3 mass shooting, three semi automtic rifles

[SavannahMann]

A semiautomatic rifle is NOT an assault weapon.

you want to hold everyone who happens to own a semiautomatic rifle responsible for crimes committed by other people.

Do you recognize any danger posed by assault weapons? And let's not get bogged down in semantics. A semi-automatic firing system fitted with a magazine containing more than ten rounds is, for the purpose of our discussion, an assault weapon.

Only if you are an idiot! I suppose using that logic, a rock sitting in the road is a ballistic missile.

Using your incorrect definition, that would make my .40 caliber handgun an assault weapon. Now can you see the idiocy in your statement?

You would be content to argue semantics rather than responsibly address the problem.

Here's the accepted tactic: first argue that no law can totally prevent gun violence and, therefore, no laws need be written. Next, argue that gun legislation is prima facea unconstitutional and therefore should not be tried. Then argue that guns are benign, inanimate objects as safe as a ball of yarn and anyone who is not immersed deeply in the gun culture are poseurs with no valid argument to offer.

This attitude by default makes you complicit in mass shootings. Lacking the imagination to craft a compromise, you are forcing society to factor in the blood of innocent victims as the cost of doing business in a gun loving society.

Call me an idiot all damn day long. It won't make your argument any more legitimate.

There are several problems, problems that people are trying to tell you about, and you refuse to listen. It is said that the Devil is in the Details. In this case, the Devil is against you, because the details you are choosing to ignore, are vitally important.

First, the weapon you all are talking about is the AR platform chambered for the 5.56 MM NATO round. It is not the most leathal choice. It’s not in the top ten. It might make the list of the top 100 most lethal rounds, but only if you exclude exotic rounds that are not in widespread use.

Let’s start with Las Vegas. There were more than 500 injured, and 58 dead not counting the shooter who offed himself. That is a lethal rating of one in ten. You may want to argue that is not Germaine, but it is. Because the 5.56 round is not designed to kill. This is one of those details that you are ignoring. The 5.56 round was chosen for a number of reasons for the military. Lethality was not one of those criteria.

First, the truth is that a vast majority of rounds are fired in suppressive efforts. In other words, the soldier is shooting in the general direction of the enemy in an effort to pin them down, to keep them from shooting the soldier. The human instinct to duck is very strong when you hear the zipping of bullets flying by. The 5.56 round was lighter, and allowed the soldier to carry more ammunition to fire even more rounds at the enemy in an effort to keep their heads down. Instead of eighty, or one hundred rounds of .308, the soldiers could carry three hundred rounds of 5.56.

Second. The 5.56 round created what is called “Military significant wounds”. This is preferred on a battlefield. If I kill an enemy, then his mates want revenge, but also don’t have to worry about him anymore. If I wound that enemy, his mates hear him screaming in pain, they see him bleeding, and possibly dying. It takes two of those enemy soldiers to carry the wounded man away. It takes a third soldier to carry the litter bearers weapons and equipment. One wound can remove three or four soldiers from the battle.

If the enemy ignores the wounded guy, then the screams work on their minds. They become afraid of being that guy, of screaming in agony as they lay dying. They are more reluctant to stick their heads up, more reluctant to do something courageous, and that results in fewer casualties on our side because of weakened morale on the enemy side.

Third. Ease of use. The 5.56 round does not have much power, so it does not have much kick. It makes it easier for smaller people to shoot the rifle. The rifle can be lighter, and easier for the soldier to carry. Now, one of the problems we had when the standard round was .30 Caliber, was that our allies who were smaller in stature couldn’t handle the rifles as easily. That was one of the reasons they developed the great grandfather of your “Assault Weapons” definition. The .30 Cal Carbine. This fired a hot pistol cartridge, so it could be smaller, lighter, and more easily used by the indigenous peoples. Early Pictures from Vietnam show the Vietnamese troops carrying this carbine. We gave it to the allies from nations where their physical stature was not as large as our own. Our own troops carried it during World War II as well as Korea and Vietnam.

The M-1 Garand was heavy, and had a powerful kick. The M-14 chamberd for the almost identical cartridge .308 was just as heavy, and had just as powerful a recoil.

By the way, both of those rifles, are far more lethal than the AR that is scaring you.

The devil is in the details. I told you that to begin with. Roughly speaking, one in ten of those shot in Vegas was killed. Again, that’s about average. It is hard to kill someone with that particular rifle cartridge. You have to hit them in a vital organ, head or heart, or clip an artery to get them to bleed out fast enough to kill them. Generally speaking of those wounded people get to a hospital alive, they have a 95% chance of survival. Not very lethal.

Let’s say you ban these semi-automatic rifles and pistols with these scary high capacity magazines. Do you think that people will not move to the larger calibers, the ones we have already explained are in fact far more lethal? Companies that are now making the popular AR platform will shift to the larger weapons. It might take them as much as two weeks to retool and start production. We’ll have a flurry of M-14 type rifles with the Ten Round magazine. But where perhaps three would die from the AR 30 round magazine, now five will die statistically speaking from the M-14 type weapon. That rifle has a 50% kill rate if you are shot by it.

So instead of saving lives, you’ll actually be killing more people.

I know, this is all just nonsense to you. But it is true. The Special Forces, the guys who have to have one shot one kill if at all possible have walked away from the 5.56 for the most part. They now use this. .458 SOCOM - Wikipedia

Much bigger bullet, much bigger hole in the baddie, and much more likely for the one shot one kill.

The FBI is switching pistols again. This time they’re abandoning the .40 for the less powerful 9MM. The reason? The cops miss their targets about 70% of the time in a shooting situation. Yes, you read that right. Three rounds out of ten will hit the baddie on average. The larger capacity allows for the cops to fire more rounds, and increase the chances that one of those hits will stop the baddie, or perhaps kill them.

Look at the reports of the Cops shooting anyone, Mike Brown. The bullets were all over his body. That was at practically point blank range. The cop was literally right on top of him and still had to empty the magazine because he couldn’t hit a vital organ reliably.

Get rid of those high capacity magazines, and the people will switch to more powerful rounds. Instead of a 9MM which you have an 80% chance of surviving, they’ll switch to a .357 Magnum, a round that is literally twice as powerful as the 9MM. It is far more powerful than the .45 ACP of the famed 1911 pistols. Those cartridges tend to stop in the human body, but the .357 plows right through and keeps on going.

If you want more lethal rounds on the street, focus on capacity. I’d prefer more wounded, than dead. But it’s the details that you need to learn to speak logically about these issues. Because I’d rather get shot with a 5.56 round any day than a .338 Lapua. I won’t survive the Lapua round if I am hit anywhere in the torso. I’ve got about one chance in five of surviving the AR round. With the Lapua, even if the round does not hit a vital organ, I’m liable to bleed out in less than two minutes.

The AR is not a magic wand of death. It is not even a very effective rifle. It is popular for the same reasons the military choose it. Not much kick, easy to shoot, ammunition is cheap, and plentiful, very accurate for it’s weight and design. Reasonably reliable all things considered.

For the record. Another of those devilish details. The 5.56 round, is a really fast .22 caliber. The original cartridge was the .223 Remington. Intended to be used to hunt very small deer. I use the classic 30.06 round for that task. That round is twice as powerful, literally again, as the .223 or 5.56. That’s the cartridge where you have one chance in two of surviving if you get shot in the torso with it.

It will make a big comeback as someone starts making the old M-1 Garands again if you ban those scary “Assault” weapons. The .308 will tear through two people with leathal injuries to both with ease. Why do you want those to become the weapon of choice? Let the people keep shooting our citizens with the least effective cartridge. It’s better for all of us if they stick with the more useless choice. We then have a much better chance of survival.

I appreciate your input. I also appreciate the fact that, while I was not brought up in a house with guns, I am out of my element when discussing specifics, details and the lexicon of the gun culture.

Americans are killing one another with frequency, rapidity and a blind eye to consequence and morality. Can you help us out here? This carnage must stop. How can we do that?[/QUOTE]

Here, things get a little more technical. Let me start by reminding you of things you probably haven’t considered. In the 1940’s it took the greatest minds of the era to come up with the Atomic Bomb. These were the finest mathematicians, physicists, and theoretical minds of their era. They were infinitely smarter than I am. It took these amazing minds years of hard work to come up with the Atomic Bomb. Today, a fairly bright High School Physics student can do the same thing. A college level student who is practically at the bottom of his class can do it. What prevents them is not that they are too smart to do it. What prevents them is one little thing. They need the fissionable material that has been refined.

Anyone can pick up Uranium. You can find it in Colorado literally laying on the ground. Your Geiger counter will click away letting you know you’ve found some. You can pick it up, and take it home. It is useless. It’s a rock that if you wear it or carry it in your pocket for fifty years might give you a bit of skin cancer. It is not refined. It is the refining that is the really hard part of building a nuclear weapon. The design is well known and able to be duplicated with ease.

This is for the most advanced and most destructive weapons know to our species. How to make it is easy, it’s one part that is hard. Now, what does this matter? Firearms are much simpler, much less complex, and the components are much much easier to get.

These are home made submachine guns that were captured by police in Brazil. Look at them. There is nothing refined about them, they are stamped steel and cast aluminum. You can make it out of essentially scrap metal you would throw away, or find at the dump. How do you restrict access to scrap metal? I’ve never done that, but I can. Anyone with even one year of high school metal shop can do it with ease.

Before you say we can limit the ammunition, are you sure we can do that? What is ammunition? Gunpowder, and a hunk of metal. Gunpowder has been around for more than a thousand years. It isn’t exactly like your Momma’s secret Chilli. Everyone knows it. Coal or charcoal, salt peter, and sulfur. When Homer Hickam wanted to build a rocket, his science teacher told him that this would make rocket fuel. Homer and his friends went to the city and found a chemical supply shop. They asked to buy a couple pounds each of those. The man told them that first, the company dealt in train car loads, not pounds. Second, that stuff made gunpowder, and he wasn’t going to sell any to a bunch of kids.

Smokeless powder, or modern powder, has Nitrogen added to it. Nitrates. It makes it more powerful, and really no more unstable.

But we can make ammunition with ease too. Including the cartridge. The secret to that is the primer. The primer is a modern equivalent, but at first it was fulminate of mercury, and then fulminate of silver. The secret for those is known to just about every chemistry student in school today. Making explosives is easy, most of the training for chemists is how not to do it.

So banning the guns doesn’t work. Banning the ammunition makes it a little harder, but not significantly so. We know. We banned Crystal Meth. We made one of the ingredients so hard to get you have to present identification to the drug store to buy it. But guess what? Production of Crystal Meth has increased by 1,000%. Seriously.

All we did was cut down on the number of idiots burning down their mobile home trying to cook meth in their kitchen. The big boys started cooking it in huge factory settings ala Breaking Bad.

So what you are asking is how do we put the Genie back in the bottle? We can’t. It can’t be done. If you managed to ban firearms today. There would be literally tens of thousands of them buried in watertight containers waiting. People would start to work on them with tools they had gotten for a couple hundred bucks. Home made guns would become the norm. Ban high capacity magazines, and people can make those just as easy. A spring is another old invention that we understand pretty well.

