Draxil on 14/8/2022 at 14:45
Quote Posted by Tocky
And there you have it. Because they are fun to shoot there is an acceptable number of children they are willing to sacrifice. A gun with no purpose but to kill and do so at high amount is fun to shoot so sorry kids. Gee that's not a very pro life stance to take is it?
I miss the days when guns had better purposes. There were no military weapons in the Sears catalogue because men did not play with guns back then. Oh there were those who liked to play soldier but actually being one tended to cure them of it.
The fact that there are in excess of 20 million AR-15s in this country and that a statistically insignificant number of them are used in mass shootings or
any crime belies your point that their only purpose is to kill and at "high amounts". The vast majority are used for sports shooting, which has a long history in this country, and hunting. 5.56 NATO is about the minimum you can use on a deer in most areas of the country.
Your memory of "back then" is false. Oswald shot Kennedy with an Italian military rifle mail ordered from a catalog. Sears catalogs sold (
https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2018/02/27/1962-sears-christmas-book-5fa2171bf27287622abd4f395327e2eea63f9a4f.jpg) M1 Carbines and M1 Garands in the 1960s as well as surplus Mausers and other military weapons. My parents have stacks of
Popular Mechanics and
Popular Science from the 50's and 60's that contain ads for surplus belt-fed anti-tank rifles, again obtainable with a check and an address.
Inline Image:
http://www.sturmgewehr.com/bhinton/OldGunAds/20mmSolothurnAd1957.jpgWeaponry wise, little has changed as to what's available to the American public in the past 75 years. The rifles are the same then and now--semi-automatic. The rounds are similar. We, as a society, are different. We're sicker. I don't think we're going to legislate and ban our way out of that.
Tocky on 14/8/2022 at 21:29
Nobody hunts with an AR 15. They play with one. If you want to call playing with them at a range or shooting willy nilly in the woods hunting then that is on you. A 30.06 is a much better hunting gun and can be had much cheaper. It has nowhere near the clip size which is my main problem with the AR 15. The AR, M16, SK, and AK are for playing with and feeling like Rambo. That's pretty much it.
The gun that killed Kennedy was single shot. He wouldn't have gotten a lot with that but getting one was his intent. I don't have any disagreement with hunting guns even if they used to be military when they are bolt action or 5 round. It's clip size that most concerns me. Nobody shoots fifty times at a deer and if they do I sure as hell don't want to be in the woods with them.
Anyway, nobody I knew was a man who played with guns. Guns had a purpose, a serious business, or they were not bought. I don't mean they did not appreciate accuracy and did not practice for that. But the men I knew would think something was off about the "I'm so manly because I have a gun" soldier of fortune types who played with them. That ad you posted was directed at that type. Unfortunately we have more of those type these days than the real men I grew up with. Once upon a time we had men who cared more about people than playing. They used guns to put food on the table to feed those people. We have degenerated from that. That is what I meant in longing for the old days.
RippedPhreak on 14/8/2022 at 23:03
Harumph, young people wanting guns these days haf smol peepee. Not like us Real Manly Boomers! Grrr woof woof!
Tocky on 15/8/2022 at 00:11
And that more than anything shows you have no conception of what I'm talking about. It's saddening that you don't.
mxleader on 16/8/2022 at 04:28
Quote Posted by Tocky
Nobody hunts with an AR 15. They play with one. If you want to call playing with them at a range or shooting willy nilly in the woods hunting then that is on you. A 30.06 is a much better hunting gun and can be had much cheaper. It has nowhere near the clip size which is my main problem with the AR 15. The AR, M16, SK, and AK are for playing with and feeling like Rambo. That's pretty much it.
The gun that killed Kennedy was single shot. He wouldn't have gotten a lot with that but getting one was his intent. I don't have any disagreement with hunting guns even if they used to be military when they are bolt action or 5 round. It's clip size that most concerns me. Nobody shoots fifty times at a deer and if they do I sure as hell don't want to be in the woods with them.
