Assuming only one shot hit a single person.
From memory many had multiple bullet wounds
that’s a phenomenal hit rate really.
Gun Control (Spray yourself down when entering and exiting the thread)
- Thread starter Crolis
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From memory many had multiple bullet wounds
that’s a phenomenal hit rate really.
I was not aware a person was not harmed by having a second, third, etc. bullet hit them (assuming the first didn't kill them).
If we're getting into the realm of breaking down how many people were injured/killed by a single bullet, I am going to question what meaningful point is being made.
If we're getting into the realm of breaking down how many people were injured/killed by a single bullet, I am going to question what meaningful point is being made.
I think it was a commentary on how effective the bump stock was in that scenario... much more than "spray and pray", which is what some argue... that the bump stocks were so inaccurate that they weren't something to "worry about".
But as we saw from that instance, bump-stock + densely-packed crowd + elevation = carnage. I will reiterate, the bump-stock is an end-run around at least the spirit of the NFA of 1934 as well as the FOPA of 1986, if not the letter. If you want legal machineguns, don't legislate them from the bench, repeal those two laws.
In this case, it's the other way around. The letter of the law is clear, and bump stocks are not machineguns, as defined in those laws.
We need new laws. Given how easy CNC/3D Printing and microcontrollers are, bump stocks aren't even the issue you should be focusing on. Bump stocks are stupid. Electronically-actuated triggers are far more worrisome. We can update the law to cover anything that makes a gun fire like an automatic, but it's whistling past the graveyard. We need to regulate the people with access to firearms, but that is politically impossible.
Yeah. Not clear.
if you assume that the 400 odd people only got hit once, that’s a 40 odd percentage hit rate.
however many (hard to pin down a number) were hit more than once, taking the hit rate even higher.
And completely orthogonal to the discussion of gun control. Yes, the LV shooter's accuracy was high despite using what were effectively automatic weapons. But in a crowd of densely-packed people such as you find at a concert, it was akin to shooting fish in a barrel.
Now can we drop this stupid tangent? I am not normally one to armchair moderate, but this line of argument is not related at all to the topic of this thread.
What regulation of who could have automatic or semi-automatic rifles do you imagine would have stopped Stephen Paddock? Short of nobody, I mean.
To be clear, I'm not saying don't regulate the guns. I'm saying the half-ass regulations on the guns themselves are going to be less and less effective. I'm not doing the "but mental health" dodge you're probably used to. I'm saying as the effectiveness of such regulations lessens, they need to be supplemented with other measures. Manufacturing is getting too easy, so banning the devices themselves is a less and less effective measure.
I'm not familiar with the personal background of Stephen Paddock. I'm in favor of red flag laws, in general, as long as they have due process, aren't completely anonymous (the flagged person would not have access to who reported them, but a judge could unseal that), and aren't just a new tool for swatting people. I've mentioned before that I would be in favor of requiring gun owners to maintain a regular inventory check of their firearms, and I would be OK with adding extra scrutiny for people who amass a huge collection of operable, non-antiques.
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If mechanisms that turn lowly-regulated guns into effective machine guns are legal, they will be sold and therefore easily available. More easily available than the guns themselves because they're not even considered to be the covered by gun regulations that do exist. You argued against a broad ban on any parts that cause a gun to fire more than once per second, which is probably the only way to ban machine guns and things that are effectively machine guns without banning semi-automatic weapons themselves. So you're "not objecting to gun control" and "for changing the law" but not in a way that would be effective or hard to evade. You want the game of whackamole that the SCOTUS majority have just set up and that results in a world in which massacres get to happen because it will be easy to buy powerful weapons and easy to buy simple machines that modify them to produce automatic fire, therefore they'll easily get into the wrong hands.
You admit you don't know much about Stephen Paddock. Well here you go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Paddock
Read it. There were no "red flags" a court would have regarded as a "red flag" unless you count buying a lot of guns and ammo in a short time. That's not among the criteria I've seen in any red flag laws.
