Fed Appeals Court upholds Maryland AR ban

Yes, if used to assault someone. If you punch me in the face, your bare fist is an assault weapon. Actually I don't want to take any chances on anyone getting hurt - everyone should wear regulation 12 ounce boxing gloves in public so if they do punch me in the face they don't fuck their hands up, and I don't get cut too badly.

The point is that it's a made up term which is completely arbitrary.

Like "Strategic Arms"? Or "Weapons of Mass Destruction"?

I don't know what "strategic arms" means without googling it. I never used the word in my military experiences. It is military, right?

It's like Russia putting nukes in Cuba.

go it - that's a little above my pay grade I guess. Are the nukes full auto? Wait...."burst" mode no doubt about it.

Yeah, I'm going to have to google it in order to provide any more information, but I think you get the idea.

Well, if anything, we've proven that the POTUS apparently has the same level of understanding of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty as two chumps on a message board.

You didn't say strategic arms reduction.

It's not fucking Simon Says, you muppet.

Strategic arms and strategic arms reduction are two distinctly different things.

Not when they are both referring to a type of weapon, which is what you seemed to be having trouble with.

I suppose I should have used the term strategic penis, to put it in terms you might understand, even if it's something you can never aspire to.

Not when referring to a weapon,yes. When referring to an action, it's very different.

ETA: my penis has had a lot of success when it comes to strategic placement.

HA! Yeah me too. Plus because of my enormous size now the Russians want to contract me out to ride on a custom made launcher in their next May Day parade.

I doubt it'll be a 4-4 decision. IIRC, SCOTUS has rarely had narrow margins when it comes to Second Amendment issues.

Which is why guys like Saddam and Bashar al-Assad tend to adopt a "kill 'em all and let Allah sort 'em out" mentality.

And tell me, what could a bunch of hippie college kids armed with weapons could have done at Kent State? Remember, as far as most Americans were concerned, they were the enemy. Do you think that folks would have switched sides if those kids had killed as many National Guard troops as students were killed? Or do you think that folks would have taken up arms against the US government? Or one of the longest serving governors in US history?

I've never said that Americans shouldn't be kept from owning firearms, only that I don't think that such ownership is going to be effective if the US government becomes tyrannical. There's a big fuck difference. After all, plenty of Native Americans owned firearms, but it didn't exactly give them control of the country, did it? What do you think would have happened if a nutter like Custer had access to a Davy Crockett? Do you think he'd have gotten his ass handed to him at Little Big Horn? I'm betting ol' "Yellow Hair" would have happily nuked the shit out of people, and since he won, nobody would have given two shits about the death toll. That tends to be what people do.

Heller was 5-4.

So, one out of how many rulings on gun issues? Saying that Heller was 5-4 doesn't mean anything if the other rulings were 6-3, 7-2, 8-1, or 9-0. Again, I'm not making a judgment call on any of the rulings, just saying that the majority of the rulings weren't decided by narrow margins. I could be wrong, but citing one case where there's a narrow majority doesn't invalidate my comment. (Citing multiple cases, would, of course.)

It's a stupid ruling since weapons that fire the exact same 5.56/.223 round, as the now illegal AR-15, are still legal.

I know, but the actual weapons themselves look SCARY! Just picking one up raises your aggression and reflexes and situational awareness by 50 percent at least! Any liberal will tell you that the laws of physics involved in the actual bullet speed & energy mean nothing when one gun looks SCARY and the other gun doesn't. Anything else is just "splitting hairs" and "defecting the argument".

Which is where we go back to the insta-Nazis comment I made earlier.

You were the one that made the point about the military allegedly having no problem shooting unarmed Americans. And this is a follow-on from the comment I made about certain people having the mentality that it would be impossible to fight against a tyrannical government, so apparently we should do everything possible to make sure of that. I just helped to underline how stupid that mentality is by using your own point against you.

Which is why there was such an uproar afterwards, right?

Yet everything you've been arguing says the opposite.

True, we didn't win, but we sure made them pay for it, didn't we?

Well, until they all started dying of radiation poisoning, anyway.

There are only 3 operative cases as to the nature of the 2nd amendment in case law (from SCOTUS). 2 of them (Heller - by far the most important - and MacDonald) were 5-4, the 3rd (Caetano) was per curiam, so 9-0 (and it should be unsurprising that the argument that the 2nd amendment only protected muskets failed unanimously).

Of the 3 non-operative cases, all 3 were unanimous, but Miller was undefended, and Presser and Cruikshank were only tangentially about the 2nd amendment, the larger case in each having a fairly obvious resolution (at the time... later courts said the Cruikshank court was full of shit).

In cases mentioning the 2nd amendment indirectly (mostly commerce clause challenges to gun and other laws), Duncan was 7-2, Lewis and Verdugo-Urquidez were 6-3 (all about incorporation against the states, of another amendment at the time), and Lopez and Stewart - or rather Raich, which the remanded Stewart case was based on - were also 5-4.

Happy now?

I'd just like to point out that my AR is .50 caliber.

a .50 cal AR? That recoil must be an ass-kicker! Anyway I'm watching a report about this now - all the Maryland banned semi-auto large magazine capacity weapons are not subject to the 2nd Amendment because they are "weapons of war." So riddle me this, Batman: if the banned weapons are "weapons of war" then why aren't these weapons used in war? For example the US army didn't use the semi-auto only civilian version of an AR-15 - we used (when I was in the sandbox in 2003) the fully automatic (three round burst) M-16, which was soon to be replaced by the M-4, which was also a three round burst fully auto weapon. Same for the AK-47 for many armies - fully auto, not semi auto. So I guess because they look like "weapons of war" then they must be weapons of war!
Damn are the left that fucking stupid? Maybe not, they figured out how to get a bullshit ban passed.

I haven't read the whole thread yet, so somebody may have already pointed this out, but they had rifles back in the 18th century, and the calibers back then were HUGE compared to today.

My question isn't really one of constitutionality. It's what is it, exactly, that Assault Weapon bans are supposed to accomplish? They are used in such a minute number of violent crimes. If you consider the number of violent crimes perpetrated by people with long guns in general, not even Assault Weapons in particular, more people are beaten to death bare handed.

Seems more of a case of going after low hanging fruit in order to look like you're doing something about violent crime instead of actually doing something about violent crime.

It's because they look scary.

Strategic arms have nothing to do with the 2nd amendment.

Yep, and so was McDonald. And those two are the most significant 2nd Amendment cases of all time. Tuckerfan does not recall correctly.

This was, in my mind, one of the biggest reasons to oppose Hillary. A SCOTUS judge appointed by her would've joined with the other liberals in simply interpreting the 2nd Amendment away.

Yes. Only tactical arms deal with the 2nd Amendment.

Exactly - much like the TSA at the airport is "security theater" banning guns that aren't often even used for crimes is "gun control theater."