AK47 assault rifle inventor Kalashnikov dies at 94

So you seriously argue that it is a moral defense to invade countries and do anything, if it makes strategic sense. And you yourself decide how threatened you are... with a review generations later. Shudder.

You're really making a very, very good argument for joining NATO before we find out how non-democratic Russia will end up being. :-(

Considering art/math/etc, I would never call Russians of today "barbaric" so no straw man attacks please. (I implied that you spread typical propaganda to create external enemies for a thieving junta. That is scary from a big neighbor.)

And lots of people were murdered, raped, tortured and in general got their lives destroyed/enslaved by Soviet outside Soviet far after the WW, so don't play the loss card from 70+ years ago after one dictator turned on another. Especially when the Soviet dictator got more citizens killed than the war (hunger, shootings, etc). I really hope the poor Russian population don't get another 1984. :-(

The asymmetry and the distance, it feels like a hit.

On an equally morbid but more realistic note, why did they have to accept prisoners? Couldn't they just have "dead checked" everyone?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_checking

Agreed, but at the same time, disparaging the OP for having to address rhetoric (that old saw) seems antithetical to that aim.

Yes, gun violence decreased in Australia when they banned guns. Violence did not. Violence, to me, seems to be specific enough an objective that specialization isn't needed. I understand why oncologists specialize in curing cancer, as that is their field of expertise. I do not understand why gun control advocates feel that specialization is necessary with violence, if the net effect is the same with or without them.

I believe that is the point that aaronem was trying to make; not that he was trying to be pithy.

For what it's worth, I'm pretty hard-line on the second amendment, and I see value in the second amendment as a tool for the preservation of freedom. If a law were passed that banned possession of a firearm that I already owned, and/or required a mandatory buyback of that firearm, I would probably become a felon for violating that law as I would deem that law unconstitutional. That said, if the 2nd amendment were repealed, I would cede my firearms. That doesn't necessarily say anything on its own, but frames the rest of what I'm about to say; which is that presumably, every responsible gun owner would also like to see a reduction in gun-related crimes, even more so than the average gun control advocates, and it boggles my mind that gun control advocates seem to focus on gun crimes specifically, to the detriment of all other forms of crime, while gun rights advocates seem to do the exact opposite. You'd think the tables would be turned, as gun owners have the most vested interest.

If your intent is to raise the hassle and expense of owning lawnmowers, then the effect of so doing on gardening and lawn care is entirely irrelevant. If your intent is to reduce the extent to which gardening and lawn care take place, it's entirely relevant. In such ambiguities originate the suspicions of the pro-lawnmower faction.

As regards the rest, I think you've got cause and effect mixed up; it seems to me not so much that the "gun debate", and similar "debates", polarize American society, as that what we call American society, and in particular the politics of the United States, revolve around a conflict between two fundamentally irreconcilable perspectives on -- well, on everything, more or less. A century and a half ago, this conflict erupted into open warfare, which concluded in a decisive victory for one of the two factions; while neither side has taken up arms in any meaningful way since, the conflict itself remains unresolved, and has simmered under the surface ever since.

On the other hand, the side which won that war I mentioned has done a sterling job of consolidating its gains and pushing to expand them, to the extent that it would be all but impossible for their opponents to pull off an upset by any conceivable means -- and God be thanked for that! It's the only thing which stands between our comfortable lives here in the United States, and chaos.

So, on the whole, I'm satisfied. Of course, I'd be happier still if I thought the winning side had a program with a snowball's chance of actually working when implemented on a platform of some three hundred million or so human beings, but I figure that, by dint of careful neglect of my health, I can more or less ensure that I won't be around to see anything worse than, at most, the initial stages of the collapse which I expect, in the fullness of time, will arrive. Sure, I could be wrong about that, but I don't think I am -- and, in the meantime, there's Calvados, and good fellowship among friends, and even a few programming languages to work in which aren't as terrible as the rest, and who can say fairer than that?

I hope it's uncontroversial to state that the most effective way of steering political opinion is to establish a method of determining the terms in which political discussion is undertaken. (It should certainly be uncontroversial to state this to a progressive, whose political movement has more precisely formalized the concept than any other in recent history!)

In this line, one might promulgate a formula by which human agency is as much as possible elided from discussion of one particular method by which humans have been known to kill one another, in favor of the unstated but strong implication -- yes, that word again -- that the essential problem lies in the method, rather than in the untrammelled urge to kill. "Killed by an AK-47" is a sterling example of the type.

You argue that "everyone knows" what is meant by that formula, and I wouldn't presume to disagree with such a trivially obvious statement. But, in that case, I'm forced to wonder why anyone bothers with the obfuscation at all! What does it add, to the attempt to reason as accurately as possible about a phenomenon in order to enact laws intended to control it to the benefit of all, to use a form of words which suggests by its structure the absurd thought of a firearm floating around willy-nilly shooting people of its own accord? To whose benefit is this absurdity deployed?

