federal assault weapons ban

Renewed, definitely.

It would appear that Bush is again playing politics with the lives of the American people. He does not want to upset his loyal contributors in the NRA. Especially so close to the election.

considering that i don't know of any true sportsman that hunts with one of these things, i say renew. permanently.

considering that i had one pointed at my chest by a rapper / gangsa when i informed him he needed to pay in cash before i could let his recording session start, i say renew. permanently.

considering that it's called an "assualt rifle" and that is what it's intended for, i say renew. permanently

there's a big difference between the 2nd amendment and arming the bad guys with something equal to or, better than the police.

so the reason Dick Cheney voted against banning armor-piercing ammo (cop killers)was?
I don't think I have ever heard his reason for doing so.

IMO the second amendment needs to be either amended or redefined. The days of the minutemen are long passed.

man, i don't know... have ya taken a look at the people running the government lately.

takin' up all the guns would be one of the most difficult task that they could take on. and it would come down the list after much easier liberties have been abolished.

any of y'all ever read or seen " the handmaidens tale"?

Re: federal assault weapons ban



There are four basic reasons for something like the second ammendment.

Every one of the founding fathers is on record to the effect that private ownership of firearms, the 2'nd ammendment, is there as a final bulwark against the possibility of government going out of control. That is the most major reason for it.

At the time of the revolution and for years afterwards, there were private armies, private ownership of cannons and warships. . . The term "letters of marque, and reprisal" which you read in the constitution indicates the notion of the government issuing a sort of a hunting license to the owner of a private warship to take English or other foreign national ships on the high seas, i.e. to either capture or sink them. The idea of you or me owning a Vepr or FAL rifle with a 30-round magazine is not likely to have bothered any of those people.

The most major motivation for the present generation of gun-control laws, i.e. the problem with drug-dealers owning AKs, is a drug problem and not a gun problem. Fix the drug-problem, i.e. get rid of the insane war on drugs and pass a rational set of drug laws, and both problems will simply go away. A rational set of drug laws would:

• Legalize marijuana and all its derivatives and anything else demonstrably no
  more harmful than booze on the same basis as booze.
  
• Declare that heroine, crack cocaine, and other highly addictive substances
  would never be legally sold on the streets, but that those addicted could shoot
  up at government centers for the fifty-cent cost of producing the stuff, i.e.
  take every dime out of that business for criminals.
  
• Provide a lifetime in prison for selling LSD, PCP, or any other sort of Jeckyl/Hyde
  formula.
  
• Do the same for anybody selling any kind of drugs to kids.
  

Do all of that, and the drug problem, the gun problem, and 70% of all urban crime will vanish within two years.

But I digress. The 2'nd ammendment is there as a final bulwark against our own government going out of control. It is also there as a bulwark against any foreign invasion which our own military might not be able to stop.

Just prior to WW-II breaking out in the Pacific, a meeting took place in Tokyo in which a number of Japanese general officers asked Isoroku Yamamoto, the only one of their number
to hve spent any time in the United States, what the problem was; why not simply invade the place and get it over with. Admiral Yamamoto replied that the problem was not the US military, that there were fifty million lunatics in this country who owned military style weaponry and practiced with it, and that there would be "a rifle behind every blade of grass". This apparently bothered him a great deal more than the 300,000 or so guys in uniform prior to the war.

A third obvious reason for private ownership of firearms is to protect yourself and your family from criminals and wild animals. Criminals in fact are not the sum total of problems in the world which firearms can help in dealing with. In particular, we read about tens of thousands of people being killed every year by poisonous snakes in India; it's hard to picture that happening if the people were armed.

Finally there's a fourth reason for the 2'nd ammendment, which is to provide the people with food during bad economic times. When you listen to people from New York and from Texas talk about the depression of the 30's, you hear two totally different stories. The people in New York will tell you about people starving and eating garbage, and running around naked. The Texans will tell you that while money was scarce, they always had 22 and 30 caliber ammunition, and that they always had something to eat, even if it was just some jackrabbit.