You can make a Glock over the next month. It’s called Polymer 80. It is a nearly finished Glock frame. All you have to do is a little filing, and drill a couple holes in it. The parts are readily available, and you would have a pistol with NO SERIAL NUMBER. Untraceable. It’s sold today. Glock Parts for Sale | Best Glock Accessories | GlockStore.com

It is sold from a number of stores and sites. So these pistols are manufactured in people’s homes, garages, workshops, or bedrooms. Basic tools, and you have a gun.

How do you ban knowledge? How do you ban basic tools? The bombing of Oklahoma City happened so long ago, but you can still buy Nitrate based Fertilizer, the key ingredient in the bomb that was used. Go to your local home improvement store, look at the fertilizers, the nitrate rating is on the bag it is sold in. You’ll need 20% or higher to make a bomb. I bet you can find at least two or three different brands of the stuff. Nitrates are very valuable as a fertilizer.

Now, all of this is capable of being made by someone with basic skills. What about those with advanced skills? What about those with advanced metalworking skills? The guys on Mythbusters made a cannon out of pipe. A cannon that was just as effective as one purpose built. They made cannon balls out of stone. They made them out of all sorts of items. How do you stop people from buying a couple hunks of pipe from their local metal supply yard? They could need it to repair a sewage line, or they could be using it to make a cannon. Welding the pipes together to make a cannon barrel is practically child’s play. Again, that one year of high school metal shop would do it to give them the skills.

If you didn’t have that year of shop, watching some You Tube videos on how to weld would give you the foundation, and a few days of practice on scrap metal would give you the skills. Now, all you need are some ball bearings, plentiful everywhere. Some gunpowder, easily manufactured, and you have a cannon firing grapeshot. Those weapons slaughtered people by the dozens with each shot during the era when they were the pinnacle of military technology.

The point I am getting to is this. There are dangerous weapons. Those are weapons that are poorly designed, or manufactured. Otherwise, there are only dangerous people. I was trained by the Army to think of this kind of stuff. I was trained to make weapons out of anything I could find. Wood would make a weapon. I could make a Pungi Pit, or a swinging spike trap. I could make a weapon out of string. Coating those spikes with fecal matter insured an infection, and probably caused the wounded to lose a leg from gangrene.

The only thing you can do is try and protect yourself from those dangerous people. You might not succeed. But you stand a better chance of it than hoping for the kindness of strangers to protect you.

 

[Brain357]

A semiautomatic rifle is NOT an assault weapon.

you want to hold everyone who happens to own a semiautomatic rifle responsible for crimes committed by other people.

Do you recognize any danger posed by assault weapons? And let's not get bogged down in semantics. A semi-automatic firing system fitted with a magazine containing more than ten rounds is, for the purpose of our discussion, an assault weapon.

Only if you are an idiot! I suppose using that logic, a rock sitting in the road is a ballistic missile.

Using your incorrect definition, that would make my .40 caliber handgun an assault weapon. Now can you see the idiocy in your statement?

You would be content to argue semantics rather than responsibly address the problem.

Here's the accepted tactic: first argue that no law can totally prevent gun violence and, therefore, no laws need be written. Next, argue that gun legislation is prima facea unconstitutional and therefore should not be tried. Then argue that guns are benign, inanimate objects as safe as a ball of yarn and anyone who is not immersed deeply in the gun culture are poseurs with no valid argument to offer.

This attitude by default makes you complicit in mass shootings. Lacking the imagination to craft a compromise, you are forcing society to factor in the blood of innocent victims as the cost of doing business in a gun loving society.

Call me an idiot all damn day long. It won't make your argument any more legitimate.

There are several problems, problems that people are trying to tell you about, and you refuse to listen. It is said that the Devil is in the Details. In this case, the Devil is against you, because the details you are choosing to ignore, are vitally important.

First, the weapon you all are talking about is the AR platform chambered for the 5.56 MM NATO round. It is not the most leathal choice. It’s not in the top ten. It might make the list of the top 100 most lethal rounds, but only if you exclude exotic rounds that are not in widespread use.

Let’s start with Las Vegas. There were more than 500 injured, and 58 dead not counting the shooter who offed himself. That is a lethal rating of one in ten. You may want to argue that is not Germaine, but it is. Because the 5.56 round is not designed to kill. This is one of those details that you are ignoring. The 5.56 round was chosen for a number of reasons for the military. Lethality was not one of those criteria.

First, the truth is that a vast majority of rounds are fired in suppressive efforts. In other words, the soldier is shooting in the general direction of the enemy in an effort to pin them down, to keep them from shooting the soldier. The human instinct to duck is very strong when you hear the zipping of bullets flying by. The 5.56 round was lighter, and allowed the soldier to carry more ammunition to fire even more rounds at the enemy in an effort to keep their heads down. Instead of eighty, or one hundred rounds of .308, the soldiers could carry three hundred rounds of 5.56.

Second. The 5.56 round created what is called “Military significant wounds”. This is preferred on a battlefield. If I kill an enemy, then his mates want revenge, but also don’t have to worry about him anymore. If I wound that enemy, his mates hear him screaming in pain, they see him bleeding, and possibly dying. It takes two of those enemy soldiers to carry the wounded man away. It takes a third soldier to carry the litter bearers weapons and equipment. One wound can remove three or four soldiers from the battle.

If the enemy ignores the wounded guy, then the screams work on their minds. They become afraid of being that guy, of screaming in agony as they lay dying. They are more reluctant to stick their heads up, more reluctant to do something courageous, and that results in fewer casualties on our side because of weakened morale on the enemy side.

Third. Ease of use. The 5.56 round does not have much power, so it does not have much kick. It makes it easier for smaller people to shoot the rifle. The rifle can be lighter, and easier for the soldier to carry. Now, one of the problems we had when the standard round was .30 Caliber, was that our allies who were smaller in stature couldn’t handle the rifles as easily. That was one of the reasons they developed the great grandfather of your “Assault Weapons” definition. The .30 Cal Carbine. This fired a hot pistol cartridge, so it could be smaller, lighter, and more easily used by the indigenous peoples. Early Pictures from Vietnam show the Vietnamese troops carrying this carbine. We gave it to the allies from nations where their physical stature was not as large as our own. Our own troops carried it during World War II as well as Korea and Vietnam.

The M-1 Garand was heavy, and had a powerful kick. The M-14 chamberd for the almost identical cartridge .308 was just as heavy, and had just as powerful a recoil.

By the way, both of those rifles, are far more lethal than the AR that is scaring you.

The devil is in the details. I told you that to begin with. Roughly speaking, one in ten of those shot in Vegas was killed. Again, that’s about average. It is hard to kill someone with that particular rifle cartridge. You have to hit them in a vital organ, head or heart, or clip an artery to get them to bleed out fast enough to kill them. Generally speaking of those wounded people get to a hospital alive, they have a 95% chance of survival. Not very lethal.

Let’s say you ban these semi-automatic rifles and pistols with these scary high capacity magazines. Do you think that people will not move to the larger calibers, the ones we have already explained are in fact far more lethal? Companies that are now making the popular AR platform will shift to the larger weapons. It might take them as much as two weeks to retool and start production. We’ll have a flurry of M-14 type rifles with the Ten Round magazine. But where perhaps three would die from the AR 30 round magazine, now five will die statistically speaking from the M-14 type weapon. That rifle has a 50% kill rate if you are shot by it.

So instead of saving lives, you’ll actually be killing more people.

I know, this is all just nonsense to you. But it is true. The Special Forces, the guys who have to have one shot one kill if at all possible have walked away from the 5.56 for the most part. They now use this. .458 SOCOM - Wikipedia

Much bigger bullet, much bigger hole in the baddie, and much more likely for the one shot one kill.

The FBI is switching pistols again. This time they’re abandoning the .40 for the less powerful 9MM. The reason? The cops miss their targets about 70% of the time in a shooting situation. Yes, you read that right. Three rounds out of ten will hit the baddie on average. The larger capacity allows for the cops to fire more rounds, and increase the chances that one of those hits will stop the baddie, or perhaps kill them.

Look at the reports of the Cops shooting anyone, Mike Brown. The bullets were all over his body. That was at practically point blank range. The cop was literally right on top of him and still had to empty the magazine because he couldn’t hit a vital organ reliably.

Get rid of those high capacity magazines, and the people will switch to more powerful rounds. Instead of a 9MM which you have an 80% chance of surviving, they’ll switch to a .357 Magnum, a round that is literally twice as powerful as the 9MM. It is far more powerful than the .45 ACP of the famed 1911 pistols. Those cartridges tend to stop in the human body, but the .357 plows right through and keeps on going.

If you want more lethal rounds on the street, focus on capacity. I’d prefer more wounded, than dead. But it’s the details that you need to learn to speak logically about these issues. Because I’d rather get shot with a 5.56 round any day than a .338 Lapua. I won’t survive the Lapua round if I am hit anywhere in the torso. I’ve got about one chance in five of surviving the AR round. With the Lapua, even if the round does not hit a vital organ, I’m liable to bleed out in less than two minutes.

The AR is not a magic wand of death. It is not even a very effective rifle. It is popular for the same reasons the military choose it. Not much kick, easy to shoot, ammunition is cheap, and plentiful, very accurate for it’s weight and design. Reasonably reliable all things considered.

For the record. Another of those devilish details. The 5.56 round, is a really fast .22 caliber. The original cartridge was the .223 Remington. Intended to be used to hunt very small deer. I use the classic 30.06 round for that task. That round is twice as powerful, literally again, as the .223 or 5.56. That’s the cartridge where you have one chance in two of surviving if you get shot in the torso with it.

It will make a big comeback as someone starts making the old M-1 Garands again if you ban those scary “Assault” weapons. The .308 will tear through two people with leathal injuries to both with ease. Why do you want those to become the weapon of choice? Let the people keep shooting our citizens with the least effective cartridge. It’s better for all of us if they stick with the more useless choice. We then have a much better chance of survival.

I appreciate your input. I also appreciate the fact that, while I was not brought up in a house with guns, I am out of my element when discussing specifics, details and the lexicon of the gun culture.

Americans are killing one another with frequency, rapidity and a blind eye to consequence and morality. Can you help us out here? This carnage must stop. How can we do that?

Here, things get a little more technical. Let me start by reminding you of things you probably haven’t considered. In the 1940’s it took the greatest minds of the era to come up with the Atomic Bomb. These were the finest mathematicians, physicists, and theoretical minds of their era. They were infinitely smarter than I am. It took these amazing minds years of hard work to come up with the Atomic Bomb. Today, a fairly bright High School Physics student can do the same thing. A college level student who is practically at the bottom of his class can do it. What prevents them is not that they are too smart to do it. What prevents them is one little thing. They need the fissionable material that has been refined.

Anyone can pick up Uranium. You can find it in Colorado literally laying on the ground. Your Geiger counter will click away letting you know you’ve found some. You can pick it up, and take it home. It is useless. It’s a rock that if you wear it or carry it in your pocket for fifty years might give you a bit of skin cancer. It is not refined. It is the refining that is the really hard part of building a nuclear weapon. The design is well known and able to be duplicated with ease.

