docwebster (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
docwebster) wrote2004-01-06 05:15 pm
docwebster) wrote2004-01-06 05:15 pm
I dunno..
Maybe it's the exposure to all that gunpowder?
Jeff Cooper On Inner-City Violence:
"…the consensus is that no more than five to ten people in a hundred who die by gunfire in Los Angeles are any loss to society. These people fight small wars amongst themselves. It would seem a valid social service to keep them well-supplied with ammunition."
Cooper's Corner, Guns and Ammo
Ted Nugent on South Africans:
"Apartheid isn't that cut and dry. All men are not created equal. The preponderance of South Africa is a different breed of man. I mean that with no disrespect. I say that with great respect. I love them because I'm one of them. They are still people of the earth, but they are different. They still
put bones in their noses, they still walk around naked, they wipe their butts with their hands … These are different people. (Me: I dunno, Ted, sounds like a pretty typical Aerosmith tour to me) You give 'em toothpaste, they fucking eat it ... I hope they don't become civilized. They're way ahead of the game."
--Detroit Free Press Magazine
Ted Nugent on homosexuality:
A "despicable act" performed by "guys that have sex with each other's anal cavities."
--Hannity and Colmes
Marion Hammer on police-maintained databases of gun buyers:
"We don't want government to know who has the guns. If the government knows who has guns and where to find them, they can ban them and then confiscate them."
--Miami Herald
"And Commander XOgswsk from the planet Feelldbub will sneak into our homes and eat our brains and steal all the pretty neon twinkies that go boing boing boing all night long and oh god where's my medication?" Hammer did NOT go on to say.
Jeff Cooper On Inner-City Violence:
"…the consensus is that no more than five to ten people in a hundred who die by gunfire in Los Angeles are any loss to society. These people fight small wars amongst themselves. It would seem a valid social service to keep them well-supplied with ammunition."
Cooper's Corner, Guns and Ammo
Ted Nugent on South Africans:
"Apartheid isn't that cut and dry. All men are not created equal. The preponderance of South Africa is a different breed of man. I mean that with no disrespect. I say that with great respect. I love them because I'm one of them. They are still people of the earth, but they are different. They still
put bones in their noses, they still walk around naked, they wipe their butts with their hands … These are different people. (Me: I dunno, Ted, sounds like a pretty typical Aerosmith tour to me) You give 'em toothpaste, they fucking eat it ... I hope they don't become civilized. They're way ahead of the game."
--Detroit Free Press Magazine
Ted Nugent on homosexuality:
A "despicable act" performed by "guys that have sex with each other's anal cavities."
--Hannity and Colmes
Marion Hammer on police-maintained databases of gun buyers:
"We don't want government to know who has the guns. If the government knows who has guns and where to find them, they can ban them and then confiscate them."
--Miami Herald
"And Commander XOgswsk from the planet Feelldbub will sneak into our homes and eat our brains and steal all the pretty neon twinkies that go boing boing boing all night long and oh god where's my medication?" Hammer did NOT go on to say.
no subject
And Marion Hammer? She's only citing history. It's happened before. Including in the US. It just hasn't ever happened *nationwide* in the US.
(Hint: Most of the first "gun control" laws, like New York's Sullivan law, were originally passed to keep arms out of the hands of those filthy, criminal, lower-class immigrant scum. Like, you know, blacks and the Irish. Yup, 1890s upper-class New York abhorred a mick with a gun like nature is reputed to abhor a vacuum.
[For something she supposedly abhors, she sure made one unholy hell of a lot of it.]
And that term "Saturday night special" that the gun control lobbyists toss around with such abandon? They've shortened it. Back when they first coined it, the full phrase was "Niggertown Saturday night special." It's quite enlightening to see how much of historical gun control in the US has been inherently racist.)
Unbelievable
I have no particular opposition to guns. As a matter of fact, I find them quite useful as tools. However, like most tools, I don't feel an overpowering need to own one simply because I can. Unless I have several acres of lawn to mow, I am not buying a riding mower, y'know?
I am different from most left-leaning Americans in that I interpret the 2nd Amendment fairly literally, ie I believe that people have the right to possess firearms to protect their property, their family and to keep themselves free of tyranny and oppression.
(I should point out that I have never held, much less fired a gun, and, I have no plans to do so at this time.)
I like to say that guns are like children: There are too many of them and all the wrong people seem to have them. It is for these reasons, amongst others, that I signed on to the NRA Blacklist. It doesn't seem to me to be unreasonable to expect a ban of semi-automatic weapons and ask for more stringent sentencing laws when a crime is committed with such a weapon.
I am chuckling a bit at this ironic tidbit: My dad is a fairly vocal member of the NRA. Our last name isn't very common and we share a ZIP code. I can't wait for the brass at the NRA to see my name on the blacklist and then match it up with my dad's name on their membership roster.
Cheap thrills such as this are the spice of life.
Cheers!
Re: Unbelievable
Why? Is someone any more dead if killed with a semi-auto pistol than if killed with a revolver, an axe, or an automobile?
This is not just a rhetorical question. I really want to hear your reasoning. (You do understand that, contrary to the intentional deception practised by the news media, "semi-automatic" does not mean "machinegun", right?)
Re: Unbelievable
To answer your first question, I will return to the tool analogy. If I need to prune a rose bush, I am going to use a pruner, not a machete or a chainsaw, right?