Eating is habit-forming; in any general societal breakdown which might be caused by a war, a major terrorist success, or whatever other cause, this last rationale for the 2'nd ammendment could very quickly become the most important.

The most major motivations for the second ammendment from all historical accounts are to provide the people with the means of removing a government, should that government become utterly tyranical, and to provide a final bulwark against any foreign invader which might get past the regular armed forces. The second ammendment is definitely not about hunting or sporting events which involve firearms.

Given that, the idea of restricting civilians to owning non-military style weapons is basically nonsensical.

Moreover, it is clear that most yuppies and leftists do not even have a clear mental picture of just what exactly the term "assault rifle" is supposed to mean.


A true assault rifle is a semiautomatic or select-fire rifle which fires ammunition of a certain size: just big enough to kill or seriously injure anybody it hits, yet small enough to allow rapid follow-on shots and/or aimed semiautomatic or automatic fire. The Germans invented this idea around 1943 with the 8 mm kurz cartridge and rifles which used it, too late to reverse the outcome of the war fortunately. True assault rifles today include mainly the M16 and various other rifles made to use .223 ammo, and Russian Kalashnikov rifles using 7.62x39 and Russian variants of .223 ammo. In particular, FAL rifles, HKs, M1s and M1A1s are not true assault rifles since they cannnot be aimed and fired rapidly due to the recoil of their heavier ammo. These should be called "battle rifles", "military rifles" or some such, and not assault rifles.

The thing being sacrificed in order to have a true assault rifle is power and range. The general assumption being made is that the bulk of military shooting will be at ranges not over 300 yards. The M16 does a bit better than most of the others in this regard due to the relatively high velocity of the .223 ammo. Marines practice at ranges to 600 yards with it and competition versions of it using heavier bullets are accurate out to all competition ranges.

The fact that competitive events are generally won with m16 type rifles is due to the fact that it takes much less time to get the rifle back on target for follow on shots.

In fact the original Henry rifle which Custer used in the civil war met the basic criteria for an assault rifle, providing a major gain in firepower while using low-power ammunition. The Henry rifle used pistol ammunition while carrying around fifteen shots in a tubular magazine, while more serious military rifles of the period used the much larger 45/70.



The original Assault Rifle

I can't wait for the end of the assault ban. I look forward to being able to pick up 15 round clips again. Most of the rifles that were on the assault ban had nothing to do with them being assault rifles as opposed to the way they looked.

One other consideration which never crosses liberals' minds on this topic is the following:

Anybody who thinks the 94 law has eliminated semiautomatic rifles from the market is deluded. There has been nothing remotely resembling a shortage of AKs, FALs, G3s, M1s, M1As, Cetme rifles, or any of that sort of thing. Gunshows are teeming to the brims with such, and such are entirely easy to purchase over the internet in fact, gunbroker.com being a sort of a firearms version of Ebay.

What the 94 LAW HAS DONE, is to make all such firearms a bit more expensive, which is the entire point of any sort of law like that. Now, in the past, all such laws were intended to keep firearms out of the hands of blacks, Irish, and other groups which were deemed incapable of dealing with them. In this case, the group which the law intended to keep firearms away from is urban drug dealers and gang bangers, and therein lies a logical fallacy.

Guess what? Between the ordinary citizen of this country making $40,000 - $80,000 a year working an honest job, and the gang-banger making $200,000 a year selling dope, who do you think has the easier time affording the new and more expensive FAL and HK rifles?


Some of you leftists might want to check out the semiauto section of gunbroker:

http://www.gunbroker.com/auction/Browse.asp?Cat=3024&Timeframe=0&Page=1&Items=50

There's absolutely no reason for you guys to have less firepower than republicans have.

Dunno, Dys. I thought bullets with steel, carbide, or depleted uranium had long been outlawed. On the other hand, I can't offhand think of any centerfire rifle round that wouldn't penetrate soft (kevlar) body armor at 50 yds or less, and that's not where we want to go.

