Assault Weapon Ban

So, I've been hearing about the so-called "assault weapon ban" that was allowed to sunset years ago.

I guess the American public is so generally ignorant that most simply don't know that under that legislation, no weapons were actually banned. Only some non-essential cosmetic features.

The lamestream media continues to refer to this failed legislation as a "ban." Seems obvious that media elites want to perpetuate the fantasy that there was a time in the not so distant past when AR-15's were banned, and then the evil Republicans allowed them to come back.

I think there's a lot of folks in America that believe this was the case.

Sad.

I don't know what an assault weapon is.

It's whatever gun a politician wants to ban.

The first assault weapons ban in California was passed in 1990. Since then, the term has grown to encompass many, many weapons that were not banned by the original law.

Any object that can be used as a weapon to assault another person.

But within the context of the gun control debate, it's a military-style semi-automatic or fully-automatic rifle.

Although it could be something like an Uzi, which isn't a rifle but a kind of hand-held bullet Pez dispenser.

There won't be another "assault weapon ban". Raise the age to buy one, sure. Better background checks, absolutely. Assault weapon ban...nah.

In effect it is a semi automatic rifle that looks "military" and thus "scary" to people that know absolutely nothing about firearms.

Again, I was being facetious. Any weapon should be considered an assault weapon.

I'd very grudgingly agree to the first, and have no problem with the second.

I also think it's time to secure schools. Whether it's teachers, police, or private security (preferably a combination), there need to be armed people on campus. It wouldn't even have to be all the time. Sky marshals aren't on every flight, but the bad guys can never know when they will be.

shootouts on campus ...insert all the eye-rolling here.

within the context of the things being said by advocates of gun control, what they mean when they say "assault weapons" is, in broad terms, a long gun who's primary design and intent is to kill the most human being in the least amount of time and with the least difficulty. This involves considerations like rate of fire and mag capacity at a minimum.

One of the difficulties with this discussion is that pro-gun folks can always simply defer back to "well you just don't understand guns" as (they presume) a trump card to any disagreement.

The things that make a gun good for offense are the same things that make it good for defense.

And the primary intent of the AR-15 is for civilian defensive use, target shooting, and hunting. 99.9999% of owners use it that way.

We shouldn't ever have to 'secure' campuses. Some campuses would also be impossible to secure.

I guess we'll just have to pour money into mental health services.

LOL sorry, forgot I was in America.

I suppose we can just depend on people to snitch on someone acting strangely to the FBI. What's the harm in that? All upside.

The impetus for the AWB was gang activity. Lots of gang bangers used AKs and SKSs to do drive-bys. When I first started working here 25 years ago, it wasn't unusual to cover several of them in a single night.

I can only speak anecdotally, but locally the number of drive-bys decreased in the years following the ban not because the weapons were no longer available (as it's been pointed out numerous times, they were never totally "banned") but because the people doing the drive-bys were caught, prosecuted, and imprisoned. Within a couple of years of the AWB, drive-bys became a rarity because the criminals themselves became more rare, not the guns.

use it that way? Particularly target shooting? Sure, because most people are not killers.

But no, I do not buy the idea that it's a defensive weapon, nor do i buy the idea that porting an army weapon to civilian use suddenly makes it a benign squirrel rifle. It was designed specifically to kill people, as quickly and easily as possible.

A hammer is designed to make a blunt impact, it doesn't change that fact that many people might use them for paper weights or door stops.

Why?

And more than likely even without a AWB in place those same people would still have been caught and imprisoned leading to a decrease in drive-by shootings.

ummmmm.........

Two people "snitched" to the FBI about this guy. The last person gave his name, address, that he had guns and that he was going to shoot up a school soon.

FBI ignored it.

Just like they have ignored a whole slew of previous mass shooters and two bombers (Boston Marathon).

My point.

Exactly. Sorry if I wasn't clear, but snitching to the FBI has clearly not been successful. And let's say the FBI starts aggressively pursuing these tips. How long before people's lives start getting ruined because they made a bad joke or just pissed off the wrong person?

We need to.

And campuses are mostly already secure. You can't just enter a school from any direction. At least the ones here in South Florida.

We have police at airports, train stations, sporting events, concerts, government buildings, and even at malls.

But for some strange reason we refuse to put police in schools. We refuse to have some teachers who volunteer for it to be armed.

It's time for that to change.

Seems like that's addressing the symptoms as opposed to the disease.

But then again, an armed society is a polite society, right?

Until people realize the disease is a mental health system that doesn't work than yes we need to treat the symptoms.

I see this all the time in the mental health part of the jail. It's a joke.

We shouldn't have to have police, but we do.

Millions of people who use it for that purpose disagree with you, as do the vast majority of people who know about firearms.

I maintain it is an excellent defensive weapon. Low recoil, accurate, powerful but not too powerful, good capacity, good ergonomics, easy to strip, lots of available accessories.

I didn't make such a claim.

The same can be said for any defensive gun.

A rifle is designed to fire metallic projectiles. What you do with those projectiles is up to you.

Unless someone can figure out what's changed that has resulted in these kinds of mass shootings. Outside of organized crime (and even then only rarely), mass shootings didn't happen when there was actually much more access to firearms, even fully automatic ones like the Thompson. There was that Texas tower shooting in the '60s or '70s, but that was about it, and the shooter had a tumor in his brain that some think may have somehow inspired him to do what he did. But what about what sprung up in the '90s? Do these kids all have brain tumors?

Saturating a society with even more guns by arming teachers (Jesus, what kind of dystopia is this?) even for the ostensible purpose of "defense" will lead to yet more violence. How long before a disgruntled educator (hi @Dayton3) goes on a spree? Or how long before a student gets hold of their teachers gun?

What happened is that you had a couple of students go on school rampages.

It's the same situation that leads to riots, or suicide bombings in Iraq, or gang violence in cities. Things happen which normalize an action. Not normalize in a "that's a good thing" sense, but in a "that thing is actually something I could realistically do and others have" sense.

The best thing about this latest shooting is that he was captured alive. He can't be an idealized martyr against the popular kids, he's not a champion who went down in a blaze of glory, he's a guy that everyone now hates and will see misery for the rest of his days.

He needs to be in a cell, alone and left with the knowledge of what he did, and anyone else considering acts like this needs to see that they will remembered as a sad pathetic relic, aging into obscurity.

I kind of doubt this started only because one or two got the bright idea to actually do it and all the others since then are just copying them.

What would stop a disgruntled educator from going on a spree now?

Yes, there is a risk for accidents or misuse, but usn't that better than leaving students defenseless in the case of an attack?

Another "garamet never offers suggestions" suggestion: Get the FBI and local LEOs to coordinate instead of having pissing contests. If you can accomplish that, maybe you can get the FBI and the CIA to end their turf wars.