The use of "honest citizen" and "criminal" was an instance of extreme imprecision on my part, brought about by unnecessary haste to reach my point, and you're right to pick on that. I could much more usefully replace those terms with "one who seeks to contribute to society" and "one who seeks to parasitize society". While still imprecise, those phrases come much closer to the heart of the distinction I draw.

You will no doubt take exception to that latter phrase in particular, and I don't blame you; "parasite" in description of any person is an extremely loaded word. Let me respond in kind by noting that "rehabilitation" is the wrong term for your meaning. To rehabilitate someone is to restore him to an ability which he previously lacked. But someone who is not able to obey the law, be he willing or otherwise, is not someone our society generally regards as criminal, because he cannot accurately be said to have possessed mens rea -- in other words, he lacks the capacity to know that what he is doing is unlawful. For some who break the law, this is true. For many, many more who break the law, this is not true in the slightest; most who break laws choose to do so, whether they conceive of themselves as having done so or otherwise.

Such a person need not be "rehabilitated", because his problem is not that he is unable to behave in accordance with the requirements of society, but rather that he chooses to do otherwise. The process through which he needs to go, in order to be restored to society's good graces, cannot therefore be accurately called rehabilitation; unfortunately, I'm not sure that our modern vernacular has a word which does describe that process. In days gone by, this process was considered one of penitence, hence the old name "penitentiary" for that institution which we now call a "prison".

Moreover, I consider the rehabilitative model a grave insult against the human dignity of most who commit crimes -- specifically, all those who commit crimes while being able to behave otherwise should they so choose. You seem to regard these people, more or less, as though they were ill, or perhaps mentally disabled; in other words, you consider them as bereft of either the necessary volition to behave other than in a criminal fashion, or of the necessary reason to differentiate behavior which accords with society's requirements from behavior which does not.

The Soviet travesty of criminal justice, for at least a considerable part of its existence, regarded its dissidents in precisely this fashion, and labeled them with a variety of pseudo-psychiatric diagnoses in an effort to explain the supposed insanity which rendered them unable to recognize the obviously ongoing triumph of dialectical materialism. You may have heard the phrase "sluggish schizophrenia"; in this enormity it has its origin, and I'm sure you can imagine what life became for those misfortunates who fell foul of the Soviet state in this fashion. Years prior, during the eugenics fad in the United States, a family history of criminal behavior was considered grounds for sterilization, in order to prevent whatever genetic traits led to such misbehavior from propagating further.

Do I seek to slander you by these invidious comparisons? I do not. I seek merely to place in sharp relief some historical consequences of the way you look at criminal behavior, in order to help demonstrate the essential difference between my attitude toward that subject and yours. Specifically, where you by default regard someone who has committed a crime -- "done a shitty thing", in your formulation -- as being unwell or mentally disabled and therefore in need of custodial care to restore him to full health, I by default regard him as having made a choice to behave as he has, and, until he demonstrates otherwise, being just as fully equipped as anyone else to choose to behave otherwise. The former, if I may borrow a term from the vernacular of the social sciences, dehumanizes him; the latter instead exalts that sine qua non of humanity, the ability to make moral choices, that which Catholics call the indwelling Holy Spirit, which Quakers call the Inner Light, and the existence of which even those au courant with the most modern atheistic agnosticism recognize, even if they tend to lack words with which to name it.

Let me finally address the siege mentality under which you seem wrongly to believe I labor. When I speak of "enemy", I refer not to some nebulous Lacanian Other, but instead to the man who is not satisfied merely to mug someone on the street for his wallet, but feels it necessary to answer any resistance with a knife, or a gun, or worse indignities still. I've been fortunate thus far in never having fallen foul of such men myself, despite having lived in some of the less delightful areas of a city generally regarded as not particularly safe. Not all my friends and acquaintances have had the same good fortune. I acknowledge that this somewhat prejudices my perspective on the matter. No doubt firsthand experience would prejudice my perspective still further. Should it not be so? Do you ask that I not merely vow allegiance to your principles, but value those principles more highly than I value my own life and unpunctured carcass? You are of course welcome to make whatever decision in that regard you find meet, inasmuch as it concerns your own meat; I'll thank you not to tell me how to dispose of mine, it being the only one I've got and a whole life's worth of use to get out of it.

Perhaps you believe it is possible to render firearms unavailable to men of such ilk. While that belief seems optimistic at best given the commonality of firearms in the United States, we need not stipulate in either direction to acknowledge that, be he able or unable to lay hands on a gun, he will certainly have no difficulty in finding a knife.

Perhaps you believe it is possible to empanel a sufficiency of police officers to ensure that such men are unable to pursue their fell trade. This has been tried. It has never worked. I see no reason to imagine it will ever work. The police we do have, God protect them, have among themselves a saying: "When seconds count, the police are there in minutes." And even if it were possible so to multiply their ranks, it is inherently enfeebling of self-respect and self-determination to be dependent, for such a basic need as the integrity of one's own corpus, on another human being -- the condition of a child, not that of an adult.