This is for the most advanced and most destructive weapons know to our species. How to make it is easy, it’s one part that is hard. Now, what does this matter? Firearms are much simpler, much less complex, and the components are much much easier to get.

View attachment 160939

These are home made submachine guns that were captured by police in Brazil. Look at them. There is nothing refined about them, they are stamped steel and cast aluminum. You can make it out of essentially scrap metal you would throw away, or find at the dump. How do you restrict access to scrap metal? I’ve never done that, but I can. Anyone with even one year of high school metal shop can do it with ease.

Before you say we can limit the ammunition, are you sure we can do that? What is ammunition? Gunpowder, and a hunk of metal. Gunpowder has been around for more than a thousand years. It isn’t exactly like your Momma’s secret Chilli. Everyone knows it. Coal or charcoal, salt peter, and sulfur. When Homer Hickam wanted to build a rocket, his science teacher told him that this would make rocket fuel. Homer and his friends went to the city and found a chemical supply shop. They asked to buy a couple pounds each of those. The man told them that first, the company dealt in train car loads, not pounds. Second, that stuff made gunpowder, and he wasn’t going to sell any to a bunch of kids.

Smokeless powder, or modern powder, has Nitrogen added to it. Nitrates. It makes it more powerful, and really no more unstable.

But we can make ammunition with ease too. Including the cartridge. The secret to that is the primer. The primer is a modern equivalent, but at first it was fulminate of mercury, and then fulminate of silver. The secret for those is known to just about every chemistry student in school today. Making explosives is easy, most of the training for chemists is how not to do it.

So banning the guns doesn’t work. Banning the ammunition makes it a little harder, but not significantly so. We know. We banned Crystal Meth. We made one of the ingredients so hard to get you have to present identification to the drug store to buy it. But guess what? Production of Crystal Meth has increased by 1,000%. Seriously.

All we did was cut down on the number of idiots burning down their mobile home trying to cook meth in their kitchen. The big boys started cooking it in huge factory settings ala Breaking Bad.

So what you are asking is how do we put the Genie back in the bottle? We can’t. It can’t be done. If you managed to ban firearms today. There would be literally tens of thousands of them buried in watertight containers waiting. People would start to work on them with tools they had gotten for a couple hundred bucks. Home made guns would become the norm. Ban high capacity magazines, and people can make those just as easy. A spring is another old invention that we understand pretty well.

You can make a Glock over the next month. It’s called Polymer 80. It is a nearly finished Glock frame. All you have to do is a little filing, and drill a couple holes in it. The parts are readily available, and you would have a pistol with NO SERIAL NUMBER. Untraceable. It’s sold today. Glock Parts for Sale | Best Glock Accessories | GlockStore.com

It is sold from a number of stores and sites. So these pistols are manufactured in people’s homes, garages, workshops, or bedrooms. Basic tools, and you have a gun.

How do you ban knowledge? How do you ban basic tools? The bombing of Oklahoma City happened so long ago, but you can still buy Nitrate based Fertilizer, the key ingredient in the bomb that was used. Go to your local home improvement store, look at the fertilizers, the nitrate rating is on the bag it is sold in. You’ll need 20% or higher to make a bomb. I bet you can find at least two or three different brands of the stuff. Nitrates are very valuable as a fertilizer.

Now, all of this is capable of being made by someone with basic skills. What about those with advanced skills? What about those with advanced metalworking skills? The guys on Mythbusters made a cannon out of pipe. A cannon that was just as effective as one purpose built. They made cannon balls out of stone. They made them out of all sorts of items. How do you stop people from buying a couple hunks of pipe from their local metal supply yard? They could need it to repair a sewage line, or they could be using it to make a cannon. Welding the pipes together to make a cannon barrel is practically child’s play. Again, that one year of high school metal shop would do it to give them the skills.

If you didn’t have that year of shop, watching some You Tube videos on how to weld would give you the foundation, and a few days of practice on scrap metal would give you the skills. Now, all you need are some ball bearings, plentiful everywhere. Some gunpowder, easily manufactured, and you have a cannon firing grapeshot. Those weapons slaughtered people by the dozens with each shot during the era when they were the pinnacle of military technology.

The point I am getting to is this. There are dangerous weapons. Those are weapons that are poorly designed, or manufactured. Otherwise, there are only dangerous people. I was trained by the Army to think of this kind of stuff. I was trained to make weapons out of anything I could find. Wood would make a weapon. I could make a Pungi Pit, or a swinging spike trap. I could make a weapon out of string. Coating those spikes with fecal matter insured an infection, and probably caused the wounded to lose a leg from gangrene.

The only thing you can do is try and protect yourself from those dangerous people. You might not succeed. But you stand a better chance of it than hoping for the kindness of strangers to protect you.

Countries with strong gun control don't have a mass killing problem. Nobody is making guns. People aren't using trucks. Bombs haven't been substituted. Lives are simply saved.

 

[SavannahMann]

Only if you are an idiot! I suppose using that logic, a rock sitting in the road is a ballistic missile.

Using your incorrect definition, that would make my .40 caliber handgun an assault weapon. Now can you see the idiocy in your statement?

You would be content to argue semantics rather than responsibly address the problem.

Here's the accepted tactic: first argue that no law can totally prevent gun violence and, therefore, no laws need be written. Next, argue that gun legislation is prima facea unconstitutional and therefore should not be tried. Then argue that guns are benign, inanimate objects as safe as a ball of yarn and anyone who is not immersed deeply in the gun culture are poseurs with no valid argument to offer.

This attitude by default makes you complicit in mass shootings. Lacking the imagination to craft a compromise, you are forcing society to factor in the blood of innocent victims as the cost of doing business in a gun loving society.

Call me an idiot all damn day long. It won't make your argument any more legitimate.

There are several problems, problems that people are trying to tell you about, and you refuse to listen. It is said that the Devil is in the Details. In this case, the Devil is against you, because the details you are choosing to ignore, are vitally important.

First, the weapon you all are talking about is the AR platform chambered for the 5.56 MM NATO round. It is not the most leathal choice. It’s not in the top ten. It might make the list of the top 100 most lethal rounds, but only if you exclude exotic rounds that are not in widespread use.

Let’s start with Las Vegas. There were more than 500 injured, and 58 dead not counting the shooter who offed himself. That is a lethal rating of one in ten. You may want to argue that is not Germaine, but it is. Because the 5.56 round is not designed to kill. This is one of those details that you are ignoring. The 5.56 round was chosen for a number of reasons for the military. Lethality was not one of those criteria.

First, the truth is that a vast majority of rounds are fired in suppressive efforts. In other words, the soldier is shooting in the general direction of the enemy in an effort to pin them down, to keep them from shooting the soldier. The human instinct to duck is very strong when you hear the zipping of bullets flying by. The 5.56 round was lighter, and allowed the soldier to carry more ammunition to fire even more rounds at the enemy in an effort to keep their heads down. Instead of eighty, or one hundred rounds of .308, the soldiers could carry three hundred rounds of 5.56.

Second. The 5.56 round created what is called “Military significant wounds”. This is preferred on a battlefield. If I kill an enemy, then his mates want revenge, but also don’t have to worry about him anymore. If I wound that enemy, his mates hear him screaming in pain, they see him bleeding, and possibly dying. It takes two of those enemy soldiers to carry the wounded man away. It takes a third soldier to carry the litter bearers weapons and equipment. One wound can remove three or four soldiers from the battle.

If the enemy ignores the wounded guy, then the screams work on their minds. They become afraid of being that guy, of screaming in agony as they lay dying. They are more reluctant to stick their heads up, more reluctant to do something courageous, and that results in fewer casualties on our side because of weakened morale on the enemy side.

Third. Ease of use. The 5.56 round does not have much power, so it does not have much kick. It makes it easier for smaller people to shoot the rifle. The rifle can be lighter, and easier for the soldier to carry. Now, one of the problems we had when the standard round was .30 Caliber, was that our allies who were smaller in stature couldn’t handle the rifles as easily. That was one of the reasons they developed the great grandfather of your “Assault Weapons” definition. The .30 Cal Carbine. This fired a hot pistol cartridge, so it could be smaller, lighter, and more easily used by the indigenous peoples. Early Pictures from Vietnam show the Vietnamese troops carrying this carbine. We gave it to the allies from nations where their physical stature was not as large as our own. Our own troops carried it during World War II as well as Korea and Vietnam.

The M-1 Garand was heavy, and had a powerful kick. The M-14 chamberd for the almost identical cartridge .308 was just as heavy, and had just as powerful a recoil.

By the way, both of those rifles, are far more lethal than the AR that is scaring you.

The devil is in the details. I told you that to begin with. Roughly speaking, one in ten of those shot in Vegas was killed. Again, that’s about average. It is hard to kill someone with that particular rifle cartridge. You have to hit them in a vital organ, head or heart, or clip an artery to get them to bleed out fast enough to kill them. Generally speaking of those wounded people get to a hospital alive, they have a 95% chance of survival. Not very lethal.

Let’s say you ban these semi-automatic rifles and pistols with these scary high capacity magazines. Do you think that people will not move to the larger calibers, the ones we have already explained are in fact far more lethal? Companies that are now making the popular AR platform will shift to the larger weapons. It might take them as much as two weeks to retool and start production. We’ll have a flurry of M-14 type rifles with the Ten Round magazine. But where perhaps three would die from the AR 30 round magazine, now five will die statistically speaking from the M-14 type weapon. That rifle has a 50% kill rate if you are shot by it.

So instead of saving lives, you’ll actually be killing more people.

I know, this is all just nonsense to you. But it is true. The Special Forces, the guys who have to have one shot one kill if at all possible have walked away from the 5.56 for the most part. They now use this. .458 SOCOM - Wikipedia

Much bigger bullet, much bigger hole in the baddie, and much more likely for the one shot one kill.

The FBI is switching pistols again. This time they’re abandoning the .40 for the less powerful 9MM. The reason? The cops miss their targets about 70% of the time in a shooting situation. Yes, you read that right. Three rounds out of ten will hit the baddie on average. The larger capacity allows for the cops to fire more rounds, and increase the chances that one of those hits will stop the baddie, or perhaps kill them.

Look at the reports of the Cops shooting anyone, Mike Brown. The bullets were all over his body. That was at practically point blank range. The cop was literally right on top of him and still had to empty the magazine because he couldn’t hit a vital organ reliably.

Get rid of those high capacity magazines, and the people will switch to more powerful rounds. Instead of a 9MM which you have an 80% chance of surviving, they’ll switch to a .357 Magnum, a round that is literally twice as powerful as the 9MM. It is far more powerful than the .45 ACP of the famed 1911 pistols. Those cartridges tend to stop in the human body, but the .357 plows right through and keeps on going.

If you want more lethal rounds on the street, focus on capacity. I’d prefer more wounded, than dead. But it’s the details that you need to learn to speak logically about these issues. Because I’d rather get shot with a 5.56 round any day than a .338 Lapua. I won’t survive the Lapua round if I am hit anywhere in the torso. I’ve got about one chance in five of surviving the AR round. With the Lapua, even if the round does not hit a vital organ, I’m liable to bleed out in less than two minutes.

