School shooting Florida

[ponderingturtle]

There's the problem with so many of the anti-gun people--kids and adults alike--seem to have. They don't have a good grasp on the issue. If somebody says 'bullett' when they mean 'cartridge,' I'm not going to condemn them. But somebody who wants to ban "assault rifles" or doesn't know the difference between 'automatic' and 'semi-automatic' doesn't get to have an opinion on gun control.

So that then includes the NRA as they count the Puckle gun and revolvers as semi auto weapons? And of course in hand guns it has not entirely fallen out that way as it still seems that the Revolver vs Automatic not Revolver vs Semi Automatic in nomenclature. The idea that automatic mean only full auto is fairly recent, and I wonder how much it was for exactly that argument.

Though funnily enough the same people who make these arguments never seem to apply them to say laws effecting women's health. There ignorance is a really pluss for lawmaking.

 

[The Great Zaganza]

There's the problem with so many of the anti-gun people--kids and adults alike--seem to have. They don't have a good grasp on the issue. If somebody says 'bullett' when they mean 'cartridge,' I'm not going to condemn them. But somebody who wants to ban "assault rifles" or doesn't know the difference between 'automatic' and 'semi-automatic' doesn't get to have an opinion on gun control.

Of course they do - they are voters.
If the pro-gun lobby is unwilling to make a clear distinction, why should the opponents?

 

[Andy_Ross]

trump Tweets

"Highly trained expert teachers will be allowed to conceal carry, subject to State Law. Armed guards OK, deterrent"

and

"On 18 to 21 Age Limits, watching court cases and rulings before acting. States are making this decision. Things are moving rapidly on this, but not much political support (to put it mildly)"


So, what a surprise. His bold statements at his 'bipartisan' meeting have all evaporated.
Instead it's going to be more guns.

 

[crescent]

.... doesn't know the difference between 'automatic' and 'semi-automatic' doesn't get to have an opinion on gun control.

I've taken to calling that the Mike Hammer fallacy. Until pretty recently, "automatic" meant semi-automatic. That was common usage in the 1930's-1950's era "hardboiled" detective stories, such as Mike Hammer.

If you'll forgive me for quoting myself from another thread, I've got the links here:

That was my experience also. These days it seems like an unforgivable sin, used to dismiss a person's point of view. Not so long ago, however, "automatic" meant semi-auto. Full-auto was usually just referred to as a "machine gun", even if it didn't meet the current definition of sustained automatic fire.

In a previous thread, I quoted from a Mike Hammer book which was using the word "automatic" to refer to what were clearly semi-auto pistols.

Here's one.

Here's another.

The thing about Mike Hammer, is that if you disagree with him, he'll just shoot you in the leg.

ETA: This is one of the semi-auto pistols that is referred to as an "automatic" in the Mike Hammer books.

And lets not forget Dana Loesch, who cited the existence of "fully automatic" guns at the time of the crafting of the Bill of Rights. I have yet to see any real documentation on that, other than one sort of gun (Belton Rifle) that was designed but never built and would have been more likely to either not work or kill the user rather than actually cause harm to whoever it was pointed at.

 

[Ron Swanson]

I've taken to calling that the Mike Hammer fallacy. Until pretty recently, "automatic" meant semi-automatic. That was common usage in the 1930's-1950's era "hardboiled" detective stories, such as Mike Hammer.

If you'll forgive me for quoting myself from another thread, I've got the links here:

Good point

The Colt M1911 is often (always?) referred to as "automatic"

 

[ponderingturtle]

Good point

The Colt M1911 is often (always?) referred to as "automatic"

Because for a long time automatic was vague, it was not clearly semi, full or selective fire.

 

[quadraginta]

<snip>


And lets not forget Dana Loesch, who cited the existence of "fully automatic" guns at the time of the crafting of the Bill of Rights.

<snip>

She's just the official mouthpiece for the NRA. There's no reason to to expect her to know the difference between 'automatic' and 'semi-automatic', so I guess she "doesn't get to have an opinion on gun control".

Maybe someone should tell the NRA that.

 

[crescent]

She's just the official mouthpiece for the NRA. There's no reason to to expect her to know the difference between 'automatic' and 'semi-automatic', so I guess she "doesn't get to have an opinion on gun control".

Maybe someone should tell the NRA that.

Yes - that made me curious, so I looked it up again. Here are the transcripts from the town hall meeting.

