had no reason to believe that that the guy with the red did not have a friend just coming around the corner with a bigger gun than he had. And this was Vallejo, which is a sleepy little working class suburb, not West Oakland. Uncle Al is right about evolution here, but you're going to plug a LOT of bodies in the ground before you get rid of all the stupid ones!
  
• "You dissin' me, you MF? You looked at my girlfriend, I'm going to plug you!" We know about road rage in California. Supposedly half of all accidents these days are due to road rage. You want to put guns in to the hands of people who are often not rational? A guy was shot to death at a Giants game a couple of weeks ago because he cut off someone else as everyone was trying to get out of the parking lot. Human nature is to over-react to conflict and the more powerful the weapons are that just happen to be available, the higher the level of carnage.
  
• Are there better examples that we know about, rather than pure conjecture? Sure! Remember my point above about the old west and people having to check their guns with the sherriff? You know *why* they had laws like that? I can sit here for hours rattling off lovely little episodes from the gold rush where there was no law enforcement, ranging from rampant murder in saloons over card games or whores, where *everyone in the room had a gun* did this stop people? Nope! These days in the inner city, no I guess the law-abiding aren't packing heat, but the rival gangs are, and *mostly* they're shooting at *each other* not at innocent bystanders. If you *know* that the other gang member is probably packing, shouldn't you think twice before firing? Do they? No! We go through waves here of tit-for-tat retaliation *in spite* of the fact that everyone is carrying a gun!
  

Really, its a nice theory. Its actually the reason I keep guns around, but I really would prefer that I can be sure that my .45 is *enough* because full-auto Tec-9s, while not *impossible* to get, are still a big enough luxury that I *probably* don't have to go barrel to barrel with one.

 

Like I said earlier: you give everyone in the ghetto a Tec-9 and you are going to see *massive* increases in demand for pine boxes. It will *not* be pretty. It will end up showing survival of the fittest, but I'm not sure its worth it....

 

Reality-Trumps-Theory-Everyday,

Buffy

[GAHD]

I the red clothin example above, consider the resuly if the guy with a camera had a gun and was allowed to fire it at whoever had just shot somebody else(excludig law-enforcement of course). After a few such incidences I'd doubt the Passionate-but-stupid peope (exciteable people in my previous post) would be around much longer.

 

Yeah, bodycounts will rise, but only for a time.

[Buffy]

I the red clothin example above, consider the resuly if the guy with a camera had a gun and was allowed to fire it at whoever had just shot somebody else(excludig law-enforcement of course). After a few such incidences I'd doubt the Passionate-but-stupid peope (exciteable people in my previous post) would be around much longer.

 

Yeah, bodycounts will rise, but only for a time.

Honest, body counts continue to rise: my point is you're arguing an unsupported theory, and I've got West Oakland and South Central Los Angeles as ongoing actual data points. The only difference your change in the scenario would have been that the gunman would have been gunned down and the second gunman would have gone to jail. Unless of course the first gunman had *his* buddy behind him in which case the second gunman would be dead and the third gunman will go to jail. Its just more bodies. In spite of 50 years of tit-for-tat since the gangs really got armed and organized, in an environment where, I say again, the *assumption* is that there are *lots* of guns near by that may shoot back--just like the nirvana you're arguing for--people will *still* choose to shoot. Easier availability of more powerful guns only increases the body count. Right now its still 1 every 3-4 days in Oakland and 3-5 everyday in Los Angeles....

 

Uncle Al *is* right, but you have to ask yourself is population reduction by vigilante action really what you want?

 

Cheers,

Buffy

[GAHD]

Point: if the camera/gun man were 'allowed' to open fire on the guy shooting, he would not go to jail as he is doing what he is allowed to do. If the gang member had friends around the corner, likely they'd think twice after seeing their homie plugged, and if not they're damned to his fate.

 

If unrestricted(minus the finantial factor) weaponry access didn't work and bodycounts did escalate exponentially, I'm quite frankly surprised we have survived as a race.

[nkt]

I see the flaw in your arguement, Buffy, as being that fact that there aren't dis-interested neutral parties carrying on the streets, only gang members and police. This puts you back in the same situation as we have over here. Tit-for-tat killings, members of the public being shot for no reason or as crossfire victims, etc. while the police carry on writing tickets for parking because that is so much safer!

 

Victim disarmament doesn't help matters, since it is one of the main causes of the falling apart of society. If you are too scared to aim your neighbour, either because you aren't prepared, or because the law will send you to jail for use of force, then there is a strong incentive to NOT do what is morally right, and stop (or help to stop) the crime in progress, and so criminals start to realise they can get away with whatever they want to do.

 

I suspect you don't get many muggings in a concealed carry area where two guys simply walk up to someone and ask for money, and get it, because the victim doesn't want a beating or a kicking to death (called "shoeing" in London).

 

Of course, we also have cases where people are mugged for mobile phones worth 50p at gunpoint, and, indeed, people who are shot in the head first, and have the phone or bike taken afterwards. In cases like those, it is impossible to argue that the situation would be escalated by others in the area, or indeed the victim, having arms (or others things) for self-defence. Yet apparently rational people do!