Hunting is not the issue, DontTreadOnMe. Second amendment addresses military (milita) type weapons, and is silent on hunter's rights. That argument sounds like a red herring.

o.k. i'm not one of those people that is full on anti gun. i own guns. and i use them responsibly for sport activity.

i understand that and you understand that. but, what comes up very often in the gun issue is hunting.

now, i also understand what the 2nd is referring to. but it is only reasonable to at least consider how guns and our american society has changed. at the time, even the gatling gun was +/- 75 years away. an automatic weapon was a guy with 2 flintlock pistols. and only good for 2 rounds.

now, anybody with some extra scratch can go to a show and pick up a piece of weaponry that will out gun the everyday police officer. swat has bigger and better, but do you really want the swat team responding to every call? and if you do, are you willing to kick out the extra taxes?

really, when you think about it in an unemotional way, does any non-military person or organization need an ak or any of the others that got mentioned? sure, they are pretty neat, ya can blow stuff up with one and the rush is good. but do you need it?

face it. in terms of 2nd amendment, if the government goes berzerk, they will come at you with the same stuff they are using in iraq or whatever they have at the time. a couple of dozen guys with ak's will not stop the tank that's gonna dump on you or the plane with the 50 caliber hanging out the door. and if you think about a "red dawn" scenario, an enemy will have the same resources.

that's not liberal. that is fact.

secondly, and this will get me in trouble with my liberal friends, is that in places like l.a., it is nearly impossible to get a conviction. and if you do, it's much lighter than it should be. everyone has some excuse for their bad behavior. there is a very much reduced fear of repercussion for your actions, so why bother being law abiding. in some circles, getting locked up is a good thing. makes you a bigger, badder cat on the street. and those guys are the ones that have way too many of the aks etc. and they will use them without thinking too damn hard about it. and with the gang problem extending far beyond l.a.,chi, nyc, miami etc. even into the east tennessee county where my folks live, the average american citizen can no longer pretend that it's "just for city folk" anymore.

some days it seems that "everybody has rights and nobody has responsibilities". that, coupled with unregulated gun ownership is not a question of 2nd amendment rights, but a question of what kind of society you want to raise your children in.

also, it was mentioned, regarding the source of violence;


while i do agree that legalization of drugs with provisos is the way to go, i don't believe that it will end all violent crime.

greed and a disregard for the life of another is the root of the problem. and that is not something you can legislate away. you can only take steps to prevent and punish it.

imho

swolf, i know an awful lot of conservatives that are for gun regulation and want the assualt ban made permanent.

so the bottom line is When guns are outlawed only the government will have guns.
there is some irony in that statement.

naw, that's not what i'm saying at all. what i'm saying is, that at the very least, until we can get a grip on the way that guns are purchased and regulated, the average, fun loving gun "enthusiast" may have to do with a little less fun.

personally, i'm tired of having sociopathic gangters running the game. trust me, i've been there. those guys don't care. but they probably have most of the guns. i mean piles of 'em. i have personally seen them. flak vests, grenades... unreal.

one dawg from the compton crips tried to sell me a freakin' chopper. in the lobby of a recording studio for cryin' out loud. and was amazed that i didn't want it.

part of what some people aren't getting about this is that they think they have the black market on illegal weapons cornered. wrong.

know why homeboy wanted ME to buy the piece? used in the commision of a violent crime. he's sells it to a long haired white boy who takes it home and stashes it away, with visions of exploding watermellons at the range dancing in his head.

no gun. no evidence. no conviction.

and the filed off serial number was just a teensie, tiny bit suspicious.
:wink:

Sorry about your experience, but why do you believe that the Founding Fathers put the 2nd Amendment in place for purposes of sports and hunting?

yep. i do understand your point. to me, though, "radio, television, internet, nor computer files" never killed anyone. i know some of the stuff makes people hoppin' mad.

and yeah, "sneak and peek" does leave comp files or even your newspaper subscription open to scrutiny.

i'm not sure if you meant for that to be a question.

one of the things that has also changed is that america now has a well established, trained and efficient (when allowed) police community.

i'm not running away from you here. but, i have to get moving for a dr. appointment.

if there's interest, i'll pick up when i get back.
dtom