Flack wrote:When silly people like Seth MacFarlane and Susan Sarandon say they want to ban "automatic weapons," what they mean is that they want to ban guns that look scary.
To quote The Bridgetender, "You are absolutely correct, sir!"
And they are not silly, they are incompetently uninformed and expressing opinions on a subject for which they have no idea what they are talking about.
They don't understand that you can't walk into a gun store and walk out with a military-style assault weapon (one that can fire multiple rounds with a single trigger pull). That's because 1) most gun dealers don't carry the military version of the scary looking gun, 2) you have to jump through an obscene number of hoops with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to even obtain a tax stamp that says you may purchase such a weapon (a process that takes months, if not years),
The guys at Moss Pawn and Gun near Atlanta, who run a YouTube video under the username Iraquiveteran8888 say that ATF hired a bunch more people, it used to take about 9 months but they've gotten the wait down to about 6 weeks to 45 days.
The bigger problem is ATF is still requiring paper fingerprinting. (Getting the transfer of an NFA firearm - which a machine gun or short barrel rifle or short barrel shotgun qualify as - or getting a license to be a firearm dealer require you get fingerprinted. On a card.)
When I went to take the training for both my Utah Non-Resident concealed carry permit and my Maryland Handgun Qualification License, the place does the paper fingerprint card for Utah as part of the course fee. (This makes sense since the application is mailed to Utah).
Maryland, on the other hand, uses electronic fingerprinting. For that, I had to go to an organization that offers it. For me, the nearest place was four blocks away in College Park at the University of Maryland Police Station. That costs $55, and then I had to go onto the State Police website and attach the receipt code to my application.
Now, nobody around here does paper fingerprint cards any more, so I had to find someone. So I called the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police, but they only provide them for DC residents. They did refer me to a private law office on K street which does them for $10 each.
and 3) the actual versions of rifles used by the military are really expensive and unaffordable for the vast majority of prospective gun owners.
Actually, they're about the same as they were back in '86, for an ordinary full-auto machine gun they're around $1 - 2,000, but it's not that they're unaffordable, it's that you cannot buy one no matter how much money you have unless you are a LEO or a military agency.
What you can buy from your local gun dealer, after that licensed gun dealer has confirmed that you passed a federal background check (yep, that's required by existing law),
It's part of the Brady Law that was enacted after Jim Brady and President Reagan were shot by Hinkley.
is a semi-automatic rifle. And now, a bunch of gun controllers who don't understand the slightest thing about guns have decided that rifle needs to be banned. Not because it's more deadly than a typical hunting rifle (it's absolutely not), but because it looks scarier.
The actual lethality vs. other firearms is not considered, it's more on the order of "Mommie, mommie, I'm scared, make it go away!"
As I have said several times, the rashes of shooting incidents are not because of some excessive lawlessness on the part of people, but something else.
Back in the 1950s and 1960s, kids would routinely bring a rifle or shotgun with them to school, and leave it in the back of the classroom until they needed it for their target shooting class,
and nobody thought about it. You still had significant incidents, like when Charles Whitman climbed into the Bell Tower at the University of Texas, Austin, and shot up the place back around '64. Before that I think you have to go back to the murder of the Clutter family back in the 1950s.
No, I think the real issue is handing out psychotropic drugs and SSRIs in schools to children like they're M&Ms. They're being used as chemical babysitters to make the alleged "unruly and disruptive" kids into docile little zombies. If as many children really needed these kinds of powerful drugs because of true mental problems we would have had to have investigations into why.
I think it's been found that in almost all of these mass shooting incidents the perpetrator was either using one or more of these powerful psychotropic drugs or was undergoing withdrawal from recently having stopped using them.
They can sometimes be quite useful in adults, as in my case, phentermine (and fenfluramine, before it was banned) helped me quite a bit although Prozac never did anything for me. But none of these drugs were ever tested on children.