So what are we to use to distinguish between high risk people and the bulk of gun enthusiasts? Or are gun criminals just the obvious tail of the distribution of gun owners and mass shooters just the obvious tail of the bell curve of all shooters. If so, maybe the only way fix the problem of gun violence in America is to reduce the size of the distribution because there's no way to cut off just the tail.
You admit you don't know much about Stephen Paddock. Well here you go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Paddock
Read it. There were no "red flags" a court would have regarded as a "red flag" unless you count buying a lot of guns and ammo in a short time. That's not among the criteria I've seen in any red flag laws.
So what are we to use to distinguish between high risk people and the bulk of gun enthusiasts? Or are gun criminals just the obvious tail of the distribution of gun owners and mass shooters just the obvious tail of the bell curve of all shooters. If so, maybe the only way fix the problem of gun violence in America is to reduce the size of the distribution because there's no way to cut off just the tail.
I'm fine with banning "mechanisms that turn guns into effectively full-auto". But how broad do you want to go to avoid the "bath salts" problem?
I'm even OK with treating all semi-autos with detachable magazines as NFA items (don't bother trying to define features of "assault weapons"). I just don't think you'll ever get that passed.
If someone makes an item and markets it as a dildo, but it just so happens to be a convenient shape that, after some modification with a dremel, it can be used to rapid-fire an AR-15-style rifle? How do you regulate that? I'm not in favor of giving police overly broad discretionary powers to criminalize everything.
Well.... peak Murika, anyway
In any case, I've seen more than a few 2A folks who just say all the deaths are the "price we have to pay for freedom". Like many other things, I'm sure that sounds fine to them until one of their loved ones is on the receiving end. It's also interesting that many of them are all about reactive* laws while complaining that the shootings happen. They just don't want to listen to proactive/preventative measures.
*Reactive meaning laws that penalize after the act. Of course, those do nothing to bring the victims back to life or cure the injuries, it's just something that tries to satisfy the vengeance/revenge of those who are still alive.
"Freedom" is a funny word for living in fear of road raging gun nuts, where my kids get traumatized by active shooter drills if not by actual active shooters, where the statistically most likely way for kids to die is through gun violence. That's not freedom, that's just a different form of tyranny.
They're absolutely not about reactive laws, the time after a particularly egregious mass shooting will instantly and invariably be met by calls to "not politicize" the recent tragedy. Now the tragedies are so commonplace that there's never a time when the issue can be addressed. It's just a constant background noise of dying kids.
This is the only way. Period. And I'm someone who owns (and shoots fairly often) multiple high-end semi-auto weapons. The whole auto-seer thing is a total red herring. People just seem to not believe that anyone can dump a thousand rounds in 10 minutes out a window with what you can buy in 5 minutes from a gun store, but you absolutely can. Or any tightly packed space.
And even treating them as NFA isn't sufficient for someone who just decides to go off the deep end. Paddock would have qualified for as many stamps as he wanted to buy.
Semi-auto firearms have been a solved engineering science for over 150 years. You either completely control them from a cultural, societal, and legal standpoint (England, for example), or you simply cannot stop a Paddock.
I know this is a Srs Bzns SB thread with Srs Bzns posts, but I laughed hard at this. It's so true.
Yeah, they also go around saying stuff like "An armed society is a polite society" not understanding that the "politeness" is actually a form of oppression. Not that it's a "freedom of speech" issue but it certainly curtails a lot of discussion that isn't just conformity. It goes right along with "might makes right", which is another fantasy held by them.
The post I commented on had stated a false account of the the amount of ammo carried by an infantry platoon so I pointed out the part of the Army TO&E
On the other hand, given the homophobic energy that gun nuts tend to generate, I'm not sure you would have to regulate that, after all, a man buying a dildo, what would the bros think?
If you have read the NFA definition and the decision you would know that the SCOTUS actually got this one right. Pains me to say it but they got it right.
I seriously think this is a viable strategy for gun control. So much of the appeal of gun ownership is cosplay, especially for the mass shooters, that requiring all civilian guns to be dildo shaped and painted pink would probably make a measurable dent.
Gives a whole new meaning to a butterfly magazine.
