Nine Rounds a Second: Why the Las Vegas Shooting Was Different
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
What we have now is the absence of domestic security and no evidence of a well regulated militia. We kowtow to the ever expanding security theater encompassing the small activities in our lives, and our day to day freedom decreases with each pat down and purse search.
The people at this show were screened, patted down, searched and then fenced in. They were the proverbial fish in a barrel and they were being shot at.
Where is the well-ordered militia that has lists of citizens who have arms stock piles like Paddock? When are citizens with militia level armaments trained in an ordered and effective fashion so that we may call upon them in times of crisis? When are arms-bearing citizens evaluated for their mental stability to ensure they exercise their rights in a fashion that promotes the security of a free state? We do none of these things because we are a failing state. By failing state, I specifically mean that we are failing to fully implement laws and regulations that enact the full meaning and intent of the 2nd amendment.
Somewhere in between "doing nothing" and trying to "ban all guns" there is a good solution waiting to be found.
Meanwhile the discussion seems deadlocked and I guess many of us can understand both sides.
It doesn't help when people who have explicitly called for an in-between solution get called "gungrabbers". I also support the right to bear arms - some arms, some places, perhaps subject to some conditions or requirements. But because I don't toe the NRA line, I get called names. Maybe part of the solution would be people matching their rhetoric to their intentions, instead of saying one thing and doing another.
Sorry if I came across that way.
To get a license to own a gun, you need to take a marksmanship test. You get 36 shots, and have to fire at a 12" circular target 25' away. Your personal maximum magazine size is the number of shots that hit the target minus 24 (36-24= max 12). If you have less than 66% accuracy (<24 hits), no license. If you only hit 25, your max size is 1. Must have gun license on you any time you're in possession of a gun outside your house (for verification of magazine limit). Shooting ranges can let you rent a gun for practice without a license, but must stay on premises.
If you're going to own a gun for the purposes of protection, you should be able to fire it accurately, or you are a danger to yourself and others. Driving a car requires proof of competence, don't see any reason why guns shouldn't be the same: especially if its an objective test.
Would be relatively politically defensible, because opposition would have to argue that people who cannot fire accurately should still be able to own higher-capacity magazines, which is pretty hard position to argue.
The biggest counterpoint I can think of is that it might make it harder for victims of domestic violence to obtain weapons to protect themselves, but I think most of those situations are close enough range that there are other non lethal alternatives (taser, mace) that could be safer/more effective for someone without shooting experience.
But, conversely, the number of bullets you need for protection in any specific situation goes down with accuracy, so inaccurate shooters legitimately need more bullets.
You have too show up and be considered active to get permits for certain classes of guns (including handguns).
This is a win-win: if you don’t show up on maintenance days you risk losing your license. Same goes if you don’t practice.
The problem is that there is a huge amount of people who are completely unwilling to compromise at all. For them, any amount of additional regulation is tantamount to a complete ban.
We have to somehow figure out a way to talk to these people.
"Assault-style rifle" has no definition from what I can tell, other than getting used repeatedly by the news when "assault rifle" is technically incorrect but it looks like an assault rifle and they want to use the word "assault" near the word "rifle".
And "semiautomatic AR-15-style assault rifle" is just wrong. Semiautomatic-only rifles are not considered assault rifles.
It's not like calling them "just guns" or whatever diminishes the fear. Or maybe it would diminish the fear--and I think that's a bit insidious to be honest. We (collectively) should fear a tool having as its only purpose to seriously injure or kill things, including (especially) people.
Banning semi-automatic rifles may help, but if you want chaos and civil strife, you'll get it. There are millions of those rifles in circulation and the people who have them (many, anyway) won't want to give them up. At the least, you'll make criminals of hundreds of thousands of people, and put lots in jail for previously legal and safe ownership of a weapon.
But let's say you ban them. Now you'll have a black market with plenty of them anyway.
In theory, if we could snap our fingers and have all semi-auto rifles gone, it could help with some of the known mass shootings. But it won't stop it. And here's my last point: It will still go on. Killings and horrors will continue, and those who don't like firearms will continue to demand their confiscation and restriction until they don't exist. And they (the anti-gun left) will do that with or without the repeal of the 2nd amendment.
Also, 'bump stocks' aren't strictly necessary. Applying forward pressure with your stabilizing hand on a rifle as you fire can cause it to bump.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assault_rifle
It is clear. Assault Rifle, is a automatic, or semi-automatic rifle with a handle and a large magazine/bullet capacity. It has a fast fire rate, and semi decent range (less than a standard rifle, but more than a pistol).
