School shooting Florida

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Civet said:
Is there an increase in AR-15 sales going on right now thanks to this? I saw a little coverage about one shop, but nothing more general.
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I read somewhere that the owners of the local store that had sold this guy the AR-15 he used to shoot up the school were so distraught they closed the store.
 
quadraginta said:
Do you really think that handguns and rifles would make any inroads against our government if it were to seriously try to suppress the public?





If you were arguing for the legal possession of RPGs, armed drones, and tanks this might make some sense, but as far as current legal weapons are concerned you seem to be deluded by too much Hollywood.
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What might the original drafters have said if brought here in a time machine? Possible solutions might include permitting citizens the same weapons as the army or disbanding the standing army entirely. They might just assume the army would no more likely obey a tyrannical government than the people would. Or they might seize on the example of India and realise that violence is not the only way to solve that problem.
 
Jack by the hedge said:
What might the original drafters have said if brought here in a time machine?
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Nobody alive possesses insight sufficient enough to answer that question intelligently. People who pretend they do will inevitably prefer uneducated guesses that most closely reflect their own predispositions.
 
Captain_Swoop said:
No this is wrong it isn't nearly impossible at all.
If you join a shooting club and attend regularly and enter matches either range or field target then you have a need for a gun.
If you have permission from the landowner and regularly go to shoot rabbit, pigeon, crows and such you have a need.
If you regularly go shooting deer then you have a need.

Over the years I have had a 22 semi auto for field shooting, a 22 target rifle and a Lee Enfield Mk 4 that I used for 'vintage military' competition.
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OK, well ... from your examples - the guns held at clubs (can you take them home?), the shooting at birds and game on private farmland, and the target shooting are all things that I covered above saying that afaik you can sill get a license for that, although I expect even that is much more difficult now than it was before things like Hungerfod and Dunblane ...

... as for your Lee Enfield (is that an ancient army rifle?) which you used at "vintage military competitions", that too was presumably target shooting or military re-enacments and such-like. Although even there, I'd be surprised if you are now in 2018 still able to get a license to keep a rifle like that and bullets in your own home, such that you could if you wished just walk out into the street and start killing people ... because that is the exactly the sort of thing that the laws were changed to stop after Hungerford and Dunblane ...

... but afaik the picture I presented of the lack of firearms in almost any normal UK home is true - you certainly will almost never find anyone with legally owned guns in their house (except for farmers, and maybe people who have a licences to shoot game). And you certainly cannot get a license now by saying you need it for such things as self protection or by saying you "need" it to enjoy shooting animals and tin cans in your garden or in the local park.
 
Thermal said:
According to CBS, Jersey ranks 48th in the country for gun ownership at under 12% owning. #1 Alaska, by comparison, has over 61%, link below. Hawaii ranks #10 with a surprising 45%. Jersey's gun crime is on the low side nationally, and is concentrated in the poorer cities (Camden, Newark, Trenton). I would have thought gun ownership was much higher, as about half of the people I know have guns.

https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/gun-ownership-rates-by-state/4/



I doubt we could ever adopt that level of restriction. Hunting in particular is almost a religion here, more a way of life than a pastime. Shotguns and rifles won't be leaving the landscape in my lifetime. We seem to get along fine without carrying handguns around, though, and we have a list of banned 'assault' weapons. If Jersey can pull it off, other States can too.


I really don't think it can happen, as in large scale disarming. Semis can (and should) be phased out, sooner rather than later. But the attachment to guns runs deep here. I think getting handguns of the street and semis off the shelves are the most realistic goals, in addition to annual licensing and registration. I think it would be better to slam new rules down fast, rather than slowly. With the rate of mass shootings rising as fast as they are, I don't think we have the luxury of a decade to enact serious reform.
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Just a couple of comments on the above (almost all of which I accept as entirely reasonable, and not far at all from what I also think about the situation) -

- re. the first highlighted paragraph - that's actually not far off the situation we have now in the UK. Ie, you can still get a license here to use a shotgun or some restricted types of rifle to shoot on farmland at certain types of wild animals (I'm a big animal lover, so personally I would stop that immediately, however that's another subject). But in the UK all handguns are banned, and so too afaik are most types of high-power rifles. So all of that seems not very different from NJ.

- re the 2nd highlighted paragraph - I too would like to see changes which remove the guns quickly rather than my suggestion of phasing in the changes over a decade or so; I was just trying to find a compromise that might not be too damaging to the businesses & the jobs of people who work in gun shops or manufacturing etc. But of course, if you take 5, 10 or 20 years to remove most of the more lethal weapons from US homes, then that will mean 5, 10, 20 years more of far too many deaths ... so, of course it would be better to do it quickly if that is practically possible.

