Communities around the U.S. have seen shootings carried out with weapons converted to fully automatic in recent years, fueled by a staggering increase in small pieces of metal or plastic made with a 3D printer or ordered online. Laws against machine guns date back to the bloody violence of Prohibition-era gangsters. But the proliferation of devices known by nicknames such as Glock switches, auto sears and chips has allowed people to transform legal semi-automatic weapons into even more dangerous guns, helping fuel gun violence, police and federal authorities said.
The (ATF) reported a 570% increase in the number of conversion devices collected by police departments between 2017 and 2021, the most recent data available.
The devices that can convert legal semi-automatic weapons can be made on a 3D printer in about 35 minutes or ordered from overseas online for less than $30. They’re also quick to install.
“It takes two or three seconds to put in some of these devices into a firearm to make that firearm into a machine gun instantly,” Dettelbach said.
If people with criminal records and a history of mental illness can’t buy firearms, maybe they should also be barred from buying 3D printers or fabrication technology which could be used to build weapons. Surely that’s a better alternative than dead kids.
I wonder how quickly can the Glock switch be destroyed, like after using it. It’s just plastic/filament, right?
Sure yeah, THAT’S the problem
Right now the Second Amendment is untouchable to regulate and expanding its coverage.
The problem is the convert to automatic things and not the motivation to kill a bunch of people that has been apparently increasing and almost always carried out with non-converted semiautomatic weapons.
It is the scary looking things.
The problem is
the convert to automatic things and notthe motivation to kill a bunch of peopleDon’t know where you’re going with the rest of your comment, but that part is the sine qua non of our violence problem.
Without the prevalence of guns, the motivation isn’t as much of an issue. Prevalence of guns isn’t a huge deal if there is a low motivation to use them to murder people. Both are necessary for the issue to be as bad as it is in the U.S.
Yes, without guns it is slightly harder to kill people. Now, how do you plan to take their guns when they can make them in a day on a 3d printer?
Bruh this was already hashed out in his post. Not even a comment, literally in the
post you responded tooriginal post.Without the prevalence of guns, the motivation isn’t as much of an issue
I think the normalization of murderous intent, (and how it manifests itself in lesser forms of violence) is a much bigger problem than murder.
I think that suicide is twice as large a problem as homicide.
I think suicidal ideation (and how it manifests in depression and self harm) is a much bigger problem than suicide itself.
I don’t think anyone with the motivation to murder or kill themselves is “cured” of that disease by taking away the guns. I think it masks the symptom, while the disease festers and grows.
before we ban every object that can be used by a sufficiently motivated person to cause harm.
Just guns, you don’t hear about mass bludgeoning with candelabra. It’s always guns, no need to bring in what aboutism, the US has one problem when it comes to murderous intent, and it’s guns.
Sure let’s work on mental health too, but keep your eyes on the ball, it’s the guns.
Did I say mental health? It’s not mental health. It’s socioeconomic despair. It’s a societal issue, a cultural issue.
You want to see a strong correlation with violence? Look at age of motherhood. The mean age of women when they have their first child.
Australia and Europe commonly wait until they are in their 30’s to have children. The average child in these areas is raised by mature, economically stable adults. Murder rates in these areas are a tiny fraction of the world rate.
Compare to Central and South America, where the average mother is 18 to 22, and the murder rates are large multiples of the world rate.
The correlation holds true across nations, across regions, across cities, across demographics. If you know the age of a motherhood in a given area, you can predict the homicide rate in that area. If you know the homicide rate, you can predict the age of motherhood.
Contrast with guns, where the nation with by far the highest access to guns in the world has a homicide rate well below the world average. The rural areas of that nation have near universal gun ownership, yet the violence is clustered in impoverished areas, where the majority of the population doesn’t actually have guns.
Turns out it’s not actually the guns. It is the motivations of the people carrying them. When those people are figuratively beaten into submission, living paycheck to paycheck with no legitimate prospects, no way to get ahead, saddled with debt, no equity… Violence is not a gun problem. It’s not a mental health problem. Violence is what happens when you systematically subjugate people, and some of them decide they don’t need to obey. Violence is a socioeconomic problem. It is a cultural problem. More specifically, it is a problem of corporate culture, where people do everything they can to take everything they can from everyone they can, and give back as little as they can to as few as they can.
We need universal healthcare. We need to eliminate food insecurity. We need to eliminate housing insecurity.
We need to restore the protections we had against 19th century robber barons. Specifically, we need to reinstate a confiscatory top-tier tax rate. The only people that businessmen hate paying more than workers is the IRS. A confiscatory tax rate forces them to choose between the two.
We need to kill the concept of “renting”. We need to create a owner-occupant credit against residential property taxes, to hold them where they are, or lower them slightly for anyone living in their own properties. A “landlord” who wants that tax credit will have to issue a “land contract” (rent-to-own arrangement, recorded with the county) or a private mortgage to secure the occupant’s credit against that property’s taxes. The occupant will then be paying a fixed rate for the duration of the contract, and will be earning equity.
It is much more feasible to fix those three factors than to enact any form of gun control, and any of those factors will reduce violent crime far more than even a total confiscation could ever hope to achieve.
Can we not do both? Metaphorically - and literally - stem the bleeding? Sure, people will switch to knives, trucks, whatever else. However, as countries who have heavily regulated firearm ownership recently, like Australia, have shown, violent crime goes down significantly once it becomes much harder to access firearms. Some of this does actually boil down to psychology - there’s a heavily-studied mental disconnect between pulling a trigger to shoot at a human being, vs physically assaulting a human being with a knife or blunt object with intent to kill. This says nothing of the fact that knife wounds, blunt force trauma, whatever, are all MUCH easier to deal with on a medical level, and the fact that you can’t stab or beat 30+ people to death in a short span of time the way you can shoot people with a semiautomatic, magazine-fed rifle.