First assault rifle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fedorov_Avtomat
The one that was made famous during WW2 (which was used to assault enemy positions at slightly closer range than a normal rifle) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StG_44
The most famous one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AK-47
>An assault rifle is a selective-fire rifle that uses an intermediate cartridge and a detachable magazine.
Semi-automatic rifles are not selective-fire rifles.
If your law abiding neighbor is building bombs in his garage, is that a problem?
Taking your garbage edit of the parent comment and setting it totally aside:
Legal firearms routinely become illegal, most often when they are stolen by people who are already criminals. Unlocked cars are a great source of 'legal' pistols as it turns out.
The problem of small arms proliferation is real and it is one of the reasons U.S. and other modern nations regulate them so much.
And for what it's worth, if you can make an intensional definition for "weapons of mass murder" that includes the most dangerous weapons for mass-murder purposes without unnecessarily curtailing the design space for the socially acceptable uses for weapons, please go for it.
Is this too much to ask? "Not killing people", is this a liberal snowflake's wet dream?
"Not killing people"? Think about it.
No it isn't. Homes in the U.S. are primarily built of wood, rifles can and will produce a tremendous amount of over penetration in such "self defense" scenarios.
The idea of some idiot who cannot comprehend ballistics in an emotional panic lacing up my neighborhood with a 30rd mag fed rifle is terrifying. Take some self defense courses please.
For the US even something like limited internal magazines isn't politically tenable (a 5 shot internal magazine and manual action would still be useful for hunting but could not be used to shoot hundreds of rounds per minute into a crowd of people).
Hell, I won't be real shocked if nothing gets done about bump stocks (which don't really have any purpose beyond shooting for fun).
In the USA. There seems to be some correlation between that and the number of mass shootings in a country, so, maybe, that has to change if one wants to decrease the number of mass shootings.
Good question. I can’t imagine any legal use for a high capacity semiautomatic weapon with armor piercing bullets. A weapon like that is comically impractical for hunting or self defense.
Law abiding citizens should be able to get by with handguns, shotguns, and hunting rifles. Clips with more than a dozen rounds should be banned, as should particularly deadly types af ammunition.
Either that or we could go back to doing it the way the framers of the constitution intended; make everything illegal except for muskets.
Me with an AR-15 versus the Marines is not going to end well for me.
> I can’t imagine any legal use for a high capacity semiautomatic weapon with armor piercing bullets. A weapon like that is comically impractical for hunting or self defense.
I was pointing out that the point wasn't hunting, or even self defense. It was to form an effective fighting force, and semiautomatic (and even fully automatic) weapons and armor piercing bullets are very useful for that.
You replied, questioning whether such things could be effective today. That's a different question. It's a valid question, but it's a different question from the intent of the Second Amendment (and of what should therefore be legal).
And by the way, the militias, by themselves, were not enough to win the Revolutionary War...
Note that the other side of the popular militia resting in the states protected by the 2nd Amendment is that that was supposed to be the foundation of national defense as well, not a large standing army. (Some standing army as a cadre and rapid reaction force was viewed as necessary, and the absence of one a failing of the pre-Constitutional system.)
For example, the amendment could say that "militia" means the National Guard, and that is in fact supposed to be a significant fighting force, with military-grade weapons and people trained and ready to use them. And for personal use, people can have weapons sufficient for self-defense but not for mass murder.
But for that to happen, we've got to persuade 3/4 of the state that that's the correct answer. That's a pretty tall hill to climb...
I bet you know the history of assault weapons, but for those that don't, it makes this all understandable. In WWII, Germany's infantry primarily carried Mauser rifles (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karabiner_98k) These were bolt action, meaning you had to pull the bolt back and forth between each shot. It shoots a high powered round, and it has a reasonably long barrel, which means that it can be accurate and deadly from a few hundred meters, but it also means that it has a fair bit of recoil. It has a ten round magazine, which is somewhat cumbersome to reload. This type of rifle works fine for hunting, and for firing from one trench to another or across an open field.
When Germany found itself doing a lot of house to house fighting with the Russians, this was not a suitable weapon. These firefights tended to be over very quickly and at very close range. There wasn't time to aim, and often soldiers shot from the hip while advancing. What was needed was a weapon that was fully automatic, handy, with a short barrel, fireable from the hip, with a large ammunition capacity and quick to reload with not too much recoil. The result was this: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP_40), a submachine gun.
