Comment by MChristopherson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MChristopherson | Hacker News Reader

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MChristopherson

I scanned through the video included in the link. At the risk of sounding like a militia-bound gun nut, the video got me a bit annoyed: "fully functional AK-47" is tossed about rather often, when in fact the guy simply made a rather heavy hunting rifle.

An AK-47, as used throughout the planet, is a machine gun. A fully-automatic machine gun. You hold down the trigger, and the gun begins firing at a high rate until you remove your finger from the trigger, or run out of ammunition.

He did not build that.

He built a semi-automatic rifle that is functionally equivalent in pretty much every way to a hunting rifle you can buy at your local sporting goods chain store.

This harkens back to the "assault rifle" issue, which sees a type of rifle that is in every way equivalent to a semi-automatic hunting rifle labeled as an "assault rifle" because it looks more bad-ass than grandpa's deer rifle.

--edit--

I'm kind of ruefully laughing at myself here, as after three years of reading Hacker News, this is the topic that got me to angrily dive to my keyboard to make an account and comment. This from a total urbanite who gets nervous at being more than three blocks from a taxi stand and a wet bar, and who would probably need counseling if confronted by any woodland creature larger than a mid-sized rat.

A gun with a limited internal magazine is materially different than a clip ready design though.

In the U.S., the legal use of assault rifle has not been particularly confused (it's always meant guns with automatic fire capability), just the sloppy and/or misconstrued use of the term in media and advocacy.

Edit: Second paragraph is wrong, see link down thread.

Hunting rifles with magazines are quite common. However, you do zero in on the effective difference between supposed "assault rifles" and semi-automatic hunting rifles: the magazine / number of rounds available.

I think this is an important point, because when you cut through the furor, that really is the only effective distinction. And it's a heck of a lot more minor a distinction than the more common blending of "fully automatic machine gun" with a semi-auto rifle that merely looks bad ass, is covered with Tactical Stuff (TM), and uses a composite stock instead of wood.

I guess it depends on whether a person thinks that the political process around gun control will result from rhetoric or from honest debate. If it's an honest debate, the exact words used to describe the eventual line that gets drawn shouldn't really matter. A semi automatic rifle with a few 10 round magazines is plenty scary enough when used for violence.

Also, when I looked up the number for post ban magazines, I realized that I was wrong about assault weapons and full automatic. Wikipedia has a summary of the federal ban:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Assault_Weapons_Ban#Cri...

I agree that an honest debate on the topic is what can lead to a reasonable and valuable process of dealing with the issue in terms of law. And it's because of that that the term "assault rifle" has always bugged me, because, let me be quite honest, I've come to realize that what so many people mean when they say that term is really "anything that looks scary and mean and military-ish".

IE, show them this: http://i.imgur.com/XZmPlGQ.jpg, and the response will be "Yeah! Ban that! Nobody should be able to own that!"

Show them this: http://i.imgur.com/a916R.jpg, however, and the response will be much more muted, perhaps with a bit of "I think my Dad had one like that for hunting or something..."

Of course they are functionally equivalent rifles, each semi-automatic. But one looks scary/bad-ass, one looks like Dad's hunting rifle.

I don't mean this all argumentatively or semantically. I think this issue really matters. If we are going to pass laws based on the outward appearance of something, then that's the kind of law - and legal process - I am very wary of. If, instead, we have an honest and reasoned debate on the issue, going through a process of deciding if, say, semi-automatic weapons should able to be owned by citizens; and if there should be a limit of the number of rounds in a magazine - or if people should be able to own a rifle that accepts a magazine; then that's the kind of process I can get on board with.

I think it's dishonest to ask a voter, "should we ban assault rifles?" I think it's much more honest to ask, in effect, a series of questions about firearms, to get at the meat of the matter in a way that is sensible.

But I don't think I'm going out on a limb here when I say that as it stands, people want to ban scary looking guns, and that is the depth to which they evaluate the entire issue.

An AK-47 does not accept "clips", it accepts magazines.

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