This says nothing of the fact that knife wounds, blunt force trauma, whatever, are all MUCH easier to deal with on a medical level, and the fact that you can’t stab or beat 30+ people to death in a short span of time the way you can shoot people with a semiautomatic, magazine-fed rifle.
Taking guns affects gun crimes.
Addressing the societal/cultural/economic issues affects guns, knives, bombs, cars, bludgeons, and barehanded crimes.
Knives are used to kill three times more often than rifles.
To answer your question, yes, we can do something useless and pointless, and address the societal issues, and work the actual problem.
What we can’t do is just the useless, pointless something, without addressing the social issues, and expect anything to actually improve.
We must enact universal healthcare. We must fundamentally address economic disparity with a punitively high top-tier tax rate like we had until the 1970’s and 80’s. We must address food insecurity, housing insecurity.
We must soften or eliminate criminal sanctions for non-violent offenses, and we must throw away the key for habitual violent offenders.
Why not both?
That is what I’m saying, it is both motivation and the already easily available semiautomatic guns that are the problem. The scary automatic conversions are a distraction because they sound and look scary, even though they are used in very few mass shootings.
Just like silencers and the ‘assault weapons’ baloney that didn’t address the majority of gun deaths which are caused by pistols even after suicides are excluded.
Gotcha, last sentence sounded a little bit pro-gun though hence my response. I still think the ease of access is the main issue, by far. I would probably be dead if I was american as I could’ve easily got a cheap 9mm to off myself during the worse times. It was easier to reach out than to buy a glock and I seriously think it saved my life.
“It is the scary looking things.” Sounds pro gun?
Weird.
Kinda dismisses the real criticism people have with guns yeah. They are not advocating against them simply because “they look scary”.
we need less non bolt action guns please.
America is the land of mad max.
Are semi-automatic 3d printed guns legal in the US?
For personal use, yes. You are required to add some metal to it though I believe.
You have to have a metal barrel for it to function. You might get a single shot of .22lr with a printed barrel.
You’re probably right. The ones I’m aware of were single shot with a chunk of metal in the grip.
That’s “the liberator.” They’ve come a long way.
Yes, although iirc you are required By law to embed a metal plate for your serial number.
Also on a practical level, you need metal parts of the thing falls apart pretty immediately. 3d printed gun parts can be useful, but 3d printed guns are basically tech demos at this point.
By federal law, you are not required to serialize it (unless you plan to sell it, but if you do that too often then you’re a manufacturer and need a license). Some states may require serialization for homemade firearms.
In most states. It’s no different than doing it with a mill legally.
This reads like pig-induced hysterics.
I’m not anti-gun myself, but there are far better arguments for the anti-gun crowd to use than this.
Calling a modified handgun a machine gun is some pretty impressive hyperbole, yeah.
I mean it’s a gun that fires continuously with a single trigger pull. How is that not a machine gun? Yeah it’s a machine pistol that’ll spend a clip in 3 seconds, but it’s still a machine gun.
A machine gun, traditionally, is a fully automatic firearm in a rifle format.
Think light machine guns (M249, PKM) or a sub-machine gun (MP5, P90)
A machine pistol isn’t technically a “machine gun” despite the name. In fact, the classification of machine pistols is a debated topic even now.
In many places, they are classified as any other pistol. In others, they considered a form of PDW or Personal Defense Weapon.
But, PDW can sometimes refer to a specific class of SMG like the P90. Basically, a compact firearm with a cartridge around 6mm or so. Which the P90 fires a 5.7mm round.
Its complicated. And we should not be painting all firearms with the same brush.
I’m glad there’s at least one person standing up for the fair and humane treatment of murder weapons.
Can you have a normal debate without resorting to ridiculous attacks like this? Grow up.
It’s an automatic pistol…
“Machine” doesn’t mean automatic, lol.
Just use words for what they are instead of trying to replace them for shock value.
I don’t expect you to do this, though.
Are raspberry Pis not computers because they’re tiny?
Are small electric cars not cars because they can only carry two people?
Are cube satellites not satellites because they’re tiny?
If I’m being fired at rapidly, I’ll be saying “help, someone is shooting at me with a machine gun!” It would be funny if someone popped in and said “ackshually…”
It’s crazy the mental gymnastics the anti-gun crowd puts them through, but it’s another reason not to take them seriously.
Who said I was anti-gun lol?
“Machine” doesn’t mean automatic, lol.
Machines are devices that leverage physical forces to some desirable effect. Strictly speaking, all guns are machine guns
The comparison I use for these conversion devices is it’s like putting high-octane fuel in a dodge caravan and calling it an F1 racer.
Nobody is saying that putting “faster” bullets into a gun makes it fully automatic (or a machine gun) so your example is silly at best.
This is about 3D printables that fundamentally change the speed at which a gun chamber/clip can be emptied.
Do better.
a gun chamber/clip
I’ve seen so many people get absurdly upset if you misnomer the place in the gun where the bullets go.
Incidentally, these same people hate pronouns.
Gun owner, pedant, and father of a trans man here. Did you just make a bigoted assumption?
It’s a shibboleth.
The distinction is simple, straightforward, widely taught, broadly known. Using it correctly is an immediate indication that one has acquired some very basic knowledge of the subject matter. Using it incorrectly is an immediate indication that they have not.
If someone with a gun calls it a “clip”, I am immediately wary. They haven’t learned very much about guns, and certainly not from responsible instructors. They might have a gun in their possession, but they haven’t proved they are gun owners.
When a non-gun owner properly calls it a magazine, I can’t immediately dismiss them as ignorant and clueless. They’ve been paying attention. They are informed, at least in some way.
A “magazine” charges the firearm; a “clip” charges the magazine.
That’s it. That’s the distinction. A magazine puts ammunition into the action of the gun, where it is fed into the chamber and fired. A clip is used to put ammunition into the magazine, where it waits to be fed into the action.