LOESCHE: On that issue, at the time, there were fully automatic weapons that were available -- the Belton gun and puckle gun. In fact, the Continental Congress reviewed a purchase of one of those firearms --

The Puckle gun was not fully automatic, or even semi-automatic. It was a sort of a big revolver than required manual operation to rotate from one revolver chamber to the next. Only two were ever built.

The Belton gun never seems to have existed. It was designed but never built, and it seems to have been manual action, even if it would not have required reloading between every shot. Superposed loads existed, but were usually manually operated between charges. Some seem to have sometimes been used at the time with alternating holes drilled between barrels of double-barreled guns, such that igniting the distal-most load in one barrel would successively ignite loads alternating between barrels - but that (and superposed loading in general) seems to have been very unreliable and more of a novelty that anything, more likely to kill or injure the user than the target.

Volley guns existed, but they were not fully automatic, they fired all rounds at once.

There were no fully automatic guns at the time of the Revolutionary war or the drafting of the Bill of Rights. The NRA claimed wrong, even though they are the self-professed experts. I guess the NRA just sort of revels in its lack of knowledge on the subject.

 

[jimbob]

Mind you, I'm not sure that a hand-cranked Gatling gun would be considered automatic either.

 

[Myriad]

There's the problem with so many of the anti-gun people--kids and adults alike--seem to have. They don't have a good grasp on the issue. If somebody says 'bullett' when they mean 'cartridge,' I'm not going to condemn them. But somebody who wants to ban "assault rifles" or doesn't know the difference between 'automatic' and 'semi-automatic' doesn't get to have an opinion on gun control.

Then you're heading into a colossal strategic blunder that will lead to the ruin of your position.

"They" have a good enough grasp of what they think the issue is. And it's not how many bumps the bump stock could hold or how long the ricochet chamber was in the gun that shot their kids. It's that some ******* who everyone knew was crazy could still get a boom-stick and shoot their kids with it.

You can declare your own unconcern about their opinion, but you don't get to decide whether or not they have, or will vote on, their opinion. If you want policy to be based on a nuanced understanding of the differences between firearms, then do what you can to make sure that people who lack that nuanced understanding acquire it. Because like it or not, you're at a watershed here. John Q. and Carol M. Public are on the verge of giving up trying to resolve the issue based on careful assessment of optimum compromise between opposing principles, and will instead start simply advocating and voting their own self-interest, which they increasingly see as having fewer guns of any kind around.

The obvious and inevitable response to "you don't know the proper terminology to distinguish one gun from another, therefore you shouldn't have a say," is going to be, "indeed I do find it difficult to distinguish one kind of gun from another, so let's just KISS and ban them all." That is not the way you want this controversy to play out in the coming years.

 

[CaptainHowdy]

I've taken to calling that the Mike Hammer fallacy. Until pretty recently, "automatic" meant semi-automatic. That was common usage in the 1930's-1950's era "hardboiled" detective stories, such as Mike Hammer.

1950s? That's not "pretty recently." How old are you? Whatever words were used in the olden days, people today should know the difference. Hysterically demanding that the government ban weapons that have already been banned makes a person look like they don't know what they're talking about.

If you'll forgive me for quoting myself from another thread, I've got the links here:


And lets not forget Dana Loesch, who cited the existence of "fully automatic" guns at the time of the crafting of the Bill of Rights. I have yet to see any real documentation on that, other than one sort of gun (Belton Rifle) that was designed but never built and would have been more likely to either not work or kill the user rather than actually cause harm to whoever it was pointed at.

Source for the Dana Loesch quote?

 

[CaptainHowdy]

She's just the official mouthpiece for the NRA. There's no reason to to expect her to know the difference between 'automatic' and 'semi-automatic', so I guess she "doesn't get to have an opinion on gun control".

Maybe someone should tell the NRA that.

If she doesn't know the difference between auto and semi-auto, no, she doesn't.

 

[crescent]

1950s? That's not "pretty recently." How old are you? Whatever words were used in the olden days, people today should know the difference. Hysterically demanding that the government ban weapons that have already been banned makes a person look like they don't know what they're talking about.


Source for the Dana Loesch quote?

Transcript: Stoneman students' questions to lawmakers and the NRA at the CNN town hall She makes the claim at the one-hour thirty-eight minute point in the video.