But in all seriousness, the current court would interpret ANY attempt to legislate the look of guns as against the second amendment. So even if it would theoretically work it’s a non-starter.
Bullshit. It was a contrived analysis that was marked by an overly tight reading of the statute that needed specific diagrams to back it up because it was so full of shit. "Operation of the trigger" need not be interpreted that narrowly. That Thomas needed to do deep factual analysis as a cover for his shit indicates they know it's a garbage opinion.
The original Act and the 68 anti-circumvention provisions can easily cover banning bump stocks and any other devices that enable automatic file from SA weapons.
Single function of the trigger. You could interpret "operation" to mean "individual human intentional trigger pull", which is what the law should be amended to, but a weapon with a bump stock or a human simulating a bump stock with just recoil is clearly only one function of the trigger per shot.
Yes, this SC may have made much more contrived interpretations than that, but the letter on this one is pretty clear, IMHO.
That does not take anti-circumvention into account.
Aside from that, the intentional trigger pull is a very easy way to interpret it. A crank would not be pulling the trigger one time, either.
FUNCTION is not a literal pull.
Aside from that, the intentional trigger pull is a very easy way to interpret it. A crank would not be pulling the trigger one time, either.
FUNCTION is not a literal pull.
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Indeed. And literal gatling guns are not machineguns, under the law.
When using a bump stock or manually bumping, the trigger is pulled past the point where the sear is released and does a full reset before another bullet is fired. By any engineering understanding, that is one function of the trigger.
Only a computer would accept so limited a definition. Realistically, when you design the device so that one of the functions of the trigger is to reactuate the trigger, well, now one function of the trigger includes that repetition. As such, no, an engineering understanding would include this designed reactuation as part of the function, resulting in multiple rounds being fired with one function.
This is how some nerds buy into bullshit. They need to be technically correct, so they latch onto techno-babble, "but actually" arguments.'
A bump stock does not need a fully manual trigger reset to work. It needs a very light trigger and calibration so that a recoil bounce can be re-activate it without a manual pull. Thomas played fast and loose with the definition of reset to make this shitty opinion have a gloss of rationality.
The fact that a crank-driven Gatling gun is supposedly not a "machine gun" is evidence the entire argument is bullshit. In fact, installing a trigger crank and an electric one would be legal under this garbage jurisprudence.
A bump stock does not need a fully manual trigger reset to work. It needs a very light trigger and calibration so that a recoil bounce can be re-activate it without a manual pull. Thomas played fast and loose with the definition of reset to make this shitty opinion have a gloss of rationality.
The fact that a crank-driven Gatling gun is supposedly not a "machine gun" is evidence the entire argument is bullshit. In fact, installing a trigger crank and an electric one would be legal under this garbage jurisprudence.
So my understanding is that with a bump stock you can "pull the trigger" once and the bounce-back keeps jamming the trigger into your stationary finger. Sounds to me like a single pull of the trigger causes repeat fire to ensue.
The legal system is full of "but actually" technicalities.
We all agree that, had the writers of the laws envisioned bump stocks, they would have included them in the definition. They didn't. A functional legal system would update the law.
But this isn't even a "founder's intent" constitutional issue. It's a law, passed by Congress, last updated in 1986. This is not some "language evolves" translation issue. The law has a glaring loophole.
We all agree that, had the writers of the laws envisioned bump stocks, they would have included them in the definition. They didn't. A functional legal system would update the law.
But this isn't even a "founder's intent" constitutional issue. It's a law, passed by Congress, last updated in 1986. This is not some "language evolves" translation issue. The law has a glaring loophole.
But the law doesn't even say "pull of the trigger". It says, "function of the trigger".
Well.... peak Murika, anyway
In any case, I've seen more than a few 2A folks who just say all the deaths are the "price we have to pay for freedom". Like many other things, I'm sure that sounds fine to them until one of their loved ones is on the receiving end. It's also interesting that many of them are all about reactive* laws while complaining that the shootings happen. They just don't want to listen to proactive/preventative measures.