Anyway, nobody I knew was a man who played with guns. Guns had a purpose, a serious business, or they were not bought. I don't mean they did not appreciate accuracy and did not practice for that. But the men I knew would think something was off about the "I'm so manly because I have a gun" soldier of fortune types who played with them. That ad you posted was directed at that type. Unfortunately we have more of those type these days than the real men I grew up with. Once upon a time we had men who cared more about people than playing. They used guns to put food on the table to feed those people. We have degenerated from that. That is what I meant in longing for the old days.
I have no problem at all with any AR-15 style defense rifle or how many rounds a clip can hold. What I am bothered by is what has caused the rise in popularity of the AR-15 style defense rifle. I think that there are a few reasons why the popularity of these rifles has risen. One is the absolutely insane amount of news coverage of modern warfare. This probably started back in the early 1990's during Desert Shield/Desert Storm when around the clock CNN news coverage showed off all the cool new stuff the US had developed. Desert Storm also had a side affect with the Hummer H1 that the Iraq and Afghan war completely ruined but that's another subject. Then along came 9/11 and the subsequent war in Iraq and Afghanistan which made a lot of people paranoid and patriotic. Of course the protracted wars, excessive news coverage and TV shows these weapons and the idea of defending the homeland was really hammered into the American consciousness. You also have veterans returning home who had a lot of experience with these weapons and a lot of them wanted to buy them for whatever reason. On a side note there may be another conversation about why modern soldiers and veterans have become obsessed with wanting these weapons after the war when the same kind of people in previous wars had much less interest in having anything to do with their experiences after returning home. But anyway, then there is the rise of conspiracy shows, websites, dishonest politicians and chat groups that have lead to the increased interest of owning these weapons in large amount out of distrust of the US government. Then you have some school shootings with massive news coverage and also FBI raids on individuals and groups that end in a lot of shooting that cause increased paranoia and distrust in government even if the government was or is in right (Another debate). And a large number of people want to defend schools and other places with these weapons, with good intentions, but little or no useful training. And one of the strangest things that have increased the popularity of these types of weapons is Zombie Apocalypse shows and movies. I say this because I know a guy who owns a long running large gun shop in my hometown and years ago I would only see hunting rifles and a reasonable selection of handguns in his shop. Fast forward a few years and he makes huge amounts of money selling weapons that he doesn't really like. Most of those weapons have very little practical value in daily life because the only time you would need a camouflage double barrel shotgun with a folding bayonet is when you are defending your encampment from zombies. He told me one day that he literally mostly sells those crazy types of weapons because that what people want and what they want is literally zombie defense weapons. It's total madness. Also, speaking of increased paranoia local police and federal agencies don't help the paranoia by outfitting themselves with surplus military gear and showboating it to the public. You could place blame in a lot of places for what is happening today but not blame one single thing, person or entity for the rise in AR-15 popularity. As for the mass shooters themselves I think that their motives are related in some ways to the popularity of AR-15 style defense weapons because of publicity and availability but it seems like the root cause of their actions is another problem entirely. The bottom line with the AR-15 is literally the bottom line though. They make people a lot of money and we in the US are a capitalist society at heart and the product of that capitalism and its potential outcomes is rarely considered until lots of bad things happen.
june gloom on 23/8/2022 at 19:23
Similar to how modern American police are directly descended from slave hunters, American gun control was invented by the antebellum south to disarm freed black landowners and prevent them from protecting their property. California's ultra-restrictive gun laws have their roots in the Mulford Act, signed into law by Governor Ronald Reagan himself under the auspices of the NRA, because the Black Panthers were performing open carry patrols of their neighborhoods and keeping an eye on the notoriously violent Oakland police force to prevent police brutality. White supremacists love gun control as long as it doesn't include them (and it rarely does.)