The AR is not a magic wand of death. It is not even a very effective rifle. It is popular for the same reasons the military choose it. Not much kick, easy to shoot, ammunition is cheap, and plentiful, very accurate for it’s weight and design. Reasonably reliable all things considered.

For the record. Another of those devilish details. The 5.56 round, is a really fast .22 caliber. The original cartridge was the .223 Remington. Intended to be used to hunt very small deer. I use the classic 30.06 round for that task. That round is twice as powerful, literally again, as the .223 or 5.56. That’s the cartridge where you have one chance in two of surviving if you get shot in the torso with it.

It will make a big comeback as someone starts making the old M-1 Garands again if you ban those scary “Assault” weapons. The .308 will tear through two people with leathal injuries to both with ease. Why do you want those to become the weapon of choice? Let the people keep shooting our citizens with the least effective cartridge. It’s better for all of us if they stick with the more useless choice. We then have a much better chance of survival.

I appreciate your input. I also appreciate the fact that, while I was not brought up in a house with guns, I am out of my element when discussing specifics, details and the lexicon of the gun culture.

Americans are killing one another with frequency, rapidity and a blind eye to consequence and morality. Can you help us out here? This carnage must stop. How can we do that?

Here, things get a little more technical. Let me start by reminding you of things you probably haven’t considered. In the 1940’s it took the greatest minds of the era to come up with the Atomic Bomb. These were the finest mathematicians, physicists, and theoretical minds of their era. They were infinitely smarter than I am. It took these amazing minds years of hard work to come up with the Atomic Bomb. Today, a fairly bright High School Physics student can do the same thing. A college level student who is practically at the bottom of his class can do it. What prevents them is not that they are too smart to do it. What prevents them is one little thing. They need the fissionable material that has been refined.

Anyone can pick up Uranium. You can find it in Colorado literally laying on the ground. Your Geiger counter will click away letting you know you’ve found some. You can pick it up, and take it home. It is useless. It’s a rock that if you wear it or carry it in your pocket for fifty years might give you a bit of skin cancer. It is not refined. It is the refining that is the really hard part of building a nuclear weapon. The design is well known and able to be duplicated with ease.

This is for the most advanced and most destructive weapons know to our species. How to make it is easy, it’s one part that is hard. Now, what does this matter? Firearms are much simpler, much less complex, and the components are much much easier to get.

View attachment 160939

These are home made submachine guns that were captured by police in Brazil. Look at them. There is nothing refined about them, they are stamped steel and cast aluminum. You can make it out of essentially scrap metal you would throw away, or find at the dump. How do you restrict access to scrap metal? I’ve never done that, but I can. Anyone with even one year of high school metal shop can do it with ease.

Before you say we can limit the ammunition, are you sure we can do that? What is ammunition? Gunpowder, and a hunk of metal. Gunpowder has been around for more than a thousand years. It isn’t exactly like your Momma’s secret Chilli. Everyone knows it. Coal or charcoal, salt peter, and sulfur. When Homer Hickam wanted to build a rocket, his science teacher told him that this would make rocket fuel. Homer and his friends went to the city and found a chemical supply shop. They asked to buy a couple pounds each of those. The man told them that first, the company dealt in train car loads, not pounds. Second, that stuff made gunpowder, and he wasn’t going to sell any to a bunch of kids.

Smokeless powder, or modern powder, has Nitrogen added to it. Nitrates. It makes it more powerful, and really no more unstable.

But we can make ammunition with ease too. Including the cartridge. The secret to that is the primer. The primer is a modern equivalent, but at first it was fulminate of mercury, and then fulminate of silver. The secret for those is known to just about every chemistry student in school today. Making explosives is easy, most of the training for chemists is how not to do it.

So banning the guns doesn’t work. Banning the ammunition makes it a little harder, but not significantly so. We know. We banned Crystal Meth. We made one of the ingredients so hard to get you have to present identification to the drug store to buy it. But guess what? Production of Crystal Meth has increased by 1,000%. Seriously.

All we did was cut down on the number of idiots burning down their mobile home trying to cook meth in their kitchen. The big boys started cooking it in huge factory settings ala Breaking Bad.

So what you are asking is how do we put the Genie back in the bottle? We can’t. It can’t be done. If you managed to ban firearms today. There would be literally tens of thousands of them buried in watertight containers waiting. People would start to work on them with tools they had gotten for a couple hundred bucks. Home made guns would become the norm. Ban high capacity magazines, and people can make those just as easy. A spring is another old invention that we understand pretty well.

You can make a Glock over the next month. It’s called Polymer 80. It is a nearly finished Glock frame. All you have to do is a little filing, and drill a couple holes in it. The parts are readily available, and you would have a pistol with NO SERIAL NUMBER. Untraceable. It’s sold today. Glock Parts for Sale | Best Glock Accessories | GlockStore.com

It is sold from a number of stores and sites. So these pistols are manufactured in people’s homes, garages, workshops, or bedrooms. Basic tools, and you have a gun.

How do you ban knowledge? How do you ban basic tools? The bombing of Oklahoma City happened so long ago, but you can still buy Nitrate based Fertilizer, the key ingredient in the bomb that was used. Go to your local home improvement store, look at the fertilizers, the nitrate rating is on the bag it is sold in. You’ll need 20% or higher to make a bomb. I bet you can find at least two or three different brands of the stuff. Nitrates are very valuable as a fertilizer.

Now, all of this is capable of being made by someone with basic skills. What about those with advanced skills? What about those with advanced metalworking skills? The guys on Mythbusters made a cannon out of pipe. A cannon that was just as effective as one purpose built. They made cannon balls out of stone. They made them out of all sorts of items. How do you stop people from buying a couple hunks of pipe from their local metal supply yard? They could need it to repair a sewage line, or they could be using it to make a cannon. Welding the pipes together to make a cannon barrel is practically child’s play. Again, that one year of high school metal shop would do it to give them the skills.

If you didn’t have that year of shop, watching some You Tube videos on how to weld would give you the foundation, and a few days of practice on scrap metal would give you the skills. Now, all you need are some ball bearings, plentiful everywhere. Some gunpowder, easily manufactured, and you have a cannon firing grapeshot. Those weapons slaughtered people by the dozens with each shot during the era when they were the pinnacle of military technology.

The point I am getting to is this. There are dangerous weapons. Those are weapons that are poorly designed, or manufactured. Otherwise, there are only dangerous people. I was trained by the Army to think of this kind of stuff. I was trained to make weapons out of anything I could find. Wood would make a weapon. I could make a Pungi Pit, or a swinging spike trap. I could make a weapon out of string. Coating those spikes with fecal matter insured an infection, and probably caused the wounded to lose a leg from gangrene.

The only thing you can do is try and protect yourself from those dangerous people. You might not succeed. But you stand a better chance of it than hoping for the kindness of strangers to protect you.

Countries with strong gun control don't have a mass killing problem. Nobody is making guns. People aren't using trucks. Bombs haven't been substituted. Lives are simply saved.

You mean like Norway in which the attack claimed 77 lives? 2011 Norway attacks - Wikipedia

Or the French attack that claimed 137 lives? November 2015 Paris attacks - Wikipedia

They may not get the press our own attacks get. But there are plenty in those nations.

List of rampage killers - Wikipedia

More than 1,500 rampage killings listed.

Even today Ethnic Cleansing is going on. In Myanmar the indigenous Muslim people are being driven out of the nation under threat of death. A threat that has been delivered on many times.

So where is this panacea that you fantasize about. One of the nations with the lowest rate is Switzerland. Where every soldier has a real fully automatic assault rifle in their closet. Even more telling those soldiers can buy their rifles as they end their military service.

How would you react to the soldiers here being offered a chance to buy their fully automatic rifles from the military as they were discharged? I’m betting you would wet your pants at the mere thought.

Chemical weapons attacks in subways.

India has restrictions on weapons. So they should be safe. But for some reason they aren’t. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Mumbai_attacks

What you do have in those unarmed nations is higher casualty numbers.

We had a mass shooting at a nightclub in Florida with a lot of dead. In another instance it could have gone differently.

'Hero' stopped mass murder by crazed bar patron who was armed to the teeth, police say | Arlington | Dallas News

Gun free zones are a favorite target. Why? If you know the population inside there are unarmed you can do whatever you want. But if one of them is armed, your risk increases dramatically.

One event and 49 died. If one had been armed in the club could half have been saved? Could 90% of those victims still be alive today? I don’t know. I do know what happened. I do know that being trusting and defenseless is never a good idea.

 

[Brain357]

You would be content to argue semantics rather than responsibly address the problem.

Here's the accepted tactic: first argue that no law can totally prevent gun violence and, therefore, no laws need be written. Next, argue that gun legislation is prima facea unconstitutional and therefore should not be tried. Then argue that guns are benign, inanimate objects as safe as a ball of yarn and anyone who is not immersed deeply in the gun culture are poseurs with no valid argument to offer.

This attitude by default makes you complicit in mass shootings. Lacking the imagination to craft a compromise, you are forcing society to factor in the blood of innocent victims as the cost of doing business in a gun loving society.

Call me an idiot all damn day long. It won't make your argument any more legitimate.

There are several problems, problems that people are trying to tell you about, and you refuse to listen. It is said that the Devil is in the Details. In this case, the Devil is against you, because the details you are choosing to ignore, are vitally important.

First, the weapon you all are talking about is the AR platform chambered for the 5.56 MM NATO round. It is not the most leathal choice. It’s not in the top ten. It might make the list of the top 100 most lethal rounds, but only if you exclude exotic rounds that are not in widespread use.

Let’s start with Las Vegas. There were more than 500 injured, and 58 dead not counting the shooter who offed himself. That is a lethal rating of one in ten. You may want to argue that is not Germaine, but it is. Because the 5.56 round is not designed to kill. This is one of those details that you are ignoring. The 5.56 round was chosen for a number of reasons for the military. Lethality was not one of those criteria.

First, the truth is that a vast majority of rounds are fired in suppressive efforts. In other words, the soldier is shooting in the general direction of the enemy in an effort to pin them down, to keep them from shooting the soldier. The human instinct to duck is very strong when you hear the zipping of bullets flying by. The 5.56 round was lighter, and allowed the soldier to carry more ammunition to fire even more rounds at the enemy in an effort to keep their heads down. Instead of eighty, or one hundred rounds of .308, the soldiers could carry three hundred rounds of 5.56.

Second. The 5.56 round created what is called “Military significant wounds”. This is preferred on a battlefield. If I kill an enemy, then his mates want revenge, but also don’t have to worry about him anymore. If I wound that enemy, his mates hear him screaming in pain, they see him bleeding, and possibly dying. It takes two of those enemy soldiers to carry the wounded man away. It takes a third soldier to carry the litter bearers weapons and equipment. One wound can remove three or four soldiers from the battle.

If the enemy ignores the wounded guy, then the screams work on their minds. They become afraid of being that guy, of screaming in agony as they lay dying. They are more reluctant to stick their heads up, more reluctant to do something courageous, and that results in fewer casualties on our side because of weakened morale on the enemy side.