I have no general fear of my fellow man; as far as I can tell, everybody's just trying to get through the day, the same as me, and why not? But if my fellow man should start to think that the best way for him to get through his day might be to interrupt mine with a demand for my wallet and a weapon at the ready should I presume to demur, I am very much in favor of the idea that he should be afraid of me -- not because I mean him harm, which I do not, but because he recognizes that, should he offer me harm, I'm just likely to see him and raise him.

Is this an ideal state of affairs? Of course not, but no ideal state of affairs is attainable in any case -- that's what "ideal" means. But I greatly prefer the situation I describe to one in which, should my fellow man take it in mind to behave toward me with fell intent, he feels free to do so unencumbered by any shadow of concern that his intended victim might ventilate him, instead. Were that state of affairs more general, I misdoubt I'd have fewer friends with scars.

You can't actually buy active grenades in the US, and SMG's and up require special licensing from the ATF to possess.

Now, then: For a private citizen to possess grenades, bombs, or other such weapons, is already felonious under the "destructive devices" provision of the National Firearms Act. Explosives in general have industrial use, but are not much less tightly regulated all the same; however, taking a lawfully obtained explosive and fashioning it into a weapon, such as a grenade or bomb, brings it under the auspices of the NFA.

The NFA also very strictly regulates fully automatic weapons to the extent where legally coming into possession of one is, for most purposes, effectively impossible. Manufacture of such weapons is similarly restricted, and the law on this point is quite uncompromising; should a weapon in your possession, even through malfunction, fire more than one round on a single squeeze of the trigger, it is considered to be an automatic weapon, and your possession of it therefore necessarily in violation of law.

I'd argue that these provisions do a great deal to demonstrate the effectiveness of the gun laws we have. The use of improvised explosive weapons is rare, albeit often striking when it does occur (e.g. the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma federal building); the use of automatic weapons in mass shootings is practically unheard of.

Handguns, believe it or not, actually do have some application in hunting. I mind me of a man I once knew who used one to hunt wild boar, which is sort of a porcine equivalent of the wolverine, only larger, nastier, and a lot harder to kill. To hunt boar, you find one, attract its attention, and induce it to charge -- something which I gather boars' general disposition makes fairly trivial. Then, ideally before the creature approaches closely enough to disembowel you, you shoot it in the head. As you may imagine, this requires an easily maneuvered weapon which throws a heavy round: "What happens if you miss?" I once asked him. "Well," he said, "then you're fucked."

Amusing anecdotes aside, from the perspective of the current discussion, handguns do admittedly pose a somewhat stickier problem.

For one thing, I'm not sure anyone really has need for items such as the 33-round magazine Jared Loughner used in the Tucson shooting two years ago; such high capacities strike me mostly as a sop to relatively incompetent shooters. (A competent shooter should be able, having spent some effort developing the skill, to reload a semiautomatic handgun and resume fire in something like two or three seconds. That capability doesn't render magazine capacity irrelevant, but it certainly renders it less so.)

In fact, I'd almost be willing to consider practicable a general ban on semi-automatic handguns (i.e., not revolvers). The trouble is that such a ban would of necessity be uneven in application; lawful handgun owners desirous of continued compliance with the law -- which is to say, more or less all lawful handgun owners -- would turn in their handguns, while those not so concerned would retain them.

This problem generalizes well, I think, across any sort of law prohibiting firearms of a certain type, class, &c.; specifically, there is a strong correlation between someone being likely to use a firearm in the commission of a crime, and someone who will not comply with a legal requirement that he turn in the firearm he would otherwise use in the commission of a crime.

There are, for better or for worse, a lot of handguns in this country. To not only ban them, but have any assurance of collecting most of them from legal and illegal owners alike, would require the sort of police action which would set civil liberties hardliners howling from now until the Last Trump, and not incidentally would itself require either an enormous expansion of police forces, or a nationwide deployment of National Guard and regular Army forces of the sort more ordinarily employed, in much more strictly limited scope, for suppression of civil disorder on the scale of the 1992 Los Angeles riots. And I'd be entirely unsurprised to see such action provoke riots, and nasty ones at that, among those who, we might euphemistically say, see their firearms as a way to enforce the redress of social inequality. Speaking as one who lives near to, and works nearer to, an area in which such riots would occur if anywhere, I'd just as soon avoid them, thanks.

Practicalities aside, though, even many hardline gun-rights advocates agree that a revolver is in many ways more serviceable for personal defense than a semi, for several good and sensible reasons. But that's just the trouble: I see no sensible way in which to set practicalities aside, in this case. If I thought it were possible to implement something like a semiautomatic handgun ban, without unreasonably curtailing lawful self-defense and without doing our nation's already threadbare social fabric far more harm than the status quo, then it's not something to which I'd feel any need to object. But, as with any social engineering project, the essential trouble is that you don't get to start from a clean slate -- and, that being inescapably the case, I find it impossible to imagine how any such program could be implemented without doing far more harm than good. (All of which assumes the political will to implement such an even-handed program, which I cannot imagine existing in the modern United States; I think it a much more likely result that those lobbying for the ban would be satisfied to disarm legal owners and leave well enough alone in the case of all others.)