Do you really think that if everyone learns precise technical gun terms that gun control arguments will change?
No, but it means there can be a discussion where each side is able to communicate effectively.
Words have meaning. If we are to have a stark discussion, at the beginning we need to come to agreement on what words mean so that either side does not misunderstand each other.
Adapting your own language to your audience is a thing. It’s like if you speak to room of professionals, you will use the common professional language. Yet speaking to the general public you will use a language that is generally understood.
But trying to force the general public to understand professional language should be a lesson in futility.
The owness is on you to understand and speak to your audience. Don’t blame them for your lack in that.
*onus
“Ownness” is also a word, but refers to the sense of self, rather than possession, and doesn’t fit in this context.
It would certainly help.
What is the point in making up terms for firearms that have never been used for them even by the military?
It only serves to muddy the waters and scare people.
I’m pretty sure the massive amount of gun violence is what scares people, not terms that aren’t used by the military.
In fact, from what I’ve seen, the people who really care about technical terms are the ones who want to find them to get around gun regulations or stop them from happening in the first place.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been told that there’s no such thing as an assault weapon when there was an assault weapon ban in law, meaning there clearly is whether or not some people don’t accept that as a technically valid term.
The term “assault weapon” is being used by people who know nothing about firearms to refer to anything that isn’t an old bolt action these days.
Its meaningless
It’s important to call things what they are. I know of magazine capacity laws written so poorly they dont even touch belt fed weapons and for the low low price of 1500 bucks you can convert the AR you already have into a belt fed weapon and constantly fire rounds until you run out of belt or the guns melts. And that’s just a part called the upper reciever which legally is not a gun. You can get it shipped online no questions asked, no checks required. Knowing what you’re talking about makes a difference. This is how loopholes get made.
It’s an automatic pistol…
“Machine” doesn’t mean automatic, lol.
So this is the problem of knowing the actual jargon vs the natural language people use.
Jargon is often prescriptive and needs to be taught. A word means a specific thing because people who know the subject well use it to describe that thing.
But natural language doesn’t work that way. You’ll note that the dictionary definition for “machine gun” includes “broadly: an automatic weapon.” Dictionaries have to be “descriptive,” because they’re helping someone understand what an average person means when they say a phrase.
There are countless examples of words beginning to mean other things in natural language. My pet peeve example is the fact that “podium,” a word containing the root meaning “foot” that is clearly about a raised platform one stands on, in the dictionary contains “see lectern.” Because a fuckload of people (especially in North America) call lecterns “podiums.”
Anyway my point here is that the average person considers any automatic weapon a “machine gun.” That may not be the technical definition of “machine gun,” but it is the natural definition. So when people use it to describe an automatic handgun they aren’t doing this for “shock value,” they’re doing it because they don’t know any better and because to them, that’s what the word they’re using means.
Gasoline generators don’t generate gasoline.
An automatic rifle in full-auto will spend its magazine just as fast. Which is why burst mode exists.
It’s not an anti-gun argument.
The theory is that you CAN’T regulate guns because people will just 3D print inferior copies.
Ding ding. "3d printers must be regulated for safety and copyright protection "
Go to home depot and you can make a pipe shotgun that doesn’t even require welding to make. A lot of fully 3d printed guns are 9mm. If you havent shot both cartridges I cannot explain the difference between 9mm and a shotgun slug. Maybe it will suffice to say the bulletproof vests that stop 9mm, when hit with a shotgun slug often result in broken ribs, punctured lungs, and general chest cave ins. Your 3d printed gun will undoubtedly have better rate of fire but in terms of accuracy and level of destruction, the shotgun will compete just fine.
Also the 3d printed gun will probably be of questionable durability, and if you think ya can have a 3d printed barrel id love to see ya fire it more than once.
No they use metal barrels but people figured out how to ECM rifle them at home too.
Ding ding. "3d printers must be regulated for safety and copyright protection "
But that’s impossible, not figuratively, but literally. 3d printers are devices designed for hobbiest-hackers you can’t put copy protection or drm controls on a device like that, it won’t work. If any legislation were passed to make that happen, there will be open source alternative firmware for these devices the very next day, months before the legislation would even take effect.
That is in other words, a waste of effort. The genie is out of the bottle and it can’t be put back in. The question is what will we do now that it’s out.
Bro I saw this show called Dr Stone and they legit show you how to make a gun in that show. It’s fucked up that they’re showing that in cartoons
People want to watch things other than Teletubbies
Gosh, I mean what could guns NOT fix?!??
I dunno, throw more guns in, I guess…
Guns can not fix the darkness I feel. Yet. I’ll keep buying them until they do.
gun thread, lemme hit you with some easy unsourced stats real quick.
About a third of all people who attempt suicide will never attempt it again, about a third will attempt it pretty repetitively, and about a third fall somewhere in the middle, where they engage in multiple attempts, but stop after the 5th or whatever. This is to say that suicide is mostly a spur of the moment decision and most people who attempt suicide aren’t completely committed to it as a course of action. It’s mostly a decision that’s made as a result of being kind of fed up and believing you have no other options in your life, it’s not a conscientious, committed kind of philosophical position, most of the time. I think there’s some sort of minor study about a bridge in, I wanna say canada, where they set up a net underneath one bridge, and another bridge about 20 minutes away didn’t have a net set up underneath it. Still, the suicides went down by about the amount you would expect to see, had you just eliminated all the suicides taking place on the bridge with the net. The people committing suicide weren’t willing to drive about 20 minutes to dive off of a different bridge, it was just something they sort of did in the moment.
So, that’s all a pretty good indication that limiting gun access to the suicidal would be a relatively helpful thing to do. The most counterargument I’ve heard against this is that, regardless of that, we should still have free access to guns, and they shouldn’t be regulated by the government, because our right to guns trumps everyone else’s right to not be successful in killing themselves. I don’t think I need to tell you that this is a kind of disgusting viewpoint.