I can accept that feelings about this run very deep in the US, and that as you say for many people hunting and shooting is a way of life (especially in the more rural areas?). In my lifetime I don't think that most people in the UK really regarded guns and shooting in that way (though I've lived all my life in London, and people who live in rural farming towns probably have a different memory of what happened there in the more distant past) ... though of course we did at one time have many more guns freely available, and that was what changed after the shootings at Hungerford and Dunblane (those were mass public shootings similar to the US cases ... though those two cases were 20 and 30 years ago now), but as I say those two cases did finally result in much tighter gun laws in the UK and did result in hand guns and most types of modern high-power rifles being banned completely from any sort of private home ownership.
 
a_unique_person said:
The problem is that mental health issues are more prevalent than many people realise. Americans use a lot more anti-depressants and self medication than you would think.
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As well as discouraging treatment for mental health. And there is the side point that what actual diagnosis these individuals are supposed to have other than being angry mostly white men, which is not a recognized diagnosis.

The whole mental health argument is simply and argument from incredulity.
 
IanS said:
OK, well ... from your examples - the guns held at clubs (can you take them home?), the shooting at birds and game on private farmland, and the target shooting are all things that I covered above saying that afaik you can sill get a license for that, although I expect even that is much more difficult now than it was before things like Hungerfod and Dunblane ...

... as for your Lee Enfield (is that an ancient army rifle?) which you used at "vintage military competitions", that too was presumably target shooting or military re-enacments and such-like. Although even there, I'd be surprised if you are now in 2018 still able to get a license to keep a rifle like that and bullets in your own home, such that you could if you wished just walk out into the street and start killing people ... because that is the exactly the sort of thing that the laws were changed to stop after Hungerford and Dunblane ...

... but afaik the picture I presented of the lack of firearms in almost any normal UK home is true - you certainly will almost never find anyone with legally owned guns in their house (except for farmers, and maybe people who have a licences to shoot game). And you certainly cannot get a license now by saying you need it for such things as self protection or by saying you "need" it to enjoy shooting animals and tin cans in your garden or in the local park.
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On youtube there is a channel about british muzzleloaders though he also does a lot with cartridge rifles. He has videos on how he reloads his lee- Metford rifle at home. And his shooting videos seem to be in the countryside not a specific organized range.
 
Checkmite said:
Nobody alive possesses insight sufficient enough to answer that question intelligently. People who pretend they do will inevitably prefer uneducated guesses that most closely reflect their own predispositions.
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I really wasn't trying to channel the spirits of the ancients or suggest the original drafters would have some kind of uniquely brilliant insight to show us The Right Thing To Do. If anything, the reverse. They developed a system for the time and place they lived in. They had no mystical powers of eternal infallibility.

I think people get carried away with the noble-sounding poetic language and think it must be right so the only puzzle is the details of how to obey it, forgetting the big clue that it is literally an amendment and can of course be amended if it proves unsuitable to the present time.
 
Pretty sure Thomas Jefferson, mind blown, would just spend all his time fapping to Nicki Minaj videos.
 
I hate the whole "We should only muzzle loading muskets because that's what they had when they wrote the 2nd amendment."

By that logic no internet, no TV, no radio, no file sharing, no e-mail, no telegraph... just hand cranked printing presses and town criers because that's what they had when they wrote the 1st Amendment.

An AR-15 is far less removed a Revolutionary War musket than the Pirate Bay is from hand printed copies of Common Sense.

Bring a "Founding Father" to now and they'd grasp what an modern rifle is pretty quick. 4Chan? Not so much. Well maybe Franklin...
 
A Founding Father would realize that the US has a standing army and therefore doesn't need a right to bear arms anymore.
 
The Great Zaganza said:
A Founding Father would realize that the US has a standing army and therefore doesn't need a right to bear arms anymore.
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Yeah because our Founding Fathers were all about all the power being in a centralized Federal level army and not the populace.
 
The Great Zaganza said:
A Founding Father would realize that the US has a standing army and therefore doesn't need a right to bear arms anymore.
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I think the Founding Fathers would say that because the US has a standing army, we need the right to bear arms more than ever. However, that isn't to say that it makes sense and, more importantly, having a gun in the trunk of your car is not exercising your "right to bear arms", as it was understood by the authors of the second amendment.

I'm very sympathetic to some arguments related to the importance of the second amendment and its role in resisting tyrannical governments. Private ownership of AR-15s would not achieve that role.
 
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