So why are liberal centrists pro-gun control? Because when the parties switched ideologies in the 1960s, the Democratic party kept gun control as liberals were developing a post-world-wars fixation on curbing violence in a violent century. But typical for the Dems, road to hell, intentions, etc. They never completely grasp the core of the issue: the right sees ethnic and sexual minorities as an existential threat. They see brown folk as potential rapists, robbers and murderers. And, more recently, they've been painting queer people as groomers and degenerates. Therefore, right-wing gun nuts see gun control as taking away their only defense against hordes of dangerous minorities. Libs, having inherited gun control from the right following the Southern Strategy era, are notoriously bad at seeing the long-term consequences of band-aid solutions. They don't understand, can't understand, that the history of gun control is all twisted up with the history of white supremacy. If you want a modern example look at how reactionaries always bring up Chicago when gun control is mentioned. "Chicago has restrictive gun laws but out-of-control gang violence!" goes the narrative. What they're actually saying, of course, is that brown people are little more than criminals and gangsters who will ignore gun laws that punish and destroy innocent, respectable white communities. We've had decades -- centuries, even -- of propaganda painting brown people as inherently criminal and violent, and mythologizing key points in American history as gallant white men overcoming adversity (an oppressive regime, or nature itself.)
Meanwhile, you know who ignores gun laws and gets away with it? White supremacists, because their cop friends will typically overlook them. White supremacists have been building armories waiting for that race war they want so badly. Whenever a mass shooter is captured alive, you ever notice how often it's a white guy? Not always, but often enough. White guys stockpiling weapons is apparently never a cause for alarm until they do something "nobody saw coming." And every goddamn time, libs will wring their hands and cry about guns, and righties will wring their hands and cry about gun control, both completely unaware that gun control is a white supremacist invention and therefore cannot ever curb white supremacist violence -- which neither of them really want to do anyway, the libs because it scares people into voting blue and the righties because stochastic terrorism is part of their playbook.
We can talk all day long about "common sense gun control" and there are solutions to be found there, but the truth is, stuff like this is only ever going to be a bandaid on the gaping wound that is white supremacy. I'm against gun control because the people most against gun control scare the living shit out of me.
Jason Moyer on 25/8/2022 at 09:04
^^^^^ Yup
PigLick on 26/8/2022 at 06:47
I did some reading into this because I really knew very little about US gun issues, beyond what goes on in comm chat. You could probably add misogny to the white supremacist factor as well. Apparently more than two-thirds (68.2%) of mass shootings in the U.S. involve shooters who either killed family or intimate partners prior to the mass shooting or had another history of domestic violence.
I didnt quite get what June was saying regarding the slavery factor, but this article explains it quite well.(
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/962307) https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/962307
demagogue on 26/8/2022 at 08:19
The original perceived need for guns in early US history, from Southern Anglos' perspective, was (1) a hostile native population as they encroached into their lands and (2) hunting down fugitive slaves.
More specifically, the original "well ordered militias" the 2nd Amendment was designed to protect was basically talking about citizen posses, and in that period, those two things were the major reasons why citizens felt they needed to form posses and couldn't wait for the police or military to make the ~8 day march out to them, which in practice meant retributive attacks on Native American villages after one of their raids, and posses to track down and capture escaping slaves to bring them back to their owners.
The whole thing was morally rotten from the start. The narrative that it was designed to protect states from a hostile federal government was built into those two things, at least from what I've read. Starting around mid-19th Century it was the federal gov't that was trying to limit white raids against Native Americans, under President Grant and as Anglos moved into plains territory, and of course the politics of the Federal Gov't trying to limit the expansion of slavery, as territories became new states, and what to do with fugitive slaves in newly free areas, was the big third rail issue that eventually blew the country up and led to the Civil War.
So you can see how the entire narrative of the 2nd Amendment would have coalesced around a tyrannical federal gov't trying to cut down state's or citizen's prerogative to "protect themselves and their property". Then you fast forward a century and that narrative still persists without saying the quiet part at its roots.
PigLick on 26/8/2022 at 09:53
There really is no solution is there? I mean Australia has some serious racism issues which a lot of people like to pretend dont exist, but nothing to the extent of what you are suggesting.