I think we can also probably say that the same would be true of gun crime broadly. There are multiple factors going into gun crime, like housing prices, redlining, drug trafficking, mental illness, sure. One of these factors is also guns. Taking away any of these factors, including guns, not just lead to a reduction in gun crime, but would probably lead to a reduction in crime overall. A reduction in crime overall with no substitution in the form of increase knife violence or other forms of violence or crime.
It’s much harder to secure your illegally owned high value property, in drugs, if it is more expensive and harder to access a gun. If it’s more expensive, that eats into your profit margins. This alone would probably cut down on violent gun crime, and drug related violent crime more broadly.
I also feel like I’m taking crazy pills whenever people talk about how if you limited access to guns, people would just switch over to knives, and knives would be equally as effective. No they wouldn’t! You have to be extremely fit and trained properly to wield a knife effectively, and even then, two or three people can easily overwhelm you and jump on top of you. People can more easily outrun you. If you wanted to try and make the leap from one technology to the other, I would think people would compare guns more to IEDs, since there’s obviously more of a similarity there in terms of effectiveness, but obviously it’s much harder to secure your drugs with IEDs, or to rob someone with a pipe bomb.
The most compelling argument against gun regulations, and especially more extreme gun regulations, is that it’s really hard to get them passed, and especially at the federal level, which is what would really cut down on their trafficking. You also have a problem with law enforcement, since most law enforcement, and probably federal law enforcement, wouldn’t really be willing or effective in stripping americans of most of their guns. You’d probably see more success with something like limiting ammunition sales or gun manufacturing, but you’d obviously expect to get lobbied against pretty hard, and, at least if you were to limit gun manufacturing, you’d only expect to see results on that maybe 10+ years down the line, in decades, and, depending on how that was passed, you might just see it get repealed before you could see anything from it.
Of course, the caveat with all of that is that most americans are actually perfectly willing to conform to, and vote for, reasonable restrictions on guns. This includes universal background checks, mental health checks, wait periods, obviously limiting things like automatic capabilities and magazine size (though to what extent this limits unlawful use, I’m not quite sure). Probably at the farther end I’d guess americans might vote for requiring licensing from gun owners, and secure handling and transportation, like most european countries, which might limit unlawful use by limiting theft.
I think also lots of gun owners are straight delulu when it comes to how effective their gun might be. They come up with lots of little hypotheticals and heuristics to try and train for, but in a gunfight, it is usually the person who shoots first who wins, the person who has the element of surprise. If you’re getting robbed at gunpoint, you’ve already lost. You almost have to wield your gun like a lunatic, brandishing it at people for intimidation, in order for it to be an effective form of self-defense (this is illegal in most places). There’s also the idea that open carry can prevent crime, but that it might also mark you as an easier, higher priority target, so I’m kind of skeptical of it. Maybe it’s better for home invasions or something, but that’s not a particularly high likelihood anyways, and you have problems with wall penetration and such. Most home robbers are going to want to hit your place when you’re not in it anyways.
I’m a gun owner who carries a firearm. I think different people and areas have different needs.
There are no children in my household, fist off. If there were I wouldn’t have guns and ammo in the same house. It’s just not safe. If a child comes to my house, the ammo goes to the car.
But I live over 30 minutes from the nearest police station. We have firearms for defense from predators, invasive animals (e.g. hogs), etc… Yeah, they could be used against people, but that’s not really something we’re worried about. We don’t even lock our doors.
That being said, I do carry in town. I also have a spare set of clothing, full set of mechanics tools, a fire extinguisher, first aid kit, and an AED in the van. I like to be prepared wherever I go, and other than the AED all of those tools have come in handy in an emergency.
I don’t like going into details about the time I had to pull my gun because I hate how right-wing nut jobs seem to celebrate the fact that I needed one as justification for all the other hateful things they do. Suffice to say I was being assaulted and the gun ended the situation without me having to shoot the assailant.
Yeah - I don’t carry the toolbox or fire exringuisher my body, but a handgun is almost never necessary in a few minutes. And of course if someone breaks into my van and steals my impact wrench it’s annoying. If they steal a gun that’s much more serious.
I think we have some major work to do to cut back on violence, and some gun reforms are part of the answer. The things that I think would have a lot of impact on gun crime with minimal impact on lawful gun ownership are improving NICS and opening it up for civilian use. Right now if I want to sell a gun to a friend or relative I can’t run a check to see if they’re legally allowed to own one. This would also be the first step towards universal background checks.
But background checks aren’t enough. There need to be record-keeping laws for individual sales that are no different than those from a dealer. The idea is kill straw purchases while improving traceability, which is the biggest issue we have with the current system.
What we have now is half of a brilliant compromise. A federal gun registry is a red line that gun owners will not cross. It’s the most important necessary precursor to mass firearm confiscation, and it’s a hard no. The fight over that is why it took so damn long to get background checks in the first place.
But we want to be able to trace guns used in crimes, so we require manufacturers and dealers to track the sales. If a gun is used in a crime, law enforcement can get a warrant and go to the manufacturer who can look it up and point them to the distributor who can point them to the retailer who can point them to the buyer. It’s a system that allows any specific gun to be tracked, while preventing the government from having a registry.
The problem is that record ends at the first sale. The buyer can sell, trade, or gift that gun without a background check and without keeping a record. It’s the major way that guns illegal in a given state get there.
It also eliminates the “gun show loophole” which is a very misleading name, since it’s actually just a “private sale loophole.” Licensed dealers are still required to do a background check and 4473 for gun show sales.
Waiting periods don’t do much. Someone wanting to commit suicide can rent a gun at the range more easily, and it happens more than you think. The federal waiting period from the 80s was simply a placeholder until NICS got up and running that gave more time for background checks.