Later, the Germans realized that although the MP40 was great for house to house fighting, for longer range engagements, it wasn't accurate enough for longer ranged engagements. They needed a compromise weapon: The StG 44 (Assault Rifle 44). The StG 44 had an intermediate power round and a medium length barrel to not create too much recoil, and be easy enough to handle close in, but have enough power and accuracy to fight at medium distances. It could fire either in semiautomatic or fully automatic mode, fully automatic for a close assault, and semi for long range accurate shooting. It had a pistol grip so that it could be fired from the hip, and an easily changeable 30 round box magazine, so that it could be reloaded quickly in a fast firefight. The AR-15/M16, AK47, and virtually all general purpose military rifles from the second half of the 20th century follow this basic concept.
This is all to say, that the basic design concepts of the assault rifle, intermediate power cartridge, selectable semi/fully auto fire, medium length barrel, pistol grip, and detachable, high capacity box magazine, make this a weapon designed for war. You can argue until you're blue in the face that none of these "evil features" make it any different than a bolt action hunting rifle, but they all exist to make it more suitable as a weapon of war, and you know it.
The very same features that make it useful for soldiers to kill enemy soldiers make it more lethal in the hands of a mass shooter. The pistol grip makes it easier to shoot on the move or from the hip. The high capacity box magazine gives a lot of firepower without reloading, and makes reloading fast. The less than full power cartridge makes rapid fire (semi or full auto) more manageable, and the medium length barrel makes it accurate at medium distance while not being unwieldy in close quarters. You can't tell me that what happened Sunday, or what happened in any of the recent mass shootings would have been any where near as deadly if the shooter had showed up with a Remington 700.
This is how laws work. If you want to put limits on what weapons are legal, you have to specify what those limits are. I mean, you could give broad intent-based discretion to the ATF, but that means that people don't know what is and isn't allowed and have to go through lots of uncertainty and risk when it comes to owning guns. Of course people want to make the laws clear, specific, and consistent. You wouldn't want a "don't let people get high" intent-based law when it comes to drugs. It would mean that you wouldn't know whether the antihistamines in your medicine cabinet will get you into legal trouble.
Complicating things is the bona-fide economic pressure to do things within the limits set. Guns that are better for mass murder are often better for legitimate purposes such as sport, hunting, shooting for fun, or home defense.
We live in a confusing world, where killing, especially mass murder is prohibited, and we will give you our harshest punishment for it, unless it's in the context of a war, in which case we will give you a medal and call you a hero for it.
All of this is to say that people want to own the closest thing to a military assault rifle that they can. You saw in the 1994 assault weapons ban, and in the various California assault weapons laws, that entrepreneurs will come up with ingenious ways to obey the letter of the law while circumventing the spirit of it. I do support an assault weapons ban. I don't like the idea of a bureaucrat deciding whether something falls under the intent of a law, but I don't see a great alternative given all the water under the bridge on workarounds for gun laws.
The intent should be this: discourage/restrict guns that are not relatively better for sporting or defensive purposes, but are relatively better for offensive, murderous purposes. Magazine capacity limits for sure, and maybe restrictions on detachable box magazines should be considered. In a mass shooting scenario, where one person is armed, and everyone else is unarmed, we want to give the unarmed as many chances as possible, and for as long a duration as possible, to disarm the shooter. Any sort of mod that enables the weapon to shoot more than about 1-2 rounds per second is obviously unnecessary for sporting purposes and dangerous for a mass shooter with a high capacity mag. Pistol grips I'm neutral on, although I don't see a sporting purpose, and they do certainly help with control of a weapon in combat. Intermediate caliber cartridges don't seem to have a sporting purpose, and they are good for mass shootings. I'd be inclined to restrict them, perhaps allowing a pistol grip or intermediate caliber but not both in one weapon.
Now you can classify many of these weapon as having the potential for mass killings (not very different than explosives).
Should shotguns, and single shot rifles be allowed to be bought and sold freely? Sure, as they seem to fit the idea of what an weapon during the time was, and the right is in the constitution.
Should rapid fire machine guns be allowed? Probably not. The battle is where do you draw the line of what is allowed and what is not.
The right to bear a weapon that can't do a devastating amount of harm without others to support you is different to the right to bear a weapon that can. If you disagree, let me know when your campaign to amend the constitution to permit the production, ownership and use of nuclear weapons is ready.
