Re: Gun owner here. Questioning the necessity of high-capacity

said no one ever.

That said, I'll bite. I'm a strong supporter of the second amendment. I own guns, carry for safety, and practice quite a bit.

With that said, I think the problem with these debates is that it is often seen as "pro" vs "anti" gun control. I dare say that 99.9% of Americans believe in some form of gun control (or more accurately weapon control). Most folks agree citizens shouldn't own tactical nukes, or operative tanks, or fighter jets. So at some point we have to recognize we're discussing degrees of control and where the line is to be drawn. I know to many here that will seem like common sense, but in my experience too many folks enter into the debate thinking we're actually debating whether there should be ANY laws regulating the ownership of weapons for law abiding citizens when in fact we're discussing where the lines should be drawn.

And reasonable people can disagree in good faith on the answer to that question.

I find myself drawing a line which obviously is to the right of some folks and to the left of others and I can see the logic in their stances as well.

One minor nitpicking here is that I'm not much a fan of arguing from a point of "why do we need..." or "what is the necessity..." when discussing rights. I'd rather it be, as most sane arguments are in mu estimation, a discussion of gains and losses with any such regulation. What do we gain as a society (and individually) by choosing to draw the line in one place or another. Of course those are often also hypothetical opinion points as we don't (and can't) know the outcome of any regulation or relaxation of regulation until it occurs.

So as to your question I do think there is rightly a "slippery slope argument" to be made when you discuss magazine sizes for weapons (for pete's sake we're not talking about clips 99% of the time). It doesn't mean that the discussion can't be had about where to draw that line, but it certainly makes logical sense, to me at least, to ask why 30 is not OK, but 20 is or why 10 is but 11 is not. Of course at some point that discussion becomes pedantic and we get stuck in a Zeno's paradox style debate where any single increment seems meaningless, but I think it is a valid point to wonder why certain lines are being drawn where they are (or where we think they should be).

But to answer your question I personally see no problem with banning large capacity magazines, but I also see very little evidence to suggest that it would have any real positive effect in a day and age where they already exist in such large quantities and even summarily inventing a lack of availability would only lead to the nutjobs doing harm with a larger quantity of smaller capacity magazines.

quozzel

Hall of Famer [20518]

TigerPulse: 100%

Posts: 11667

Joined: 10/15/02

Jun 13, 2016, 3:19 PM

Assault rifles in the civilian market have got to go.

They're banned in places like Europe and Australia, and the result is, they're available on the black market, sure, but the price has escalated to over $30,000...which puts them well out of the reach of the kind of guy who would commit an act like this. When you look at the profiles of mass murderers, usually they're all having some sort of career issue; they aren't going anywhere in life, usually, and that frustration manifests itself as blame towards those who have "blocked" them. Black market weapons also tend to be faulty. That ISIS terrorist those three Americans took down on that train in France had an AK-47, which had been smuggled in. It jammed and they took it away from him and literally beat him over the head with it.

You can still commit murders using handguns and hunting rifles, but it's a whole lot harder to run up big body counts that way.

The problem is, almost every single massacre that has happened lately has involved the AR-15, and almost all of those guys - I'm tempted to say all, but I'm too lazy to go google each individual incident - involved guns that were obtained legally. When disturbed people are just walking up to their local Bass Pro Shops and buying an affordable assault rifle and then using it to empty a school, a nightclub, or a movie theatre, there's an obvious problem going on.

An AR-15 is absolutely useless for home defense. If it's sitting there loaded and waiting in your home it's a menace to anybody who goes near it on an ordinary day; it it's secured and unloaded it can't help you and you're probably not going to have time to load it if somebody breaks in. If you're defending your home you probably want a handgun or a shotgun, which is much better for the kind of up-close-and-personal encounter you're going to be having, and a shotgun has the added benefit of being lethal only up to 15 feet or so, which means you're not going to shoot through a wall and kill a kid in the next room or the house next door. I have zero problem with shotguns. They're great for home defense and impractical for massacres; somebody running away from a shotgun will usually get away.

You wouldn't really even have to do much to curb this plague. There's little point in confiscating existing assault rifles; you'd create a lot more crime than you prevent trying that. The fact that an assault rifle hasn't been used yet tells us their present owners likely aren't planning anything too horrific. History tells us that guys who are going to do something like this almost always drive to the store and buy a brand new one for the job. Once they have it, they usually misuse it quite quickly.

I'd just ban the sale of any new assault-type weapon. It may not stop massacres altogether but it will keep the body counts down, and if you can't take 50 people with you, is it really going to be as appealing for a would-be maniac to do something like this? Unless we want to continue to see almost daily images of 20-50 kids being hauled out of schools in bodybags because some maniac had a problem, and ready access to way too much cheap firepower. In an ideal world, of course, we'd identify those maniacs and just deny them access to firearms, but does anybody know of any real way to do that effectively?

We can quibble later over the utility of semi-auto handguns - and I'm sure people will - but at the moment, ban assault rifles and I think body counts will drop, a lot, and this spree of constant massacres will slow down.

Assault rifles were designed to kill a lot of people, very quickly. Period. Unless you're Charles Bronson, you likely aren't going to have a legit reason to go do that as a civilian.

flag link

military_tech

thumb_down

thumb_up

Gun owner here. Questioning the necessity of high-capacity