One issue that needs resolving is NICS needs to finish background checks. There are 3 standard results when running a background check: Approve, Deny, and Delay. Approve and Deny are self-explanatory. Delays occur when there’s a partial match. Since NICS just uses 3 items (name, date of birth, and state of birth) for the check partial matches can occur, especially if the buyer has a common name - it’s especially common with Hispanic last names since there’s a lot of Raul Hernandezes out there.
When there’s a delay, the gun can be sold without a response in 3 days, though more and more stores are instituting a policy that it needs an approval before the sale. This is because most Denys are initially a Delay, and sometimes (rarely) it takes a week.
But the rub is half the time NICS simply doesn’t follow up on a Delay, or they do it in 6 weeks. Any firearm transaction must be finished within 30 days of the initial background check, so if they take 6 weeks a new background check has to be started. I had a friend named David Jones who couldn’t purchase a gun from lots of dealers because NICS always took longer than 30 days to respond.
And finally the biggest issue with NICS - Identity Verification. NICS needs to be able to verify that a person exists. Right now a fake or mispelled name (whether the misspelling is in the database or on the 4473) will work 100% of the time since all it checks against is a blacklist. A $50 fake ID shouldn’t allow someone to buy a gun.
Totally correct and a pretty good solution, I wish more gun owners were as responsible as you sound, and I wish we could take more steps towards a reality in which they are. Realistically, I don’t really want to eliminate guns altogether, I like guns perfectly fine, they’re great plinking devices, they’re great for controlling the populations of invasive species, they’re mechanically, and sometimes historically, fascinating devices. What I prefer more is just a world in which those are the roles that guns take, rather than guns having like, such a fucked up pretense of reality, a pretense of utility, in self-defense. Rather than being an economic engine of political fearmongering. Mostly, I find this type of shit to be incredibly annoying, because my small town is constantly flooded with people who wholeheartedly believe the militarized self-defense chaff around this stuff, but have also never been to any large city in america, and are totally incurious about what the root causes of crime might be. Their concern for the world stops at the end of their fingertips, anything out of reach for them. Anything that doesn’t directly intersect or connect to them, is something they don’t give a shit about at all. It’s myopic, it’s selfish, it’s a mentality that is not conducive to a good society, much less, a society at all. That’s it, that’s my little spiel on that.
I didn’t think much about gun rentals at ranges, that’s a pretty good point. It is still probably the case that waiting periods, I suspect, would cut down on suicides for the same reason I stated previously, right, making guns harder to access for the suicidal will cut down on, not necessarily even suicide attempts, but suicide lethality. Being able to walk into any walmart in the 40’s and blow your brains out with a shotgun for probably less than 20 bucks is kind of, a very convenient method of suicide. It’s like the suicide booth from futurama, almost. Still, the point is taken well, and it’s probably a better point for more stringent precautions at rental ranges to prevent such outcomes. I don’t really know what those would end up looking like. I’d imagine a lot of those generally would end up falling into the middle and latter categories anyways, of suicide, and I would assume they’d be more due to things like ptsd and stuff like that.
I’d also imagine a lot of that is just from NICS being kind of an underfunded thing, but a more thoroughly automated and more publicly accessible database would be a pretty good solution to that, I would think. I’d also think that, more than being totally publicly accessible, it would probably need to be accessible more to local law enforcement and local government, and maybe between private parties if it were verified by credentials, more for protection of personal privacy. Sort of in the same way that buying a used car works out, in lots of states. God damn if that isn’t super inconvenient when you buy a car from the 1970’s with the original title, though. Certainly there’s quite a lot of room for improvement with NICS, but yeah, it’s very hard to kind of, push in any direction, in that respect, because it’s hard to move away from the propaganda about whatever you might pass being a violation of personal freedom and privacy and yadda yadda ya.
A lot of ranges now have a rule that non-members cannot rent a gun unless they are with someone else or brought a gun of their own specifically because of suicides.
My local range still had an incident where a guy brought his new neighbor to the range for some “guy bonding” just so he could shoot himself. Someone who puts that much effort into it is probably pretty committed, but also fuck him for using his neighbor like that and putting everyone at the range through the trauma of someone shooting themselves in the head. Dude survived, though.
As for privacy, I think there’s a solution. Someone should be able to run a background check on themselves in NICS and when it’s approved it can generate a kind of “redemption” code that they can share with others for 30 days (the maximum time a NICS check is good for). Then the seller can run that code and name in combination to verify they’re an approved buyer.
It’s like 2FA for background checks.
What frustrates me endlessly is that so many people who understand the industry refuse to acknowledge its dangers, while so many of the most powerful anti-gun people simply don’t know anything about the firearms they’re trying to regulate. So we end up with either nothing changing at all, or idiotic laws that are actively harmful.
In California, all newly-designed handguns are required to have a feature that literally doesn’t exist. The guns are supposed to stamp their serial numbers on the primers. No new gun has been added to the California approved handgun list in over a decade because if it, which is why some guns that have been redesigned to improve safety and prevent accidental discharge are illegal, where the old pistols that may fire when rattled are still being sold new.
New Jersey had a law mandating that once a major gun manufacturer released a handgun that had electronic smart features to prevent unauthorized people from firing the gun that any gun without that feature would be illegal to sell. So, New Jersey basically prevented those guns from being developed by telling manufacturers their sales would tank on every other model if they ever tried.
On the other side, Texas started permitless carry. I live in Texas and that shit is idiotic. I keep my handgun license current because people should be trained if they’re gonna carry. When I took my first LCH class, there was a woman who couldn’t hit the silhouette target frame (2’x4’) at 3 yards. She obviously failed the test, but now she’s allowed to carry without a license. That’s incredibly stupid.
So… What’s your plan for any of those scenarios where someone wants more than just to run off with your phone/wallet/car?