Near the end of the transcripts:

SCHULMAN: When the second amendment was ratified, they were talking about muskets. We're not talking about muskets. We're talking about assault rifles. We're talking about weapons of mass destruction that kill people.
(APPLAUSE)
LOESCHE: On that issue, at the time, there were fully automatic weapons that were available -- the Belton gun and puckle gun. In fact, the Continental Congress reviewed a purchase of one of those firearms --

The woman Loeach is speaking to (Linda Beigel Schulman) is the mother of one of the slain teachers (Scott Biegel). Loesch is speaking on behalf of the NRA, she's the person they chose to be their representative, she was also included in great big photos at the NRA's booth at CPAC. I have seen no retraction of the claim from the NRA.

 

[CaptainHowdy]

Yes - that made me curious, so I looked it up again. Here are the transcripts from the town hall meeting.



The Puckle gun was not fully automatic, or even semi-automatic. It was a sort of a big revolver than required manual operation to rotate from one revolver chamber to the next. Only two were ever built.

The Belton gun never seems to have existed. It was designed but never built, and it seems to have been manual action, even if it would not have required reloading between every shot. Superposed loads existed, but were usually manually operated between charges. Some seem to have sometimes been used at the time with alternating holes drilled between barrels of double-barreled guns, such that igniting the distal-most load in one barrel would successively ignite loads alternating between barrels - but that (and superposed loading in general) seems to have been very unreliable and more of a novelty that anything, more likely to kill or injure the user than the target.

Volley guns existed, but they were not fully automatic, they fired all rounds at once.

There were no fully automatic guns at the time of the Revolutionary war or the drafting of the Bill of Rights. The NRA claimed wrong, even though they are the self-professed experts. I guess the NRA just sort of revels in its lack of knowledge on the subject.

Looks like there was a whole lot of nonsense being spewed at that townhall meeting. Either Dana Loesch doesn't know the difference between auto and semi-auto or she doesn't know that automatic weapons didn't exist when the 2nd amendment was debated. I know that lack of knowledge doesn't bother any of you but it bothers me.

She also missed the opportunity to tell that idiot Schulman that, no, we're not talking about assault rifles.

 

[crescent]

Puckle gun, AR-15, what’s the difference?

“On that issue, at the time, there were fully automatic weapons that were available — the Belton gun and Puckle gun,” Loesch said. “In fact, the Continental Congress reviewed a purchase of one of those firearms.”

And there you had it. Typical NRA obfuscation. Neither the Belton nor the Puckle gun was fully automatic. The automatic weapon wasn’t invented until 1892. And, by the way, the Belton gun was never actually a thing. It was an idea proposed in 1777 to the Continental Congress by gun designer John Belton. Gen. George Washington ordered 100 of the guns, but the weapon never reached the manufacturing stage because Belton’s prices were too high for the borderline-bankrupt Congress. So we’ll never know whether it would have worked or not.

The Belton gun, at best, could have fired 16 rounds over, perhaps, a few minutes. Here’s how Belton described the loading and firing of his conceptual gun in a letter to the Continental Congress. You will note that he never guaranteed it would shoot more than five rounds at a time:

“Sir, Please to inform the Honourable Congress, that as I have heretofore asserted to them, that I can discharge sixteen, or twenty balls from one piece, one charging, by once puling tricker, or at two or three diffrent times, by little more than cocking & priming the same lock two or three different times. And as I mean ever to fulfill all & every one of my Assertions, I propose . . . to make the following exhibition to make five different discharges from one pulling tricker.”

Note the the "five different discharges from one pulling tricker" probably refers to a volley of five six rounds simultaneously, which is not fully automatic. The energy from one shot does nothing to make the second shot happen.

The NRA and its allies use jargon to bully gun-control supporters

I’m writing a book on the Belton gun and can safely say her argument is bunk: Both the Belton and the Puckle required an operator to fire each shot with an individual pull of the trigger, then manually cock the gun’s action to fire each successive shot. This is known as “single action,” and it’s about as far from “fully automatic” as a firearm gets. Modern automatic arms can fire upward of 100 rounds per minute with a single, sustained trigger pull — sometimes more; the Puckle and the Belton “repeaters,” with an adept operator cycling their actions under the best conditions, could perhaps fire a shot every five to 10 seconds.

And yes, a growing number of American gun owners, including me, find “assault weapons” easier to define, and harder to defend, with time. I know that an AR-15 is not a machine gun or an assault rifle, that its rounds are not high-powered, that it accepts magazines, not clips — any law that seeks to ban them should be written with precision. But I also know that it, or a weapon patterned after it, was used in Aurora, Colo.; Newtown, Conn.; Las Vegas; San Bernardino, Calif.; Orlando; Sutherland Springs, Tex.; and Parkland. Whatever the causes — media sensationalism, marketing, “tacticool” military mimicry, easy availability — this rifle and its relatives are clearly go-tos for a certain kind of American-bred killer. That’s worth at least addressing in a public policy forum, even if the pro-gun camp continues to suppress debate with heavy rhetorical firepower, instead of just shooting straight.