[quote="Flack"]When silly people like Seth MacFarlane and Susan Sarandon say they want to ban "automatic weapons," what they mean is that they want to ban guns that look scary. [/quote]
To quote The Bridgetender, "You are absolutely correct, sir!"
And they are not silly, they are incompetently uninformed and expressing opinions on a subject for which they have no idea what they are talking about.
[quote]They don't understand that you can't walk into a gun store and walk out with a military-style assault weapon (one that can fire multiple rounds with a single trigger pull). That's because 1) most gun dealers don't carry the military version of the scary looking gun, 2) you have to jump through an obscene number of hoops with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to even obtain a tax stamp that says you may purchase such a weapon (a process that takes months, if not years), [/quote]
The guys at Moss Pawn and Gun near Atlanta, who run a YouTube video under the username Iraquiveteran8888 say that ATF hired a bunch more people, it used to take about 9 months but they've gotten the wait down to about 6 weeks to 45 days.
The bigger problem is ATF is still requiring paper fingerprinting. (Getting the transfer of an NFA firearm - which a machine gun or short barrel rifle or short barrel shotgun qualify as - or getting a license to be a firearm dealer require you get fingerprinted. On a card.)
When I went to take the training for both my Utah Non-Resident concealed carry permit and my Maryland Handgun Qualification License, the place does the paper fingerprint card for Utah as part of the course fee. (This makes sense since the application is mailed to Utah).
Maryland, on the other hand, uses electronic fingerprinting. For that, I had to go to an organization that offers it. For me, the nearest place was four blocks away in College Park at the University of Maryland Police Station. That costs $55, and then I had to go onto the State Police website and attach the receipt code to my application.
Now, nobody around here does paper fingerprint cards any more, so I had to find someone. So I called the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police, but they only provide them for DC residents. They did refer me to a private law office on K street which does them for $10 each.
[quote]and 3) the actual versions of rifles used by the military are really expensive and unaffordable for the vast majority of prospective gun owners.[/quote]
Actually, they're about the same as they were back in '86, for an ordinary full-auto machine gun they're around $1 - 2,000, but it's not that they're unaffordable, it's that you cannot buy one no matter how much money you have unless you are a LEO or a military agency.
[quote]What you can buy from your local gun dealer, after that licensed gun dealer has confirmed that you passed a federal background check (yep, that's required by existing law),[/quote]
It's part of the Brady Law that was enacted after Jim Brady and President Reagan were shot by Hinkley.
[quote] is a semi-automatic rifle. And now, a bunch of gun controllers who don't understand the slightest thing about guns have decided that rifle needs to be banned. Not because it's more deadly than a typical hunting rifle (it's absolutely not), but because it looks scarier.[/quote]
The actual lethality vs. other firearms is not considered, it's more on the order of "Mommie, mommie, I'm scared, make it go away!"
As I have said several times, the rashes of shooting incidents are not because of some excessive lawlessness on the part of people, but something else.
Back in the 1950s and 1960s, kids would routinely bring a rifle or shotgun with them to school, and leave it in the back of the classroom until they needed it for their target shooting class, [i]and nobody thought about it[/i]. You still had significant incidents, like when Charles Whitman climbed into the Bell Tower at the University of Texas, Austin, and shot up the place back around '64. Before that I think you have to go back to the murder of the Clutter family back in the 1950s.
No, I think the real issue is handing out psychotropic drugs and SSRIs in schools to children like they're M&Ms. They're being used as chemical babysitters to make the alleged "unruly and disruptive" kids into docile little zombies. If as many children really needed these kinds of powerful drugs because of true mental problems we would have had to have investigations into why.
I think it's been found that in almost all of these mass shooting incidents the perpetrator was either using one or more of these powerful psychotropic drugs or was undergoing withdrawal from recently having stopped using them.
They can sometimes be quite useful in adults, as in my case, phentermine (and fenfluramine, before it was banned) helped me quite a bit although Prozac never did anything for me. But none of these drugs were ever tested on children.