*Reactive meaning laws that penalize after the act. Of course, those do nothing to bring the victims back to life or cure the injuries, it's just something that tries to satisfy the vengeance/revenge of those who are still alive.
Isn't "Security is the first freedom" a right-wing talking point in the USA ? If so, there is a contradiction there, but you'll tell me it's just another one.
Perhaps because they foresaw someone arguing that a device which automated pulling the trigger would be invented and figured that by saying "function" rather than "pull" it would be understood to include such automated actuation.
I wasn't talking about self-defense. I was talking about mass shootings, murders, etc. I have literally had several pro-2A people, on different occasions, tell me that those are just the price of freedom. Guns have to be available (because freedom) and those incidents are just some of the downsides that we have to live with so everybody can have freedom guns. And yes... I asked them does that mean that they'd just grin and bear it if one of their immediate family members were in one of those body counts but they either didn't answer that or one went full blown Murika talking about how it would be a glorious sacrifice or some crap.
Bingo. The intent was to broaden the scope. The SC decisions narrow it by playing pedantic games, and the resident shooters here are buying into the technical arguments out of some strange thinking that the law is some kind of engineering spec.
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Thinking like this is how the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts will be gutted. If the laws do not spell out in detail what exact pollutants can be regulated, the Court will say that the interpretation used by the EPA is overreaching. This will roll on to all regulatory agencies, and we'll be set back 60 years in almost every aspect of life where government matters.
All because people buy into this pseudo-technocratic obfuscation about the policy question.
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We all live with downsides to a lot of the things we can do. Folks will just have to draw the line wherever they think.
Guns are available because America worships a dish-rag that should have been expired decades ago and evolved but hey; tradition or something.
I think the ruling is good for one thing: To out a lot of the self-styled GRA as the hypocrites they are.
How many pages did we have were GRA's argued that the problem of a lot of gun legislation is that operates on technicalities, ie on magazine sizes, and that gun legislation would be much better if it were aimed at capabilities.
Thing is, the bump-stock ban is clearly a capability-based legislation. It clearly aims at restricting devices allowing semi-automatic weapons to achieve a rate of fire in the hand of untrained[0] personnel that otherwise is only achievable using automatic weapons, and none of the technicalities fielded so far for justifying the ruling can deny this.
Furthermore, none of the statements offered so far can offer a convincing argument reconcling the very literal, technical reading in the small (the exact technicalities of how a bump stock operates, instead of what outcomes it provides) with the type of interpretation-at-large reading of the Second Ammendment required to sustain Heller.
[0] Things like the "Mad Minute" thing are, at best, an irrelevant trivia, due to the level of training required. Every single fucking university-trained chemist knows how to make Sarin, because there is a bog-standard undergrad reaction that if done wrong produces Sarin directly, and several others that if done wrong produce precursors that can result in the real monty if the stars are "right"; yet no one doubts that outlawing the posession or production of Sarin as a CWC Schedule 1 compound is a good idea.
How many pages did we have were GRA's argued that the problem of a lot of gun legislation is that operates on technicalities, ie on magazine sizes, and that gun legislation would be much better if it were aimed at capabilities.
Thing is, the bump-stock ban is clearly a capability-based legislation. It clearly aims at restricting devices allowing semi-automatic weapons to achieve a rate of fire in the hand of untrained[0] personnel that otherwise is only achievable using automatic weapons, and none of the technicalities fielded so far for justifying the ruling can deny this.
Furthermore, none of the statements offered so far can offer a convincing argument reconcling the very literal, technical reading in the small (the exact technicalities of how a bump stock operates, instead of what outcomes it provides) with the type of interpretation-at-large reading of the Second Ammendment required to sustain Heller.
[0] Things like the "Mad Minute" thing are, at best, an irrelevant trivia, due to the level of training required. Every single fucking university-trained chemist knows how to make Sarin, because there is a bog-standard undergrad reaction that if done wrong produces Sarin directly, and several others that if done wrong produce precursors that can result in the real monty if the stars are "right"; yet no one doubts that outlawing the posession or production of Sarin as a CWC Schedule 1 compound is a good idea.