Off Topic Politics Thread

Oh come off it There are thousands of children "teased and tormented" every day in the world, hundreds just in the UK. The difference? Children in this country (and elsewhere) don't think, "I'm going to get my own back on that girl who wouldn't smile at me and that boy who laughed at me and get myself a gun and kill them all." Next you're going to say that a woman deserves to be raped just because she didn't want to dance with a man or didn't want to have sex. Victim-blaming is disgusting and shameful. I'm surprised at you.

 

Luckily, in the UK, if you upset someone on a football forum, and they're having a bad day, they can't pop down to Wallmart and buy an assault rifle.

 

Making it harder for homicidal maniacs to buy guns

Can't be that hard, most countries manage it pretty well.

 

I'm frankly gobsmacked at your comment, a bit of bullying (which goes on at virtually every school in the World) is no justification at all for someone getting cold bloodedly murdered and very often it is people that had nothing to do with it that get caught up in it.

 

OK apart from the nonsense about rape, you are now trying to say why he should not have been able to buy the gun, why not ? what needs to be changed? what do you actually think would have stopped this shooting ?

 

Its no justification to a normal person, this was clearly not a normal person

 

But you were commenting like they deserved it in some way.

 

Sorry Helen, the rape comment is comparing apples and oranges and there is no way to say a woman deserves to be raped. In schools across the UK cases of knife attacks are on the increase, guns are harder to get hold of in the UK and I'm pretty sure that some knife attacks would have been with a hand gun if the attacker could have got one, the question is why are kids now becoming more aggressive and twisted in the last 10 years

 

you're arguing in circles

 

Soooo... doesn't that suggest that a certain amount of gun control is the answer? From everything I've read I don't think that anyone is advocating banning guns completely in the US - everyone knows that it would never, ever work - but surely some level of gun control, having to register firearms, not selling guns there and then at gun fairs (gun fairs, Jesus!!), having to go through certain checks, not allowing people with registered mental illnesses to purchase guns etc is at least a step in the right direction?

 

But no one is saying what is gun control. It ranges from selling no more guns to going door to door and taking the guns. The Florida shooting shows that communication between different forces and different states is ****, only 38 states report people with mental illness or are thought to be a danger. A registered person could simply go to a different state, or buy the different parts online and make the rifle at home. The Federal government would have to take control and then the States would shout bloody murder. Semi automatic rifles account for less than 2 % of deaths, banning these and stopping there would solve nothing, most weekends places like new Orleans have 10 fatalities and none are with rifles, the wishy washy `gun reform` these people are marching for would not work. With changing the law, words matter and shouting gun reform will not cut it.

 

I am not saying that easy access to guns is a good thing, they should be hard to get, but how is it regulated and what about the 3,000,000 guns already out there?

 

in most countries its pretty much illegal to buy a firearm. in the UK for example you would have to apply to the police, they will see why you need a firearm (normally a shotgun license) they will inspect your wall safe for the proposed firearm, and then you get your license which is good for 5 years. The license is not updated to allow for any shift in mental state of the person, so with this license the person can buy shells or shotguns for 5 or so years. That was correct when I had mine 20 years ago. If a person wanted to buy a hand gun and asked the police for a license the police would either laugh or arrest that person.
Only in America is it a right of a person to bear arms (obvious exceptions) and many would argue that the 2nd amendment protects all the other amendments

 

I think the reality is that while Australia managed it (or something similar) it seems pretty clear to me that American society isn't ready for a total ban on guns or any other single measure that would entirely resolve the situation. Any changes will need to be made step by step. Banning semi automatic rifles might not stop that many deaths but it would establish/entrench the principle that Americans don't have an entirely unfettered right to guns and pave the way for further changes in future.

 

those pesky rabbits!

 

If you could a few on here wouldn't last the week....

 

More than there is at the moment.

That might just be a start.

Vin

 

Ah, the old "AR doesn't stand for assault rifle" gag. (I've seen all of these).

Well, while the AR doesn't stand for "Assault Rifle", an AR-15 is an assault rifle. It's identical to the rifles used by infantry soldiers to attack fixed positions. The only difference is that it's semi-automatic rather than full automatic. And that's utterly irrelevant. It's a red herring.

When I was in the TA we used fully automatic only in one situation, namely the one soldier carrying out the final run at a position, the one clearing, say, a trench. We never used them in full automatic except in that very specific situation, because full auto is wildly, ludicrously, incomprehensibly inaccurate. Fire a burst at a target and the first shot will be the only one that hits. In the confines of a trench full auto works. Anywhere else it's just a waste of ammunition. So, in 99.9% of army usage, a semi-automatic is identical to a full automatic.

And they are useless for self-defence (the next argument). They are too big to use inside a house. I can say from experience that they are damned hard to use indoors and I'd rather have a pistol. (And that was the SA-80, which is eight inches shorter than the AR-15).

To be honest, I suspect the main use of an AR-15 is as a penis enhancement.

Vin

 

That auto switch or 2-3 round burst is a pretty big difference and makes these rifles illegal. its kinda true to say a AR-15 and m-16 share a lot of the same ideas, but they are an old design and fall into the its not broken so don't fix it bracket. To be an assault rifle, the rifle must be capable of selective fire, and fire an intermediate power cartridge the AR-15 that you can legally buy fails in those last two.
A lot of states have banned the AR-15 from hunting anything bigger than a small mammal because the cartridge is not powerful enough. Totally agree that a fully auto rifle is useless for shooting, a bump stock is a good way to waste ammo, one round would hit the target and the other 29 would be hitting clouds.
In a classroom a trained teacher with a pistol would hold so many advantages against a shooter with a rifle. I am surprised that these rifles have been used in massed shootings, I would have thought that a semi auto shotgun with 16 shot mag would make more sense- cheaper, less likely to jam, more likely to hit the target and the shells are much easier to buy with less red flags.

 

And yet, as above, anyone who has been in the military states that they are taught from day one to use the single-shot modes if you're actually intending to hit something. It's a distinction without difference.

This is nonsense. The .223 Remington cartridge fired by an AR-15 is a very high-velocity round. It's not a great round for big game because it doesn't produce gigantic wounds, but humans are not big game.

A bump stock is a great way to throw a tonne of bullets into a crowd, however.

There really wouldn't. Pistols fire slower, have more recoil, and are notorious for their inaccuracy over any substantial distance. A teacher armed with a pistol might slow the shooter down, and might even hit their target, but they're likely to be another casualty. And that's assuming that they transform into Rambo and charge the shooter.

There are no "red flags" in the States. You wanna buy eight AR-15s and 2000 rounds of ammunition? Have at it.

You also keep referring to "the target". "The target" isn't generally a designation that mass shooters care about; the target is a group of people, not a person. A semi-automatic rifle will output an awfully large number of bullets, and those bullets have a lot of penetration, meaning that if they miss the thing you're shooting at, there's still a pretty decent chance that they will go through something and wound or kill someone anyway. Unlike a semi-automatic shotgun, you really don't need to have real skill to operate one, either. Mass murder doesn't get any more user-friendly.