(Keeping in mind the that cops have zero obligation to stop a crime in progress if there’s any potential risk to them, leading to scenarios like this: https://youtu.be/jAfUI_hETy0 )
I’m not the person you’re replying to, but: there are defense tools that are simultaneously less lethal than firearms, while actually more effective than firearms for self defense.
Elaborate, please.
There are lots of situations where fire arms aren’t good for defense.
They need to be aimed.
They need to be loaded.
They are not allowed in some places/They have specific transportation requirements which preclude them from bring brought to some places.
They can kill/ grievously wound uninvolved people.
They aren’t effective for summoning help.
Someone wielding one in self defense can be reasonably misidentified as an aggressor.
Not every defence device has these deficiencies.
Can you name viable alternatives, and what’s your personal plan?
Copying my reply to someone else because much of it is relevant here too.
I didn’t mean to suggest that there was something without any of those drawbacks, so I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear about that.
I’m not going to propose a one size fits all solution.
But I think people should consider the situations they are most likely to find themselves in, and make considered decisions.
I don’t think guns are likely to be the best choice very often.
I’m not that interested in discussing what I do personally for safety, because every situation is unique.
My question is for someone passionately arguing against keeping a gun for self defense, with the implication being it’s law, and so regardless of training and care and personal circumstances.
The pro-gun crowd doesn’t just blanket recommend guns for everyone in every situation either, so my question is specifically about how those worst case defensive scenarios are envisioned by people who eschew the idea of personally owning guns.
Not every defence device has these deficiencies.
So which do you propose?
Pepper spray can deal permanent damage to one’s sight and sense of smell, and affects everyone nearby.
A shocker can kill a person with heart problems.
A traumatic pistol may just not be enough, it’s like a device to punch a person in effect.
A knife requires training and won’t help against a stronger attacker likely.
Gun violence is a symptom of socioeconomic inequality and a lack of mental health care. We could ban all guns today and while I’m sure there would be a reduction in violent events, people wanting to cause harm would switch to bladed weapons (see knife crime in the UK and axe attacks in China).
If somebody is going to try and kill me, I’d prefer they at least break a sweat in doing so.
Also there is empirical evidence that people are less “empathic” the further away they are from you. Shooting someone is psychologically much easier than stabbing someone.
It can be a nervous sweat if it needs to be.
Which leads to hundreds/thousands of people not dying every year due to being shot.
Even if it’s only one life saved, that’s great. But can’t we want to fix the systemic problems that lead to gun violence as well? It also fixes a lot of other bad things that don’t lead to gun violence, like homelessness, depression, preventable deaths, inadequate health care, etc.
What I’m saying is that guns aren’t the problem. They make the problem worse. I’d like to see us try to fix both instead of a half measure of different gun laws.
We can do both.
UK knife crime per capita is lower than that of US knife crime and US has gun crime on top of that.
There is no evidence that overall rates stay the same if gun violence gets reduced, but there is evidence that reductions in gun crime also reduce other types of violence. Meaning you’re talking the opposite of truth.
https://epirev.oxfordjournals.org/content/38/1/140.full.pdf+html
It’s just silly NRA propaganda without a shred of evidence for it. Just like all rhetoric against gun control.
And even if he were right, when was the last time you heard of someone in the UK stabbing a hundred people at a concert, or thirty kids in an elementary school?
Exactly.
A knife is nowhere near as dangerous as a semi-automatic weapon.
The main point is that he’s completely wrong, though.
“Reductions in nonfirearm homicides were also observed,” Santaella-Tenorio et al. note, “although not as pronounced as the ones observed for firearm homicides.”
There’s been at least one organized mass stabbing in China, I don’t think everyone died but over a hundred people were stabbed by a half dozen or so attackers.
So a “half-dozen” people organized to do with knives what one American could do with a gun?
Something that in the us is called a “Tuesday”, we might add.
Cool. There are over 600 mass shootings in the U.S. every year.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/mass-shootings-days-2023-database-shows/story?id=96609874
Yeah no it’s not. You’re try to compare a place with social safety nets to a country that doesn’t have any.
Trying to compare the EU to the USA for anything gun wise is pointless.
Trying to compare the EU to the USA for anything gun wise is pointless.
Actually, to that point, EU v US is a better comparison than “a country the size of Michigan” v US.
Here’s the company America is in, worldwide, for the right to own guns.
The Czech Republic does as well. Mexico doesn’t really count, it’s basically impossible to get a firearm as a civ and the cartels have basically all the weapons
Excuses and bullshit. Zero evidence for anything you’re saying. Stop perpetuating shitty NRA propaganda.
https://infogram.com/us-vs-uk-on-knife-crime-1hmr6gyrxmlo6nl
It’s the guns.
Gun control works as surely as antibiotics do.
Gun control works as surely as antibiotics do.
If there’s one thing the last four years have taught us, it’s that there’s an overwhelming number of Americans who disagree with both sides of that analogy.
Antibiotics? You mean vaccines. Two very different things. If anything, those Americans are into antibiotics too much to the point that they thought taking them would stop COVID.
If Trump told them to never take antibiotics, they’d throw them all out that day.
Lol no it’s not. The UK has no where near what we have when it comes to civ gun ownership. There are more guns in civ hands than all armies combined basically. When Australia did their forced buyback they had a 60% turn in rate…they had 1mil in civ hands at that time. Do you know what 40% is of 450 million firearms? Still more than all other nations that allow their citizens to even look at a firearm.
We have a very small sub set of people who commit gun violence. Do you think they’ll be the ones to turn them in? No. Because most legally cannot own them now.
Gun control works great if you have safety nets already in place so people don’t turn to crime to survive.
Also the NRA can fuck off… it’s always hilarious when you think you’re arguing with some Republican NRA dipshit.