Third. Ease of use. The 5.56 round does not have much power, so it does not have much kick. It makes it easier for smaller people to shoot the rifle. The rifle can be lighter, and easier for the soldier to carry. Now, one of the problems we had when the standard round was .30 Caliber, was that our allies who were smaller in stature couldn’t handle the rifles as easily. That was one of the reasons they developed the great grandfather of your “Assault Weapons” definition. The .30 Cal Carbine. This fired a hot pistol cartridge, so it could be smaller, lighter, and more easily used by the indigenous peoples. Early Pictures from Vietnam show the Vietnamese troops carrying this carbine. We gave it to the allies from nations where their physical stature was not as large as our own. Our own troops carried it during World War II as well as Korea and Vietnam.

The M-1 Garand was heavy, and had a powerful kick. The M-14 chamberd for the almost identical cartridge .308 was just as heavy, and had just as powerful a recoil.

By the way, both of those rifles, are far more lethal than the AR that is scaring you.

The devil is in the details. I told you that to begin with. Roughly speaking, one in ten of those shot in Vegas was killed. Again, that’s about average. It is hard to kill someone with that particular rifle cartridge. You have to hit them in a vital organ, head or heart, or clip an artery to get them to bleed out fast enough to kill them. Generally speaking of those wounded people get to a hospital alive, they have a 95% chance of survival. Not very lethal.

Let’s say you ban these semi-automatic rifles and pistols with these scary high capacity magazines. Do you think that people will not move to the larger calibers, the ones we have already explained are in fact far more lethal? Companies that are now making the popular AR platform will shift to the larger weapons. It might take them as much as two weeks to retool and start production. We’ll have a flurry of M-14 type rifles with the Ten Round magazine. But where perhaps three would die from the AR 30 round magazine, now five will die statistically speaking from the M-14 type weapon. That rifle has a 50% kill rate if you are shot by it.

So instead of saving lives, you’ll actually be killing more people.

I know, this is all just nonsense to you. But it is true. The Special Forces, the guys who have to have one shot one kill if at all possible have walked away from the 5.56 for the most part. They now use this. .458 SOCOM - Wikipedia

Much bigger bullet, much bigger hole in the baddie, and much more likely for the one shot one kill.

The FBI is switching pistols again. This time they’re abandoning the .40 for the less powerful 9MM. The reason? The cops miss their targets about 70% of the time in a shooting situation. Yes, you read that right. Three rounds out of ten will hit the baddie on average. The larger capacity allows for the cops to fire more rounds, and increase the chances that one of those hits will stop the baddie, or perhaps kill them.

Look at the reports of the Cops shooting anyone, Mike Brown. The bullets were all over his body. That was at practically point blank range. The cop was literally right on top of him and still had to empty the magazine because he couldn’t hit a vital organ reliably.

Get rid of those high capacity magazines, and the people will switch to more powerful rounds. Instead of a 9MM which you have an 80% chance of surviving, they’ll switch to a .357 Magnum, a round that is literally twice as powerful as the 9MM. It is far more powerful than the .45 ACP of the famed 1911 pistols. Those cartridges tend to stop in the human body, but the .357 plows right through and keeps on going.

If you want more lethal rounds on the street, focus on capacity. I’d prefer more wounded, than dead. But it’s the details that you need to learn to speak logically about these issues. Because I’d rather get shot with a 5.56 round any day than a .338 Lapua. I won’t survive the Lapua round if I am hit anywhere in the torso. I’ve got about one chance in five of surviving the AR round. With the Lapua, even if the round does not hit a vital organ, I’m liable to bleed out in less than two minutes.

The AR is not a magic wand of death. It is not even a very effective rifle. It is popular for the same reasons the military choose it. Not much kick, easy to shoot, ammunition is cheap, and plentiful, very accurate for it’s weight and design. Reasonably reliable all things considered.

For the record. Another of those devilish details. The 5.56 round, is a really fast .22 caliber. The original cartridge was the .223 Remington. Intended to be used to hunt very small deer. I use the classic 30.06 round for that task. That round is twice as powerful, literally again, as the .223 or 5.56. That’s the cartridge where you have one chance in two of surviving if you get shot in the torso with it.

It will make a big comeback as someone starts making the old M-1 Garands again if you ban those scary “Assault” weapons. The .308 will tear through two people with leathal injuries to both with ease. Why do you want those to become the weapon of choice? Let the people keep shooting our citizens with the least effective cartridge. It’s better for all of us if they stick with the more useless choice. We then have a much better chance of survival.

I appreciate your input. I also appreciate the fact that, while I was not brought up in a house with guns, I am out of my element when discussing specifics, details and the lexicon of the gun culture.

Americans are killing one another with frequency, rapidity and a blind eye to consequence and morality. Can you help us out here? This carnage must stop. How can we do that?

Here, things get a little more technical. Let me start by reminding you of things you probably haven’t considered. In the 1940’s it took the greatest minds of the era to come up with the Atomic Bomb. These were the finest mathematicians, physicists, and theoretical minds of their era. They were infinitely smarter than I am. It took these amazing minds years of hard work to come up with the Atomic Bomb. Today, a fairly bright High School Physics student can do the same thing. A college level student who is practically at the bottom of his class can do it. What prevents them is not that they are too smart to do it. What prevents them is one little thing. They need the fissionable material that has been refined.

Anyone can pick up Uranium. You can find it in Colorado literally laying on the ground. Your Geiger counter will click away letting you know you’ve found some. You can pick it up, and take it home. It is useless. It’s a rock that if you wear it or carry it in your pocket for fifty years might give you a bit of skin cancer. It is not refined. It is the refining that is the really hard part of building a nuclear weapon. The design is well known and able to be duplicated with ease.

This is for the most advanced and most destructive weapons know to our species. How to make it is easy, it’s one part that is hard. Now, what does this matter? Firearms are much simpler, much less complex, and the components are much much easier to get.

View attachment 160939

These are home made submachine guns that were captured by police in Brazil. Look at them. There is nothing refined about them, they are stamped steel and cast aluminum. You can make it out of essentially scrap metal you would throw away, or find at the dump. How do you restrict access to scrap metal? I’ve never done that, but I can. Anyone with even one year of high school metal shop can do it with ease.

Before you say we can limit the ammunition, are you sure we can do that? What is ammunition? Gunpowder, and a hunk of metal. Gunpowder has been around for more than a thousand years. It isn’t exactly like your Momma’s secret Chilli. Everyone knows it. Coal or charcoal, salt peter, and sulfur. When Homer Hickam wanted to build a rocket, his science teacher told him that this would make rocket fuel. Homer and his friends went to the city and found a chemical supply shop. They asked to buy a couple pounds each of those. The man told them that first, the company dealt in train car loads, not pounds. Second, that stuff made gunpowder, and he wasn’t going to sell any to a bunch of kids.

Smokeless powder, or modern powder, has Nitrogen added to it. Nitrates. It makes it more powerful, and really no more unstable.

But we can make ammunition with ease too. Including the cartridge. The secret to that is the primer. The primer is a modern equivalent, but at first it was fulminate of mercury, and then fulminate of silver. The secret for those is known to just about every chemistry student in school today. Making explosives is easy, most of the training for chemists is how not to do it.

So banning the guns doesn’t work. Banning the ammunition makes it a little harder, but not significantly so. We know. We banned Crystal Meth. We made one of the ingredients so hard to get you have to present identification to the drug store to buy it. But guess what? Production of Crystal Meth has increased by 1,000%. Seriously.

All we did was cut down on the number of idiots burning down their mobile home trying to cook meth in their kitchen. The big boys started cooking it in huge factory settings ala Breaking Bad.

So what you are asking is how do we put the Genie back in the bottle? We can’t. It can’t be done. If you managed to ban firearms today. There would be literally tens of thousands of them buried in watertight containers waiting. People would start to work on them with tools they had gotten for a couple hundred bucks. Home made guns would become the norm. Ban high capacity magazines, and people can make those just as easy. A spring is another old invention that we understand pretty well.

You can make a Glock over the next month. It’s called Polymer 80. It is a nearly finished Glock frame. All you have to do is a little filing, and drill a couple holes in it. The parts are readily available, and you would have a pistol with NO SERIAL NUMBER. Untraceable. It’s sold today. Glock Parts for Sale | Best Glock Accessories | GlockStore.com

It is sold from a number of stores and sites. So these pistols are manufactured in people’s homes, garages, workshops, or bedrooms. Basic tools, and you have a gun.

How do you ban knowledge? How do you ban basic tools? The bombing of Oklahoma City happened so long ago, but you can still buy Nitrate based Fertilizer, the key ingredient in the bomb that was used. Go to your local home improvement store, look at the fertilizers, the nitrate rating is on the bag it is sold in. You’ll need 20% or higher to make a bomb. I bet you can find at least two or three different brands of the stuff. Nitrates are very valuable as a fertilizer.

Now, all of this is capable of being made by someone with basic skills. What about those with advanced skills? What about those with advanced metalworking skills? The guys on Mythbusters made a cannon out of pipe. A cannon that was just as effective as one purpose built. They made cannon balls out of stone. They made them out of all sorts of items. How do you stop people from buying a couple hunks of pipe from their local metal supply yard? They could need it to repair a sewage line, or they could be using it to make a cannon. Welding the pipes together to make a cannon barrel is practically child’s play. Again, that one year of high school metal shop would do it to give them the skills.

If you didn’t have that year of shop, watching some You Tube videos on how to weld would give you the foundation, and a few days of practice on scrap metal would give you the skills. Now, all you need are some ball bearings, plentiful everywhere. Some gunpowder, easily manufactured, and you have a cannon firing grapeshot. Those weapons slaughtered people by the dozens with each shot during the era when they were the pinnacle of military technology.

The point I am getting to is this. There are dangerous weapons. Those are weapons that are poorly designed, or manufactured. Otherwise, there are only dangerous people. I was trained by the Army to think of this kind of stuff. I was trained to make weapons out of anything I could find. Wood would make a weapon. I could make a Pungi Pit, or a swinging spike trap. I could make a weapon out of string. Coating those spikes with fecal matter insured an infection, and probably caused the wounded to lose a leg from gangrene.

The only thing you can do is try and protect yourself from those dangerous people. You might not succeed. But you stand a better chance of it than hoping for the kindness of strangers to protect you.

Countries with strong gun control don't have a mass killing problem. Nobody is making guns. People aren't using trucks. Bombs haven't been substituted. Lives are simply saved.

You mean like Norway in which the attack claimed 77 lives? 2011 Norway attacks - Wikipedia

Or the French attack that claimed 137 lives? November 2015 Paris attacks - Wikipedia

They may not get the press our own attacks get. But there are plenty in those nations.

List of rampage killers - Wikipedia

More than 1,500 rampage killings listed.

Even today Ethnic Cleansing is going on. In Myanmar the indigenous Muslim people are being driven out of the nation under threat of death. A threat that has been delivered on many times.

So where is this panacea that you fantasize about. One of the nations with the lowest rate is Switzerland. Where every soldier has a real fully automatic assault rifle in their closet. Even more telling those soldiers can buy their rifles as they end their military service.