Now apply that analogy to guns. If my intent is to protect myself, I feel that I would have a better chance of stopping whatever is threatening me with a weapon over which I have at least partial control. Maybe I don't want to kill or even maim, I just want to frighten the treat away. That's not possible with an assault rifle.
Assault rifles are built to kill. They have no other purpose. That's not necessarily true of other guns.
Cheers!
Re: Unbelievable
Assault rifles are built to kill.
Actually, this may surprise you, but you are precisely wrong in that. Which is to say, your belief is not only wrong, it's actually the opposite of the truth. Assault rifles -- TRUE assault rifles -- were designed to wound, not to kill.
You see, one of the insights that led to the development of 'assault rifles', firing reduced-power cartridges (as most of them do), is that it is, from a military standpoint, better to wound your enemy than to kill him. Every time you kill a member of an opposing force, you reduce your enemy's effective strength by one. But wound him instead, and now your enemy has to leave another man behind to look after that wounded man, so each man you wound reduces his strength by two. Plus, he's now got to spare resources to medevac that man, and build and staff a field hospital to treat him. Wounding one of your enemy's men costs him MUCH more resources than merely killing one.
They have no other purpose. That's not necessarily true of other guns.
Well, in the first place, if your assumption about 'assault weapons' were true, it would be no less true of any other type of firearm. In the second place, it's actually considerably more true of, for example, a hunting rifle, the goal of which is not only to kill what you're shooting at, but wherever possible to kill it as instantly as possible with a single shot.
Historically, with certain exceptions (specialized target firearms, line-throwing guns, assault rifles), the primary purpose of all firearms is indeed to kill things. As you said, a gun is a tool, and it's a tool for killing.
That said, if all you want to do is scare away an attacker (which, frankly, is the first choice of just about anyone who carries a gun for defence), isn't that goal most likely to succeed if you have the scariest-looking weapon possible? The more overwhelming and obvious your firepower advantage, the less likely you'll actually have to unleash it. The armed intruder who might brazen it out against a .22 revolver is very much less likely to fancy his chances against, say, an Uzi submachinegun.
(NOTE: This is not to say that I think a semi-automatic rifle is a good personal defense weapon. It isn't. It's too unwieldy, too slow to aim as such short ranges, and too likely by far to overpenetrate and hit someone two or three houses away. A pump shotgun is a much better choice. Not only is it easier to aim and much less likely to penetrate a wall, but that's a hell of a big scary hole in the end, and Hollywood has made the SHA-CHINK of the slide on a pump-action 12-guage a sufficiently widely-recognized sound that just racking the slide should be enough to loosen any ne'er-do-well's anal sphincter. My first wife once broke up a domestic-violence situation in exactly this manner without having to fire a shot.)
Re: Unbelievable
Utter myth. A wounded man is still capable of killing you.
Anyway, the M-193 5.56mm ball round actually is deadlier than a heavier round, according to studies. A heavy round like a 7.62mmN will punch through, leave a clean wound channel. A 5.56mmN will bounce around in soft tissue.
That being said, the point of any firearm is to kill. rats to elephants, the only point of a firearm is to drive bits of metal into a living object at high speed.
Re: Unbelievable
Granted, yes, a wounded man may well still be perfectly capable of killing you. A man wounded in the arm or leg, be he wounded with a K-98, an StG45[m], or an M16, may very well be still in the fight to some extent. On the other hand, a gut-shot trooper or one with a sucking chest wound is pretty much out of the fight, regardless of whether he got his wound from a shell fragment, a rifle, or a pungi stick. The MP43/44 and StG44/45 were intended to have a significantly higher probability than the K98 of leaving such men wounded rather than killing them outright.
The M16 is a special case. As you probably know, in its first generation the original 55-grain bullet was badly understabilized, and had a nasty tendency to tumble, producing massive wound cavities. I seem to recall that the bullet also had a nasty tendency to break in half after impact. Both of these effects were unplanned, and I'm sure you're aware the round has been redesigned several times to reduce this undesired "excess lethality", culminating in the current 69-grain bullet based on the Belgian SS109 NATO loading (the M193 ball you mention, iirc).
As for studies, well, I've seen studies going both ways on that. I think it largely depends who does the study, what methodology they use, and what they're trying to show with the study. Remember, though, that the 5.56mm round is a high-velocity microcaliber round, very different in its external and terminal ballistics from the .30-caliber intermediate rounds used in the first generation of assault rifles, the late-WW2 German designs, and the second generation, the Kalashnikov and its various spin-offs.
Full-caliber rifles such as the M14, the AR10, the FN FAL, the Heckler and Koch G3, and the SiG StG57, SG510 and SG542 properly aren't true assault rifles at all, and should more correctly be considered selective-fire battle rifles. So they really shouldn't enter into this discussion.
Re: Unbelievable
Re: Unbelievable
It is, however, illegal to possess the parts to do so, unless one also possesses a Federal Class III license. Current BATF doctrine is that possession of the necessary parts to convert a rifle to full-automatic fire, whether or not you possess the matching rifle, is considered legally equivalent (as far as severity of charges and penalties) to possessing the finished full-automatic weapon.
I'm afraid I've never bought into the argument that if someone is willing to violate the law to do something that's already a felony, passing another law to make it even more illegal is going to stop them. Criminals are, by definition, people who violate laws. For example, possession of any firearms at all, except for a few 'grandfathered' rifles and shotguns, is illegal in Washington DC, yet for a "legally gun-free" city, it's surprising how many of the people murdered there each year die from gunshot wounds.
no subject