Never any evidence, just regurgitating bullshit propaganda, ZzZZzzZzZzzzz
Come back when you have actual science instead of this childish garbage.
https://epirev.oxfordjournals.org/content/38/1/140.full.pdf+html
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/policy-evaluation/
What bullshit did I spew? The NRA just says mental health and gun control doesn’t work. You listed a link to fucking Harvard which is known to directly make studies to say what they want. This isn’t news.
I’ve stated that safety nets in countries with less crime in general isn’t because they have less guns. It’s because their citizens are taken care of. Are you really going to sit there and say this isn’t true?
Suicides…guns do not magically make people more prone to suicide, this is and has always been false. Japan is one of the strictest countries on the planet for access to firearms. Yet they have a suicide rate that is far greater than ours. Are you suggesting their miniscule amount of suicides is related to their access to firearms?
Ah yes, the NRA doesn’t bullshit while having no science, but Harvard is “known to directly make studies say what they want”
Thanks for saving me time in not having a conversation with a science denying brainwashed hillbilly.
You keep saying things, but unfortunately we sane people live in the real world and here we back things up with data.
All of which shows you’re wrong, which makes you cry, so you think you’re gonna “argue” the matter, again repeating the same childish NRA talking points.
Which this time is literally “nahh dem Haarvaard boyss are making their stoodies saying what they is thinking they are need to say”. It’s not like peer-reviewed science has established practices to require proof and verification right? //s
Roflmao
UK knife crime per capita is lower than that of US knife crime and US has gun crime on top of that.
Depends who you ask and comparisons like these are almost definitely flawed by how different countries do reporting.
e.g. this site says the UK has slightly more knife deaths than the US https://wisevoter.com/country-rankings/stabbing-deaths-by-country/#united-states-of-america
Then you’ve also got to consider differences in treatment. Are there more stabbings but less deaths because they’re treated better in the US? Conversely, maybe the problem is even worse in the UK but because of their health care system they’re treated better resulting in fewer deaths.
Then we also need to consider repeat offenders and rehabilitation. Is the knife crime higher in the UK but repeat offenders are lower because of treatment?
There is no evidence that overall rates stay the same if gun violence gets reduced, but there is evidence that reductions in gun crime also reduce other types of violence.
Anyways, point being, this is the exact kind of statement that requires pointing out correlation does not equate to causation. In fact, this could be further evidence that guns are not the problem.
As for your source… These are the primary conclusions of the authors (direct quote):
In a comprehensive review of firearm-control legislation worldwide, we identified a range of studies examining the as- sociation between firearm-related laws and firearm deaths. Three general observations emerge from this analysis:
- The simultaneous implementation of laws targeting multi- ple elements of firearms regulations reduced firearm-related deaths in certain countries; 2) some specific restrictions on purchase, access, and use of firearms are associated with re- ductions in firearm deaths; 3) challenges in ecological design and the execution of studies limit the confidence in study findings and the conclusions that can be derived from them.
I didn’t read the whole thing but … If you’ve got a specific page, paragraph, etc on the whole correlation thing, I’d be willing to hear you out.
You’re not completely wrong. But (1) guns make it sooo much easier to cause a lot of harm, and (2) a gun gives you so much more confidence than a knife. Also: you can run from a knife, you can’t run from a gun
you can run from a knife, you can’t run from a gun
Ahh, not handicapable, I see.
But unintended ableism aside, you’d also be surprised, if you can get upwards of 25yrd away from the shooter, they probably can’t hit you for shit (doubly so if they have a glock switch, they reduce accuracy). Most criminals don’t train at all, much less for distance.
You are a bit delulu hmmm?
No, there’s a reason most people who get shot, especially with handguns, are closer than 75ft: it’s harder than you think. To me it’s delusional how many people seem to think aim assist is real.
I totally agree. The anti-gun crowd is just a bunch of useful idiots who refuse to tackle problems at their roots.
They’re also usually city-folk who don’t understand that people living in rural America only have guns to defend themselves. No cop is going to protect their farmhouse from robbers, lol.
So the pro gun in the US are just farmers that need to defend their farmhouse from robbers? You might want to sit down and think who the useful idiot is here.
Not too long ago here on Lemmy, someone told me that we need guns to protect ourselves from attacks by bears, mountain lions and rattlesnakes. Even in cities. They showed me a link about a bear harmlessly roaming around some suburb as proof of this necessity.
My pointing out that there have been 180 fatal bear attacks in all of North America since the 18th century, and many of those were bears in captivity, didn’t help.
What’s funny is that I don’t ever see any “sensible” gun owners telling these people to stop helping.
🤡
Its more like there are already hundreds of millions of guns in the US. Criminal element and the scum of society would keep theirs while the law abiding surrender theirs. Society would get worse and less safe.
But the so-called law abiding didn’t surrender their altered guns, did they?
Pure and unadulterated bullshit.
(Also the US has more knife crime than the UK as well).
I’d say its a symptom of our police and justice system being completely ineffective at cleaning up our cities and locking away violent offenders to keep them out of society. They’re more interested in milking the taxpayers for stupid shit that doesn’t require any effort like traffic tickets or massive amounts of overtime for doing nothing. There’s too many violent people out there and no one is doing anything to neutralize the threat to law abiding society.
A knife battle sounds kinda better. I’ll have a greater chance to survive and some bad-ass scars.
The loser of a knife fight dies in the parking lot, the winner dies in the ambulance.
Buddy of mine (alright, coworker, but he was cool) decided to try and break up a bar fight one night, one of the guys ended up slicing his stomach right the fuck open. Like REALLY open. Was fucking wild, dude spent a long time in the hospital and never came back to work, but I did hear he was doing better so he at least did live.
Still though, point is, knife attacks are a lot more brutal than those who advocate for knives think.
Keep thinking that. Meanwhile most people here wouldn’t be able to fight off someone with a knife.
It takes size and muscle, shooting the attacker takes a single trigger pull.
