War Man wrote:
[...]
I could go on and on with bunch more examples. I am generally against any kind of gun laws/restrictions because often times they are made by people that are ignorant of guns and up creating laws that are contradictory, inconsistent, and/or just plain incorrect. Of course it is possible they know better, but they just want guns banned so they fucking lie to get things banned.
uziq wrote:
https://twitter.com/ronnyjacksontx/status/1548803270696640512?s=21&t=ZE5gayO6PV77NrCc0pWfwA
this texan calls them ‘assault rifles’ too?
even people on your side of the debate are pretty casual with their terms, it seems. doh!
The guy is running for politics, hell he could easily be someone that actually doesn't own any guns but wants votes so says and does whatever to get it. Being Texan doesn't guarantee being a big gun guy. It took Texas awhile to be a constitutional carry state when several states before it became constitutional carry.
war man, whilst i don't doubt that you know your weapons very well and can indeed poke holes in any legal or technical definitions, what you're highlighting are just the technical limitations of
any sort of legal ban, or indeed legislative definitions in general. there is always an 'arms race' (no pun intended) between a textual or legal definition and real-world applications of that term, which inevitably escape it.
it's the same thing with the war on drugs. legislation is modified to add to an ever-growing list of chemicals and substances which are declared dangerous or 'scare imbeciles' (to use your term) into political action. in chemistry as in gun design: change a few molecules or 'palm grip' modules here and there, and you technically have a 'new' thing by an extremely literal legal definition – perhaps even a more dangerous new thing compared to the afeared illegal ones. occasionally someone will come up with the seemingly logical idea to include entire
classes of drugs in a sweeping ban, just to foreclose the possibility of this future tinkering and to shut down the ever-escalating arms race or increasing speciation. ... but then those class-based definitions never quite hold, as there are no fixed ontological and universal categories: there is no a priori 'amphetamine' class that will cover all future variations that chemists cook up, just as there is no a priori 'assault weapon' class that will effortlessly and cleanly classify all weapons. this is why legal interpretation exists and why a little commonsense goes a long way.
so far, so legal. this is just a basic language problem of semantics, and of trying to nail down a complex reality, into relatively simple and logical categories for the purposes of legislation. this is not an insuperable problem, however.
i can't help but feel you are missing the forest for the trees. the gun control problem has been largely nixed in every other country on earth by a swift ban of 'assault-style weapons'. doesn't matter if there are technically 'better' assault rifles that a specialist could still get hold of, or a gun-nut aficionado. (most mass killers are not gun-nut aficionados, i'd wager: they're unhinged individuals who just want to get hold of the easiest thing that can kill very quickly.) putting in place reasonable restrictions, regulations, background checks, etc, - which includes at a federal level of coordination - can go a long ways to putting this phenomenon to bed. there are many, many case studies where a country has effectively nipped its mass shootings phenomenon in the bud with a judicious and timely ban: australia and new zealand are two recent examples.
criminals will always be able to get guns if they really want them; probably true enough. you'll never be able to ban a class of weapons in a way that is entirely technically correct and doesn't produce weird exceptions or categorisations; probably true enough. but there
are reasonable steps that a country can take to make these things sufficiently difficult to get. the fact is that right now an unhinged individual can acquire an extremely proficient killing weapon in most states with little to no bother at all. that's clearly a major contributor to mass killings, and it can be dealt with in the main by a broad-brush political solution, even if that makes a niche of hobbyists and weapon enthusiasts wrinkle their brow and start muttering 'ackshually ...'
War Man wrote:
In fact the assault weapons ban in a nutshell was just a ban on weapons and features that looked scary despite said features having no impact on the weapons' performance.
for a ban that was "technically inconsistent and contradictory" from the POV of a gun enthusiast, it was also, erm, an effective piece of legislation that evidently served its purpose. again, i'm not claiming it was literally and exhaustively perfect in its definitions (see, again, drugs bans), and that it didn't make a few militia LARPers in illinois angry because they couldn't get hold of their latest spec ops roleplay gear.
people here can get hold of guns if they have a technical and specialist reason for doing so. for which they have to go through a long list of paperwork and database registrations to make sure that they are (a) compos mentis, (b) have a justified reason for needing the weapon, and (c) can quickly be held responsible for anything that happens with that firearm. this might scream 'tyranny' to you, but europeans generally like living in societies where they don't have to worry about their children being murdered to death when dropped off each day to learn their ABCs. it seems to me that you're willing to live with a very high level of background anxiety, misery, death and terror just so you can get excited about the difference between ammo types and camo patterns. i dunno: maybe just get a new hobby, semi-war man?
Last edited by uziq (2022-07-18 18:13:28)