Explosives could have been made the time the constitution was written by using gun powder. Weapons being as powerful as explosives isn't itself a good reason in itself to ban them.
But otherwise I think you're right. The right to bear arms was to allow the populace to protect themselves against the state. Any kind of weapon that can provide a great deal of damage in mass shootings, and could reasonably be replaced by another safer weapon and still give the populace the ability to protect themselves from the state, should be banned.
On its own it isn't actually a very useful explosive. You couldn't use it for mining, unlike dynamite (made from nitroglycerine). You could set fire to a pile of gunpowder and stand nearby, and you'd be fine.
This is why you can buy big bags of black powder easily, but you can't buy high explosives without all sorts of licences and permits.
Other limitations such as magazine capacities and bullet buttons[1] are also easy to circumvent (the San Bernardino shooters did so[2]). Most firearm components are simple pieces of metal and plastic, so it's hard to stop people from making illegal modifications. It's also hard to discover such modifications before the lead starts flying. The police can't go into every home and inspect every firearm. For the most part, these sorts of laws serve to annoy law-abiding people while slightly inconveniencing criminals.
That said, trivial inconveniences might make a difference. I doubt most criminals are willing to invest the time and effort needed to make reliable modifications to their weaponry.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_button
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_San_Bernardino_attack#Inv...
They have random spot checks to make sure guns and ammunition are stored correctly (locked up separately).
They check the guns owned and make sure types and serial numbers match up.
And if you no longer have a valid reason to keep them (you quit regularly shooting at a club/range), they will ask you to hand them in and you're no longer allowed to keep them.
I'm not sure that argument would fly, but I would love to see you apply it when proposing a law! It doesn't have to be about guns even, just anything. :-)
These modifications that make something "almost NFA" have always rubbed me the wrong way. I wouldn't be surprised if the ATF issues a new opinion letter regulating their manufacture / sale.
I also think that this is a strong case of genetics at play considering that the shooter didn't even spend time with his bank robber father. The psychopath apple didn't fall far from the psychopath tree.
Wow doesn't that fit nicely into some narrative. His phrenologic profile was off the charts too and a Virgo on top of that!
There's more where that came from.
However, we should be cautious about making statements about genetics. Apart from there not being any major scientific research behind it, it also leads to disturbing effects like the state detaining blood relatives of someone that commits crime because they will be more at risk of committing crimes in the future, thought-crimes, etc.
Do we know this? Do we know what his motivation was?
He's not just a random crazy person that bought a gun and went on a spree, there was a lot of planning involved, so he's probably a terrorist of some sort.
No new gun control laws came out of Sandy Hook, or any of the other mass shootings in this decade. Why should this one be any different?
Additionally, fathers and sons share more than just genetics. They quite often share upbringing and culture. Not to mention the Father set that example of bank robbing.
Looks like a bump stock was used though https://apnews.com/e74a33083fb84b1b94c1ce3da986fd4f
On the other hand the majority of NATO training emphasises rapid single shots, with bursts only for initiating ambush or breaking contact ( and usually only when authorised by the NCO ). Being limited to single-shot isn't therefore too much of a restriction.
Since then there has been several mass casualty shootings in the states.
Wish I burned them now.
edit:
I didn't get rid of my collection over any huge reason, just didn't want the liability sitting around home when I haven't gone shooting in years. That said I feel like I've made a critical mistake in yielding my arms to people who would likely be less responsible than I during my ownership.
For anyone in the same position remember you can disable most firearms pretty easily by kludging a part or two. Hopefully will save someone that nagging feeling I have.
It is obviously my duty to deescalate & inhibit violence in my community when possible, while restricting people's avenues to tools that multiply the potential damage they can inflict.
This is why we have mental health care and regulations for buying explosives.
The best I could figure with my firearms at the time was selling them to the most responsible party possible, in my case it was gunsmiths. Recently some criminals attempted to break into their shop. Didn't get away with anything. So my choice already yielded measurable results in a way.
I'm not responsible people's heinous acts, but I am responsible for the environment people choose to act in.
(I first wrote "...for being responsible", but then it has two opposite possible readings. Yikes.)
If you want to be extra cautious in storing weapons, you can take the bolt or firing pin out and store it in a different place. I keep an old rifle out in my house for decoration, but the bolt is stored in the safe.
Nah, more like disabling them so I can mount them up on a wall as a showpiece. I honestly never contemplated that route until after I sold them.