You may not like to hear it, but guns aren’t going anywhere. Maybe if we stop making out gun owners to be some raging lunatics. Then they may be more likely to give them up.
This is all pointless anyway.
Knife crime in UK is still lower than knife crime in US. You’ve been drinking some weird kool-aid without faxt checking.
Sounds like I should stay strapped so I don’t get poked
It will only get worse as batteries improve and printed rail guns become trivial to make and difficult to detect.
So cool, always wanted one. They are not very energy-effective though.
And yet we’re seeing a drop in gun related deaths after it spiked during the pandemic:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6b/1999-_Gun-related_deaths_USA.png
It’s too early to call this a trend, but assuming home conversion to full auto is getting common, it has not yet correlated with a rise in gun deaths.
I don’t think it will for an important reason: full auto actually sucks. Most people don’t know how to use it and tend to spray bullets while hitting nothing. Even the AR15, which has relatively low recoil, is not very accurate when you hold down the trigger like that.
One exception is the 2017 Las Vegas shooting (which was a bump stock, but effectively the same end result). He was shooting into a large crowd where every bullet was all but guaranteed to hit someone. Most mass shootings aren’t like that.
The way the military uses full auto isn’t necessarily to hit anyone, either. It’s to force the enemy to keep their heads down so your side can maneuver into a better position. That’s not how a lone mass shooter would operate. They don’t have a team where that tactic makes sense.
Yes, there are fewer gun related deaths. But there are more mass shootings and guns have become the # 1 killer of children and teens. Source
this is false, this stat deliberately counts 18 and 19 year olds as “children” and purposefully includes gang related violence. great example of using statistics to sell a story.
how many gang members are going to surrender their firearms after a ban?
Where did you find that? Because the info states … “Of the 6,192 children and teenagers under 18 who were shot in 2023, more than 1,600 died.”
your source links to this source of data, which only goes up to 2021. The table clearly states they’re counting 15 - 19 year olds.
that 6,192 number appears to come from the gunviolencearchive site, but I don’t see any source for their data other than claims that “suicide data provided by CDC”
further, a simple search of the claim “guns number one cause of death in children” will find a lot of valid critiques of this claim.
No it doesn’t. For the stats on kids it uses this source from 2024.
yes I know, I mentioned that in my comment. can you tell me where on that page it indicates their source of data?
Here …
If I was told correct info I think even the armed forces dont like full auto outside of specific use cases like mounted guns with hundreds to thousnads of rounds in boxes and for supressing fired from rifles with detachable mags. If you really wanted to mow through a crowd for some ungodly reason a semi auto (not pump) shotgun with buckshot shells and a detachable mag would work as well as full auto rifle in an intermediate cartridge.
The way the military uses full auto isn’t necessarily to hit anyone, either. It’s to force the enemy to keep their heads down so your side can maneuver into a better position
The military from what I heard doesn’t. They use burst mode to improve the chance of hitting something, but not waste too much too easily.
It depends
Not all weapons have a burst mode. Often though, militaries prefer controlled bursts of full auto, but it depends on the role and weapons system. Machine gunners are more likely to go full hog than a rifleman for example, but that’s assuming that all soldiers do the most optimal choice in any given situation, which just isn’t true.
I’m not sure what your point is. So what if gun deaths are down since the pandemic? Viewing the chart you submitted as evidence we can pretty much just trace a continuation of the trajectory in gun deaths straight to where they would have been from before the pandemic to after - so they’re still trending upward overall. Also, the article doesn’t postulate an increase in gun deaths, just that modded guns are likely being used in crimes.
Who cares what the military does? These aren’t military users, and they’re using automatic fire to spray bullets in gang turf wars or whatever. They’re not known for taking the time to aim, and are just fine with taking out little kids or bystanders.
Overall, I have no idea what you’re trying to prove except “Look over there!!” and your points ramble all over the place.
Fact is that if more bullets fly probability says more people are gonna get hit. Maybe not today, but tomorrow.
Guns with conversion devices have been used in several mass shootings, including one that left four dead at a Sweet Sixteen party in Alabama last year and another that left six people dead at a bar district in Sacramento, California, in 2022. In Houston, police officer William Jeffrey died in 2021 after being shot with a converted gun while serving a warrant. In cities such as Indianapolis, police have seized them every week.
So again, not sure what you sound like you’re tying to minimize or dismiss. Full auto isn’t a problem? I can assure you that you’d feel differently if you were downrange in a shopping mall and someone decided to fire one up.
Overall, I have no idea what you’re trying to prove except “Look over there!!” and your points ramble all over the place.
I’m not the person you’re talking to, but this sentence makes you an imbecile saying that if somebody’s smarter than you, it’s their problem.
You might consider that if you just discard opinions of people competent in the subject, such as military and, well, usual gun nuts, the end result is not worth much.
The conclusion is that mass shooting deaths would actually go down if we just let people use full auto. It’s a counterintuitive result, but it’s all there.
/s? Because if not that’s the biggest line of horseshit I’ve ever heard in my life. What do you plan on doing, allowing only Imperial Stormtroopers access to guns? SMH…don’t bother replying.
Good. If a beligerent has one of these we can at least do something about it, as opposed to “legal” weapons of mass murder.
Maybe, just maybe guns are actually the problem.
Clearly the obvious step is to totally legalise fully automatic weaponry with no limits on firing rate or capacity, so that the good guys can buy them and then the problem will solve itself
You know they’re not illegal in the majority of states, right? The main thing limiting access is cost, but even then it’s no more than a used car. Yeah, you have to go through the NFA, but that’s hardly more difficult than a normal NICS check, just pay the $200 and wait for the okay.
Best get rid of the NFA then.
Yes please!
Eh, even Mac10s are going for 12k USD or so, nowadays, and that’s not exactly the most quality of fully automatic guns. They are a little closer to the price for a new car, I guess.
