The Gun Control Challenge

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Don't you just love the automatic assumption that ALL gun people are rednecks that have never been anywhere.

Because I respect Dox47 and I have higher expectations of him. I have no opinion about ShamelessGit, and I am not prepared to waste my time and energy there.



So, "he started it," should be accepted as a justification for descending to that person's level? Is the only response to condecension to do likewise? Dox47 is better than that, even if ShamelessGit isn't.

In that case I'm not wasting my time and energy with you. No, two wrongs don't make a right but you only hold the retaliator responsible while you cop out on the instigator. Excuse me for not considering retaliation as equally wrong as instigation.

And that is a fair call, to which I will plead guilty.

I hope that Dox47 will realize that it is a testament to the respect in which I hold him, rather than excusing the behaviour of his provoker.

It's hard to do one's best work from a smartphone at work, but I was sufficiently annoyed with by the previous post(s) to embrace brevity and reduce my thoughts to a few bullet points. I was mostly being ironic with the STFU part, as that poster had both personally insulted the previous poster, completely ignored anything said in the OP, and ranted about people tearing down things they don't know about while ranting about guns, which he was clearly ignorant on. Textbook cause for a smack-back.

As to my OP, I've answered your criticisms, as have others who've also found your view to be missing the forest for the legalese, so I'm going to regard that matter as closed. I've made clear that I'm not a lawyer and am not interested in debating what the state legally can do, but rather what positive effects can be proven to have resulted from certain state actions, namely various forms of gun control. You, on the other hand, seem to want to focus on the legal minutia, which is unsurprising given your former profession(s), but that is not what I'm here to discuss.

As laid out in my other reply, I was chained to a smartphone at work and was forced to compress my points, which made them a bit edgier than I would normally like. However, I will admit to generally using a tit-for-tat system of online politeness to modulate the forcefulness with which I reply to people, and my buttons had definitely been pushed with this one. Notice that even then I didn't descend into personal insult, but merely told someone to check their own ignorance and be quiet if they didn't know what they were talking about, if impolitely; pretty standard kit for PPR and arguing in general. Descending to his level would have required some personal attacks and incorrect statements.

I'm not touching the drama ITT with a 10 foot pole, but it's increasingly clear that nationalism is a big factor among those trying to laud the M16A1 over the AK-47 simply because the former is made in the USofA(and the latter being of Russian origin) even though the rest of the world recognizes the latter's supremacy. You can almost always be sure that the Made in America seal = low quality, even with guns which we american can't get enough of!

WTF exactly are you talking about??

Please kindly explain the strengths and weaknesses you see between the ballistics of the M193/M855 and M1934 bullets, the M-16/M-4 and AK-47, and the design changes you think should be made to either of them.

But do you still not see that you haven't invited any sort of discussion here. You have set up an impossible set of circumstances and then complain when others take the discussion in a direction that at least permits of some.

As for legal minutiae--what else is public policy making? Government makes law, and it makes law within a framework of allowable jurisdiction. You cannot expect to have a discussion about the creation of legal frameworks and their impacts without the expectation that the discussion will incorporate a legal assessment of the discussion.

Now I am quite prepared to agree with you that regulation is not the answer to the problem of firearms violence--at least not the sole answer. While I may favour a more regulated system than you, I do not see that system as effective in and of itself. But I am not prepared to accept your statement, "no one can prove it works therefore I oppose it ab initio." You are right to be skeptical. I think that you are wrong to be uncritically dismissive.

Does the fact that more people own Casios than Rolexs mean that Casio makes a better watch?

The AK has several virtues, namely cheapness, ruggedness, and simplicity; it's also heavy and inaccurate and fires a round with relatively low wounding potential, and isn't particularly modular. It's a great weapon if you don't have the money to afford something better, don't have trained troops, or need something that can be buried in the mud for month on end and still remain functional, it's not so great if you have money and professional troops and proper storage and maintenance capabilities. The AR series is hardly the only family of rifle that I judge superior to the AK, HK, Sig, Steyr, FN, etc all also make fine rifles, none of those are American and I'd take any of them over an AK if given the choice. Given the choice, I'd probably still opt for an AR variant in .308 with the proper accessories for various reasons, but for all I care the specific model could be made in Germany, I'm only interested in performance when it comes to my weapon preferences. If we were talking bolt action rifles I'd go for a Sako TRG42 in .338 Lapua all day every day, and nothing is American there.

It seems probable to me that if gun regulations work, that there would be an instance that would satisfy his requirements. I can't see any way that his requirements are excessive. They seem minimal, and the only reason I can see for any of them is to prevent non-comparable cases.


Why support a regulation that won't do its job?

• Machine guns aren't banned; they merely require a $200 tax and a lot of paperwork. Despite this, very, very few crimes are committed with machine guns. The paranoia of CA legislators is completely without merit.

• Gun companies have become a powerful special interest in this country, and often have interests which run contrary (or indifferent) to gun owners. The NRA doesn't represent gun owners anymore and I suggest every gun owner take a look at the GOA.

• The problem with gun regulation (permits or registration) is who is doing the regulating. The state is the exception to every rule they make. I'm far more concerned about the police becoming militarized in this country than I am militias.

Oh, but I have sparked some discussion, 6 pages of it so far. What I have done is try and exclude the most ridiculous and easily disproven anti-gun arguments from the get go, mostly for my own convenience as I'm tired of repeatedly tearing them down when we get new blood around here that doesn't know the lay of the land; that's the whole reason I started the thread actually. I've basically put my cards on the table and said "this is how I'm going to tear down your gun control argument, see if you can beat it", hence the word "challenge" in my title.

Also, I don't believe I've complained, what I've done is dismissed as irrelevant. Bit of a difference.



Even if I grant you that the legal minutia has a place, I just assign it much less of a place in this particular discussion than you do, your responses have been all or mostly concerning the legal minutia, where as I'm more interested in the relatively simple "does it work?". You've also been using said legal minutia to nit-pick at my posts, where as most other people seem to have gotten the idea of what I was asking for just fine, even if my exact terminology was not perfectly precise. In sort, I think you're sweating the small stuff and making mountains out of molehills rather than engaging with the idea I'm trying to convey. Plenty of other people seem to have "gotten" my OP just fine, so I'm going to invert things a bit and ask you how you would have written it, since it seems to only be bothering you. I don't doubt your intellect, so I'm sure you won't have any problems there.



"No one can prove it works" is only part of my opposition to gun control, I'm just choosing to focus on that aspect for this particular thread as a way of challenging it's advocates to put their money where their mouths are. I can also debate the topic on purely philosophical grounds, ethical/moral grounds, etc, and I know you've seen me do so, repeatedly. I'm using this particular framework because it's relatively unambiguous, data is available, and it puts the burden of proof on the gun controllers, who largely aren't used to being challenged in this way. If someone can come up with a good example of working gun control, I'll be happy to critically examine it, but as of yet that has not happened.

"Gun control" is very much a secular religion.

"Make those evil totems go away and all will be well!"

So WTF is up with WA legislators who ban all automatic firearms?