How would you react to the soldiers here being offered a chance to buy their fully automatic rifles from the military as they were discharged? I’m betting you would wet your pants at the mere thought.

Chemical weapons attacks in subways.

India has restrictions on weapons. So they should be safe. But for some reason they aren’t. 2008 Mumbai attacks - Wikipedia

What you do have in those unarmed nations is higher casualty numbers.

We had a mass shooting at a nightclub in Florida with a lot of dead. In another instance it could have gone differently.

'Hero' stopped mass murder by crazed bar patron who was armed to the teeth, police say | Arlington | Dallas News

Gun free zones are a favorite target. Why? If you know the population inside there are unarmed you can do whatever you want. But if one of them is armed, your risk increases dramatically.

One event and 49 died. If one had been armed in the club could half have been saved? Could 90% of those victims still be alive today? I don’t know. I do know what happened. I do know that being trusting and defenseless is never a good idea.

Yes, rare events in other countries. How many in Norway since that one rare event? These are regular events here.

There was an armed off-duty cop doing security in Orlando.... he was too outgunned. Need to stop selling weapons for mass killing. Nice try though. The corpses keep piling up while you guys say the same things.

 

[Brain357]

This is what can happen when mass killing weapons are illegal:
Milwaukee man accused of plotting machine gun attack at Masonic center still in jail

Nobody dead. Guy planning killing in jail.

 

[Brain357]

What Explains U.S. Mass Shootings? International Comparisons Suggest an Answer

Americans make up about 4.4 percent of the global population but own 42 percent of the world’s guns. From 1966 to 2012, 31 percent of the gunmen in mass shootings worldwide were American, according to a 2015 study by Adam Lankford, a professor at the University of Alabama.

Adjusted for population, only Yemen has a higher rate of mass shootings among countries with more than 10 million people — a distinction Mr. Lankford urged to avoid outliers. Yemen has the world’s second-highest rate of gun ownership after the United States.

More gun ownership corresponds with more gun murders across virtually every axis: among developed countries, among American states, among American towns and cities and when controlling for crime rates. And gun control legislation tends to reduce gun murders, according to a recent analysis of 130 studies from 10 countries.

 

[Nosmo King]

There is no solution that provides a panacea. There are, nor have there ever been, no law written that absolutely prevents crime. When legislative solutions are proffered, those who advocate for wide gun rights point out that fact. Their argument goes on to say since no law can prevent crime, there should be no time wasted on writing gun laws. The perfect being the enemy of the good.

Further they say any gun control measure is essentially unconstitutional. This in spite of laws strictly limiting machine gun ownership. Gun advocates also claim that any gun regulation will inevitably result in forced gun confiscation. The "doomsday" argument.

Offering no solutions, offering total intransigence in the face of mass shootings, acknowledging no real problem with the mass shootings that cannot be stopped without a fully armed citizenry, gun advocates provide the entirety of opposition to any search for actual solutions. Their singular devotion to guns and the gun culture prevents them from taking responsibility for the very problem they do not acknowledge. Is this responsibility?

 

[BlackSand]

Can you help us out here? This carnage must stop. How can we do that?

Of course we can help you out ... Thanks for asking.

Bushmaster
Along with any number of their particular models ... There are several alternative manufacturers to choose from.
If you desire the assistance of the government instead ... Dial 911.

.

 

[Nosmo King]

Can you help us out here? This carnage must stop. How can we do that?

Of course we can help you out ... Thanks for asking.

Bushmaster
Along with any number of their particular models ... There are several alternative manufacturers to choose from.
If you desire the assistance of the government instead ... Dial 911.

.

Perhaps I should charge my fire extinguisher with gasoline too.

An arms race never ends well. It is not a responsible solution.

 

[BlackSand]

Perhaps I should charge my fire extinguisher with gasoline too.
An arms race never ends well. It is not a responsible solution.

There is no arms race ... The firearms you are speaking of are available to, and currently owned by, private citizens.

You are not trying to remove access to something people don't already have ... Or adding gasoline in a fire extinguisher.
You are attempting to suggest we should not have what we already do have ... More akin to suggesting we shouldn't have a fire extinguisher because there is a fire department.

Try again ...

.

 

[Nosmo King]

Perhaps I should charge my fire extinguisher with gasoline too.
An arms race never ends well. It is not a responsible solution.

There is no arms race ... The firearms you are speaking of are available to, and currently owned by, private citizens.

You are not trying to remove access to something people don't already have ... Or adding gasoline in a fire extinguisher.
You are attempting to suggest we should not have what we already do have ... More akin to suggesting we shouldn't have a fire extinguisher because there is a fire department.

Try again ...

.

And those readily available weapons are the tools used in mass shootings. What puts the "mass" in "mass shooting"? The body count. What creates a horrendous body count? As many bullets flying into human beings as quickly as possible. What other tool can wreck such havoc?

So I ask. What is the virtue of these weapons as currently available? Why should we have more of what we know is not producing a god outcome?

 

[BlackSand]

And those readily available weapons are the tools used in mass shootings. What puts the "mass" in "mass shooting"? The body count. What creates a horrendous body count? As many bullets flying into human beings as quickly as possible. What other tool can wreck such havoc?

So I ask. What is the virtue of these weapons as currently available? Why should we have more of what we know is not producing a god outcome?

Should I get rid of my fire extinguisher because a bunch of people die in fires and there is a Fire Department ...
I mean that is a way of looking at ... That is what you are asking.

I have a firearm like the ones you are talking about.
It does specifically what I intend for it to do.

It could be used to do things I never intend it to do.
I could rely on the government (which has been an utter failure in these circumstances).

No thanks ... I'll keep what I have and use it appropriately when necessary.
Sorry if you are upset with the fact the firearm is far more efficient at its purpose than the government is.

.

 

[SavannahMann]

There are several problems, problems that people are trying to tell you about, and you refuse to listen. It is said that the Devil is in the Details. In this case, the Devil is against you, because the details you are choosing to ignore, are vitally important.

First, the weapon you all are talking about is the AR platform chambered for the 5.56 MM NATO round. It is not the most leathal choice. It’s not in the top ten. It might make the list of the top 100 most lethal rounds, but only if you exclude exotic rounds that are not in widespread use.

Let’s start with Las Vegas. There were more than 500 injured, and 58 dead not counting the shooter who offed himself. That is a lethal rating of one in ten. You may want to argue that is not Germaine, but it is. Because the 5.56 round is not designed to kill. This is one of those details that you are ignoring. The 5.56 round was chosen for a number of reasons for the military. Lethality was not one of those criteria.

First, the truth is that a vast majority of rounds are fired in suppressive efforts. In other words, the soldier is shooting in the general direction of the enemy in an effort to pin them down, to keep them from shooting the soldier. The human instinct to duck is very strong when you hear the zipping of bullets flying by. The 5.56 round was lighter, and allowed the soldier to carry more ammunition to fire even more rounds at the enemy in an effort to keep their heads down. Instead of eighty, or one hundred rounds of .308, the soldiers could carry three hundred rounds of 5.56.

Second. The 5.56 round created what is called “Military significant wounds”. This is preferred on a battlefield. If I kill an enemy, then his mates want revenge, but also don’t have to worry about him anymore. If I wound that enemy, his mates hear him screaming in pain, they see him bleeding, and possibly dying. It takes two of those enemy soldiers to carry the wounded man away. It takes a third soldier to carry the litter bearers weapons and equipment. One wound can remove three or four soldiers from the battle.

If the enemy ignores the wounded guy, then the screams work on their minds. They become afraid of being that guy, of screaming in agony as they lay dying. They are more reluctant to stick their heads up, more reluctant to do something courageous, and that results in fewer casualties on our side because of weakened morale on the enemy side.

Third. Ease of use. The 5.56 round does not have much power, so it does not have much kick. It makes it easier for smaller people to shoot the rifle. The rifle can be lighter, and easier for the soldier to carry. Now, one of the problems we had when the standard round was .30 Caliber, was that our allies who were smaller in stature couldn’t handle the rifles as easily. That was one of the reasons they developed the great grandfather of your “Assault Weapons” definition. The .30 Cal Carbine. This fired a hot pistol cartridge, so it could be smaller, lighter, and more easily used by the indigenous peoples. Early Pictures from Vietnam show the Vietnamese troops carrying this carbine. We gave it to the allies from nations where their physical stature was not as large as our own. Our own troops carried it during World War II as well as Korea and Vietnam.

The M-1 Garand was heavy, and had a powerful kick. The M-14 chamberd for the almost identical cartridge .308 was just as heavy, and had just as powerful a recoil.

By the way, both of those rifles, are far more lethal than the AR that is scaring you.

The devil is in the details. I told you that to begin with. Roughly speaking, one in ten of those shot in Vegas was killed. Again, that’s about average. It is hard to kill someone with that particular rifle cartridge. You have to hit them in a vital organ, head or heart, or clip an artery to get them to bleed out fast enough to kill them. Generally speaking of those wounded people get to a hospital alive, they have a 95% chance of survival. Not very lethal.

Let’s say you ban these semi-automatic rifles and pistols with these scary high capacity magazines. Do you think that people will not move to the larger calibers, the ones we have already explained are in fact far more lethal? Companies that are now making the popular AR platform will shift to the larger weapons. It might take them as much as two weeks to retool and start production. We’ll have a flurry of M-14 type rifles with the Ten Round magazine. But where perhaps three would die from the AR 30 round magazine, now five will die statistically speaking from the M-14 type weapon. That rifle has a 50% kill rate if you are shot by it.

So instead of saving lives, you’ll actually be killing more people.

I know, this is all just nonsense to you. But it is true. The Special Forces, the guys who have to have one shot one kill if at all possible have walked away from the 5.56 for the most part. They now use this. .458 SOCOM - Wikipedia

Much bigger bullet, much bigger hole in the baddie, and much more likely for the one shot one kill.

The FBI is switching pistols again. This time they’re abandoning the .40 for the less powerful 9MM. The reason? The cops miss their targets about 70% of the time in a shooting situation. Yes, you read that right. Three rounds out of ten will hit the baddie on average. The larger capacity allows for the cops to fire more rounds, and increase the chances that one of those hits will stop the baddie, or perhaps kill them.

Look at the reports of the Cops shooting anyone, Mike Brown. The bullets were all over his body. That was at practically point blank range. The cop was literally right on top of him and still had to empty the magazine because he couldn’t hit a vital organ reliably.

Get rid of those high capacity magazines, and the people will switch to more powerful rounds. Instead of a 9MM which you have an 80% chance of surviving, they’ll switch to a .357 Magnum, a round that is literally twice as powerful as the 9MM. It is far more powerful than the .45 ACP of the famed 1911 pistols. Those cartridges tend to stop in the human body, but the .357 plows right through and keeps on going.

If you want more lethal rounds on the street, focus on capacity. I’d prefer more wounded, than dead. But it’s the details that you need to learn to speak logically about these issues. Because I’d rather get shot with a 5.56 round any day than a .338 Lapua. I won’t survive the Lapua round if I am hit anywhere in the torso. I’ve got about one chance in five of surviving the AR round. With the Lapua, even if the round does not hit a vital organ, I’m liable to bleed out in less than two minutes.