 

[Trebuchet]

Looks like there was a whole lot of nonsense being spewed at that townhall meeting. Either Dana Loesch doesn't know the difference between auto and semi-auto or she doesn't know that automatic weapons didn't exist when the 2nd amendment was debated. I know that lack of knowledge doesn't bother any of you but it bothers me.

She also missed the opportunity to tell that idiot Schulman that, no, we're not talking about assault rifles.

It's not lack of knowledge. It's lying.

 

[smartcooky]

1950s? That's not "pretty recently." How old are you? Whatever words were used in the olden days, people today should know the difference. Hysterically demanding that the government ban weapons that have already been banned makes a person look like they don't know what they're talking about.


Source for the Dana Loesch quote?

The meaning of "Automatic" can depend on what you are talking about.

Originally, when referring to firearms, "automatic" referred to the reloading mechanism of the rifle, for example an SLR (self-loading rifle) such as an M16, L1A1 or a FN-FAL automatically reloads and cocks the rifle ready for firing after each round is fired.

Note: In the Belgian FN FAL battle rifle, FAL stands for "Fusil Automatique Léger" (Light Automatic Rifle).

When I did my weapons training with the FN-FAL, the instructors specifically and repeatedly called them an automatic rifle "because the rounds were loaded automatically". I'm my time in the military, what is now referred to as "an automatic weapon" was referred to as a "machine gun".

IMO, the correct nomenclature should be

Automatic: Any firewarm that reloads itself or does not require a manual action by the shooter to reload and re-cock.

Semi-Automatic: Any automatic firearm that can only fire one round per trigger pull.

Fully Automatic: Any automatic firearm that can fire multiple rounds per trigger pull.

This would cause far less confusion than the current state of affairs!

 

[Meadmaker]

There's the problem with so many of the anti-gun people--kids and adults alike--seem to have. They don't have a good grasp on the issue. If somebody says 'bullett' when they mean 'cartridge,' I'm not going to condemn them. But somebody who wants to ban "assault rifles" or doesn't know the difference between 'automatic' and 'semi-automatic' doesn't get to have an opinion on gun control.

Well, too bad, because we still vote, whether or not you think we ought to have opinions.

And I do know the difference between automatic and semi-automatic. It's the 'ban assault rifles" that trips me up. I want to ban them, for some definitions of "ban".

Here's the deal, CaptainHowdy. I know that there is no universally agreed definition of an "assault rifle". It's just a catch all term. I know that when legislation banning them was put together last time, and when it will be put together next time, a bunch of congressional staffers and their legal teams sat around a committee room and argued about whether this one ought to be included or that one ought to be excluded, and like every other committee in the world came up with something that was not perfect, and was in some places almost silly.

And you know what? I don't care. The fact that they did this or that or the other thing and didn't get all of the right weapons doesn't bother me. They got some of them, and next time they'll get some of them, and the damned things are a plague on the United States and yes, banning them, or severely restricting them, will indeed make it harder to get hold of them and will in fact result in a few less dead kids. I don't know how many, because even after the laws are passed some idiot somewhere will still manage to get hold of one and do something stupid, and some fool will say, "See, it still happens", but we'll never know about the mass shooting that didn't happen because that other idiot didn't manage to get the paperwork in order to get past the restrictions, or got caught in a sting operation trying to buy one illegally.

But I want them banned, and it's easy to see why, and I don't give a rat's ass who thinks I'm not entitled to an opinion on the subject. Enough is enough. No good can ever come from selling the damned things.


But if the NRA asks real nice, I'll let people keep them at a licensed and locked range, because dang it, they make a really cool sound.

 

[Meadmaker]

And, while i'm here, it really ticks me off that the American people are too cheap to hire an extra chemistry teacher to improve our pathetic schools, but they'll hire armed guards.


Oh.....and they'll hire grief counselors.

 

[thaiboxerken]

But somebody who wants to ban "assault rifles" or doesn't know the difference between 'automatic' and 'semi-automatic' doesn't get to have an opinion on gun control.

Nonsense. But keep on preaching your religion and applauding the sacrifice of lives so you can have your precious toys.