The AR is not a magic wand of death. It is not even a very effective rifle. It is popular for the same reasons the military choose it. Not much kick, easy to shoot, ammunition is cheap, and plentiful, very accurate for it’s weight and design. Reasonably reliable all things considered.

For the record. Another of those devilish details. The 5.56 round, is a really fast .22 caliber. The original cartridge was the .223 Remington. Intended to be used to hunt very small deer. I use the classic 30.06 round for that task. That round is twice as powerful, literally again, as the .223 or 5.56. That’s the cartridge where you have one chance in two of surviving if you get shot in the torso with it.

It will make a big comeback as someone starts making the old M-1 Garands again if you ban those scary “Assault” weapons. The .308 will tear through two people with leathal injuries to both with ease. Why do you want those to become the weapon of choice? Let the people keep shooting our citizens with the least effective cartridge. It’s better for all of us if they stick with the more useless choice. We then have a much better chance of survival.

I appreciate your input. I also appreciate the fact that, while I was not brought up in a house with guns, I am out of my element when discussing specifics, details and the lexicon of the gun culture.

Americans are killing one another with frequency, rapidity and a blind eye to consequence and morality. Can you help us out here? This carnage must stop. How can we do that?

Here, things get a little more technical. Let me start by reminding you of things you probably haven’t considered. In the 1940’s it took the greatest minds of the era to come up with the Atomic Bomb. These were the finest mathematicians, physicists, and theoretical minds of their era. They were infinitely smarter than I am. It took these amazing minds years of hard work to come up with the Atomic Bomb. Today, a fairly bright High School Physics student can do the same thing. A college level student who is practically at the bottom of his class can do it. What prevents them is not that they are too smart to do it. What prevents them is one little thing. They need the fissionable material that has been refined.

Anyone can pick up Uranium. You can find it in Colorado literally laying on the ground. Your Geiger counter will click away letting you know you’ve found some. You can pick it up, and take it home. It is useless. It’s a rock that if you wear it or carry it in your pocket for fifty years might give you a bit of skin cancer. It is not refined. It is the refining that is the really hard part of building a nuclear weapon. The design is well known and able to be duplicated with ease.

This is for the most advanced and most destructive weapons know to our species. How to make it is easy, it’s one part that is hard. Now, what does this matter? Firearms are much simpler, much less complex, and the components are much much easier to get.

View attachment 160939

These are home made submachine guns that were captured by police in Brazil. Look at them. There is nothing refined about them, they are stamped steel and cast aluminum. You can make it out of essentially scrap metal you would throw away, or find at the dump. How do you restrict access to scrap metal? I’ve never done that, but I can. Anyone with even one year of high school metal shop can do it with ease.

Before you say we can limit the ammunition, are you sure we can do that? What is ammunition? Gunpowder, and a hunk of metal. Gunpowder has been around for more than a thousand years. It isn’t exactly like your Momma’s secret Chilli. Everyone knows it. Coal or charcoal, salt peter, and sulfur. When Homer Hickam wanted to build a rocket, his science teacher told him that this would make rocket fuel. Homer and his friends went to the city and found a chemical supply shop. They asked to buy a couple pounds each of those. The man told them that first, the company dealt in train car loads, not pounds. Second, that stuff made gunpowder, and he wasn’t going to sell any to a bunch of kids.

Smokeless powder, or modern powder, has Nitrogen added to it. Nitrates. It makes it more powerful, and really no more unstable.

But we can make ammunition with ease too. Including the cartridge. The secret to that is the primer. The primer is a modern equivalent, but at first it was fulminate of mercury, and then fulminate of silver. The secret for those is known to just about every chemistry student in school today. Making explosives is easy, most of the training for chemists is how not to do it.

So banning the guns doesn’t work. Banning the ammunition makes it a little harder, but not significantly so. We know. We banned Crystal Meth. We made one of the ingredients so hard to get you have to present identification to the drug store to buy it. But guess what? Production of Crystal Meth has increased by 1,000%. Seriously.

All we did was cut down on the number of idiots burning down their mobile home trying to cook meth in their kitchen. The big boys started cooking it in huge factory settings ala Breaking Bad.

So what you are asking is how do we put the Genie back in the bottle? We can’t. It can’t be done. If you managed to ban firearms today. There would be literally tens of thousands of them buried in watertight containers waiting. People would start to work on them with tools they had gotten for a couple hundred bucks. Home made guns would become the norm. Ban high capacity magazines, and people can make those just as easy. A spring is another old invention that we understand pretty well.

You can make a Glock over the next month. It’s called Polymer 80. It is a nearly finished Glock frame. All you have to do is a little filing, and drill a couple holes in it. The parts are readily available, and you would have a pistol with NO SERIAL NUMBER. Untraceable. It’s sold today. Glock Parts for Sale | Best Glock Accessories | GlockStore.com

It is sold from a number of stores and sites. So these pistols are manufactured in people’s homes, garages, workshops, or bedrooms. Basic tools, and you have a gun.

How do you ban knowledge? How do you ban basic tools? The bombing of Oklahoma City happened so long ago, but you can still buy Nitrate based Fertilizer, the key ingredient in the bomb that was used. Go to your local home improvement store, look at the fertilizers, the nitrate rating is on the bag it is sold in. You’ll need 20% or higher to make a bomb. I bet you can find at least two or three different brands of the stuff. Nitrates are very valuable as a fertilizer.

Now, all of this is capable of being made by someone with basic skills. What about those with advanced skills? What about those with advanced metalworking skills? The guys on Mythbusters made a cannon out of pipe. A cannon that was just as effective as one purpose built. They made cannon balls out of stone. They made them out of all sorts of items. How do you stop people from buying a couple hunks of pipe from their local metal supply yard? They could need it to repair a sewage line, or they could be using it to make a cannon. Welding the pipes together to make a cannon barrel is practically child’s play. Again, that one year of high school metal shop would do it to give them the skills.

If you didn’t have that year of shop, watching some You Tube videos on how to weld would give you the foundation, and a few days of practice on scrap metal would give you the skills. Now, all you need are some ball bearings, plentiful everywhere. Some gunpowder, easily manufactured, and you have a cannon firing grapeshot. Those weapons slaughtered people by the dozens with each shot during the era when they were the pinnacle of military technology.

The point I am getting to is this. There are dangerous weapons. Those are weapons that are poorly designed, or manufactured. Otherwise, there are only dangerous people. I was trained by the Army to think of this kind of stuff. I was trained to make weapons out of anything I could find. Wood would make a weapon. I could make a Pungi Pit, or a swinging spike trap. I could make a weapon out of string. Coating those spikes with fecal matter insured an infection, and probably caused the wounded to lose a leg from gangrene.

The only thing you can do is try and protect yourself from those dangerous people. You might not succeed. But you stand a better chance of it than hoping for the kindness of strangers to protect you.

Countries with strong gun control don't have a mass killing problem. Nobody is making guns. People aren't using trucks. Bombs haven't been substituted. Lives are simply saved.

You mean like Norway in which the attack claimed 77 lives? 2011 Norway attacks - Wikipedia

Or the French attack that claimed 137 lives? November 2015 Paris attacks - Wikipedia

They may not get the press our own attacks get. But there are plenty in those nations.

List of rampage killers - Wikipedia

More than 1,500 rampage killings listed.

Even today Ethnic Cleansing is going on. In Myanmar the indigenous Muslim people are being driven out of the nation under threat of death. A threat that has been delivered on many times.

So where is this panacea that you fantasize about. One of the nations with the lowest rate is Switzerland. Where every soldier has a real fully automatic assault rifle in their closet. Even more telling those soldiers can buy their rifles as they end their military service.

How would you react to the soldiers here being offered a chance to buy their fully automatic rifles from the military as they were discharged? I’m betting you would wet your pants at the mere thought.

Chemical weapons attacks in subways.

India has restrictions on weapons. So they should be safe. But for some reason they aren’t. 2008 Mumbai attacks - Wikipedia

What you do have in those unarmed nations is higher casualty numbers.

We had a mass shooting at a nightclub in Florida with a lot of dead. In another instance it could have gone differently.

'Hero' stopped mass murder by crazed bar patron who was armed to the teeth, police say | Arlington | Dallas News

Gun free zones are a favorite target. Why? If you know the population inside there are unarmed you can do whatever you want. But if one of them is armed, your risk increases dramatically.

One event and 49 died. If one had been armed in the club could half have been saved? Could 90% of those victims still be alive today? I don’t know. I do know what happened. I do know that being trusting and defenseless is never a good idea.

Yes, rare events in other countries. How many in Norway since that one rare event? These are regular events here.

There was an armed off-duty cop doing security in Orlando.... he was too outgunned. Need to stop selling weapons for mass killing. Nice try though. The corpses keep piling up while you guys say the same things.

Help me out. How was a customer in my first link able to stop a mass shooting? Not a cop. A citizen. Just a regular guy.

 

[Brain357]

And those readily available weapons are the tools used in mass shootings. What puts the "mass" in "mass shooting"? The body count. What creates a horrendous body count? As many bullets flying into human beings as quickly as possible. What other tool can wreck such havoc?

So I ask. What is the virtue of these weapons as currently available? Why should we have more of what we know is not producing a god outcome?

Should I get rid of my fire extinguisher because a bunch of people die in fires and there is a Fire Department ...
I mean that is a way of looking at ... That is what you are asking.

I have a firearm like the ones you are talking about.
It does specifically what I intend for it to do.

It could be used to do things I never intend it to do.
I could rely on the government (which has been an utter failure in these circumstances).

No thanks ... I'll keep what I have and use it appropriately when necessary.
Sorry if you are upset with the fact the firearm is far more efficient at its purpose than the government is.

.

When was the last mass killing with a fire extinguisher?

 

[Brain357]

I appreciate your input. I also appreciate the fact that, while I was not brought up in a house with guns, I am out of my element when discussing specifics, details and the lexicon of the gun culture.

Americans are killing one another with frequency, rapidity and a blind eye to consequence and morality. Can you help us out here? This carnage must stop. How can we do that?

Here, things get a little more technical. Let me start by reminding you of things you probably haven’t considered. In the 1940’s it took the greatest minds of the era to come up with the Atomic Bomb. These were the finest mathematicians, physicists, and theoretical minds of their era. They were infinitely smarter than I am. It took these amazing minds years of hard work to come up with the Atomic Bomb. Today, a fairly bright High School Physics student can do the same thing. A college level student who is practically at the bottom of his class can do it. What prevents them is not that they are too smart to do it. What prevents them is one little thing. They need the fissionable material that has been refined.

Anyone can pick up Uranium. You can find it in Colorado literally laying on the ground. Your Geiger counter will click away letting you know you’ve found some. You can pick it up, and take it home. It is useless. It’s a rock that if you wear it or carry it in your pocket for fifty years might give you a bit of skin cancer. It is not refined. It is the refining that is the really hard part of building a nuclear weapon. The design is well known and able to be duplicated with ease.

This is for the most advanced and most destructive weapons know to our species. How to make it is easy, it’s one part that is hard. Now, what does this matter? Firearms are much simpler, much less complex, and the components are much much easier to get.

View attachment 160939

These are home made submachine guns that were captured by police in Brazil. Look at them. There is nothing refined about them, they are stamped steel and cast aluminum. You can make it out of essentially scrap metal you would throw away, or find at the dump. How do you restrict access to scrap metal? I’ve never done that, but I can. Anyone with even one year of high school metal shop can do it with ease.

Before you say we can limit the ammunition, are you sure we can do that? What is ammunition? Gunpowder, and a hunk of metal. Gunpowder has been around for more than a thousand years. It isn’t exactly like your Momma’s secret Chilli. Everyone knows it. Coal or charcoal, salt peter, and sulfur. When Homer Hickam wanted to build a rocket, his science teacher told him that this would make rocket fuel. Homer and his friends went to the city and found a chemical supply shop. They asked to buy a couple pounds each of those. The man told them that first, the company dealt in train car loads, not pounds. Second, that stuff made gunpowder, and he wasn’t going to sell any to a bunch of kids.

Smokeless powder, or modern powder, has Nitrogen added to it. Nitrates. It makes it more powerful, and really no more unstable.

But we can make ammunition with ease too. Including the cartridge. The secret to that is the primer. The primer is a modern equivalent, but at first it was fulminate of mercury, and then fulminate of silver. The secret for those is known to just about every chemistry student in school today. Making explosives is easy, most of the training for chemists is how not to do it.

So banning the guns doesn’t work. Banning the ammunition makes it a little harder, but not significantly so. We know. We banned Crystal Meth. We made one of the ingredients so hard to get you have to present identification to the drug store to buy it. But guess what? Production of Crystal Meth has increased by 1,000%. Seriously.

All we did was cut down on the number of idiots burning down their mobile home trying to cook meth in their kitchen. The big boys started cooking it in huge factory settings ala Breaking Bad.

So what you are asking is how do we put the Genie back in the bottle? We can’t. It can’t be done. If you managed to ban firearms today. There would be literally tens of thousands of them buried in watertight containers waiting. People would start to work on them with tools they had gotten for a couple hundred bucks. Home made guns would become the norm. Ban high capacity magazines, and people can make those just as easy. A spring is another old invention that we understand pretty well.

You can make a Glock over the next month. It’s called Polymer 80. It is a nearly finished Glock frame. All you have to do is a little filing, and drill a couple holes in it. The parts are readily available, and you would have a pistol with NO SERIAL NUMBER. Untraceable. It’s sold today. Glock Parts for Sale | Best Glock Accessories | GlockStore.com

It is sold from a number of stores and sites. So these pistols are manufactured in people’s homes, garages, workshops, or bedrooms. Basic tools, and you have a gun.

How do you ban knowledge? How do you ban basic tools? The bombing of Oklahoma City happened so long ago, but you can still buy Nitrate based Fertilizer, the key ingredient in the bomb that was used. Go to your local home improvement store, look at the fertilizers, the nitrate rating is on the bag it is sold in. You’ll need 20% or higher to make a bomb. I bet you can find at least two or three different brands of the stuff. Nitrates are very valuable as a fertilizer.

Now, all of this is capable of being made by someone with basic skills. What about those with advanced skills? What about those with advanced metalworking skills? The guys on Mythbusters made a cannon out of pipe. A cannon that was just as effective as one purpose built. They made cannon balls out of stone. They made them out of all sorts of items. How do you stop people from buying a couple hunks of pipe from their local metal supply yard? They could need it to repair a sewage line, or they could be using it to make a cannon. Welding the pipes together to make a cannon barrel is practically child’s play. Again, that one year of high school metal shop would do it to give them the skills.

If you didn’t have that year of shop, watching some You Tube videos on how to weld would give you the foundation, and a few days of practice on scrap metal would give you the skills. Now, all you need are some ball bearings, plentiful everywhere. Some gunpowder, easily manufactured, and you have a cannon firing grapeshot. Those weapons slaughtered people by the dozens with each shot during the era when they were the pinnacle of military technology.

The point I am getting to is this. There are dangerous weapons. Those are weapons that are poorly designed, or manufactured. Otherwise, there are only dangerous people. I was trained by the Army to think of this kind of stuff. I was trained to make weapons out of anything I could find. Wood would make a weapon. I could make a Pungi Pit, or a swinging spike trap. I could make a weapon out of string. Coating those spikes with fecal matter insured an infection, and probably caused the wounded to lose a leg from gangrene.

The only thing you can do is try and protect yourself from those dangerous people. You might not succeed. But you stand a better chance of it than hoping for the kindness of strangers to protect you.

Countries with strong gun control don't have a mass killing problem. Nobody is making guns. People aren't using trucks. Bombs haven't been substituted. Lives are simply saved.

You mean like Norway in which the attack claimed 77 lives? 2011 Norway attacks - Wikipedia

Or the French attack that claimed 137 lives? November 2015 Paris attacks - Wikipedia

They may not get the press our own attacks get. But there are plenty in those nations.

List of rampage killers - Wikipedia

More than 1,500 rampage killings listed.

Even today Ethnic Cleansing is going on. In Myanmar the indigenous Muslim people are being driven out of the nation under threat of death. A threat that has been delivered on many times.

So where is this panacea that you fantasize about. One of the nations with the lowest rate is Switzerland. Where every soldier has a real fully automatic assault rifle in their closet. Even more telling those soldiers can buy their rifles as they end their military service.

How would you react to the soldiers here being offered a chance to buy their fully automatic rifles from the military as they were discharged? I’m betting you would wet your pants at the mere thought.

Chemical weapons attacks in subways.

India has restrictions on weapons. So they should be safe. But for some reason they aren’t. 2008 Mumbai attacks - Wikipedia

What you do have in those unarmed nations is higher casualty numbers.

We had a mass shooting at a nightclub in Florida with a lot of dead. In another instance it could have gone differently.

'Hero' stopped mass murder by crazed bar patron who was armed to the teeth, police say | Arlington | Dallas News

Gun free zones are a favorite target. Why? If you know the population inside there are unarmed you can do whatever you want. But if one of them is armed, your risk increases dramatically.

One event and 49 died. If one had been armed in the club could half have been saved? Could 90% of those victims still be alive today? I don’t know. I do know what happened. I do know that being trusting and defenseless is never a good idea.

Yes, rare events in other countries. How many in Norway since that one rare event? These are regular events here.

There was an armed off-duty cop doing security in Orlando.... he was too outgunned. Need to stop selling weapons for mass killing. Nice try though. The corpses keep piling up while you guys say the same things.

Help me out. How was a customer in my first link able to stop a mass shooting? Not a cop. A citizen. Just a regular guy.

What do you need help with? The bad guy was incoherent. Who knows what his intentions were. Sure would be nice if he wasn't armed though. In Orlando 49 died with an armed police officer there. We need to stop arming killers so well.

 

[jc456]

So no one gets killed with a gun in the UK?

Of course people get killed in the U.K. No law is a panacea. No law PREVENTS all crime. Stop making the perfect the enemy of the pragmatic.

The pragmatic would be to enforce the gun laws we already have with harsh sentencing and no parole not blaming all gun owners for the actions of fucking criminals.

Commit any crime while in possession of a firearm even if that fire arm was never drawn automatic 25 years no parole

Commit any crime and draw a firearm during the commission of that crime even if the gun is not fired 35 years no parole

Commit any crime and fire a gun during the commission of that crime and no one gets injured or killed 50 years no parole

Commit a crime and injure or kill with a firearm during the commission of that crime LIFE no parole

That is gun control

And the men's tally frazzled take all that into account right up to the point they pull the trigger.

What puts the "mass" in "mass shooting"? The weapon.

So, you somehow, magically, get all of the guns off the streets. The bad guys switch to trucks. Do you see where this leads?

Why are you more afraid of trucks than semi-automatics? Can't imagine another use for trucks than as weapons?

we just know that a vehicle kills more than a gun.

 

[Brain357]

Of course people get killed in the U.K. No law is a panacea. No law PREVENTS all crime. Stop making the perfect the enemy of the pragmatic.

The pragmatic would be to enforce the gun laws we already have with harsh sentencing and no parole not blaming all gun owners for the actions of fucking criminals.

Commit any crime while in possession of a firearm even if that fire arm was never drawn automatic 25 years no parole

Commit any crime and draw a firearm during the commission of that crime even if the gun is not fired 35 years no parole

Commit any crime and fire a gun during the commission of that crime and no one gets injured or killed 50 years no parole

Commit a crime and injure or kill with a firearm during the commission of that crime LIFE no parole

That is gun control

And the men's tally frazzled take all that into account right up to the point they pull the trigger.

What puts the "mass" in "mass shooting"? The weapon.

So, you somehow, magically, get all of the guns off the streets. The bad guys switch to trucks. Do you see where this leads?

Why are you more afraid of trucks than semi-automatics? Can't imagine another use for trucks than as weapons?

we just know that a vehicle kills more than a gun.

And we know gun control lowers gun deaths.

 

[jc456]

The pragmatic would be to enforce the gun laws we already have with harsh sentencing and no parole not blaming all gun owners for the actions of fucking criminals.

Commit any crime while in possession of a firearm even if that fire arm was never drawn automatic 25 years no parole

Commit any crime and draw a firearm during the commission of that crime even if the gun is not fired 35 years no parole

Commit any crime and fire a gun during the commission of that crime and no one gets injured or killed 50 years no parole

Commit a crime and injure or kill with a firearm during the commission of that crime LIFE no parole

That is gun control

And the men's tally frazzled take all that into account right up to the point they pull the trigger.

What puts the "mass" in "mass shooting"? The weapon.

So, you somehow, magically, get all of the guns off the streets. The bad guys switch to trucks. Do you see where this leads?

Why are you more afraid of trucks than semi-automatics? Can't imagine another use for trucks than as weapons?

we just know that a vehicle kills more than a gun.

And we know gun control lowers gun deaths.

conceal and carry you're exactly right.

 

[Brain357]

And the men's tally frazzled take all that into account right up to the point they pull the trigger.

What puts the "mass" in "mass shooting"? The weapon.

So, you somehow, magically, get all of the guns off the streets. The bad guys switch to trucks. Do you see where this leads?

Why are you more afraid of trucks than semi-automatics? Can't imagine another use for trucks than as weapons?

we just know that a vehicle kills more than a gun.

And we know gun control lowers gun deaths.

conceal and carry you're exactly right.

We have more concealed carry than ever:
FBI: Violent crime increases for second straight year

 

[jc456]

So, you somehow, magically, get all of the guns off the streets. The bad guys switch to trucks. Do you see where this leads?

Why are you more afraid of trucks than semi-automatics? Can't imagine another use for trucks than as weapons?

we just know that a vehicle kills more than a gun.

And we know gun control lowers gun deaths.

conceal and carry you're exactly right.

We have more concealed carry than ever:
FBI: Violent crime increases for second straight year

we certainly do, and I thank god for it everyday. one day violent crime will be limited forever. the libs and taking guns merely jeopardized the average citizen to the violence of criminal. not no more.