AR15 saves life of New York students

[Alex C]

Revising history to make a point not only doesn't make the OP right, it makes him flat out wrong.

And you guys are right - I just don't get it.

Canadians have quite a few guns, but they are mostly for hunters. All of the friends I know who hunt do so with bolt-action rifles, and almost never keep them in their homes. The ones that do keep them in the basement, locked in a trunk, with no thought to ever making them accessible in case a burglar came in.

There is no culture or need here to have weapons for home defense, because it generally isn't an issue.

The guys who wrote the constitution were pretty amazing and got a lot of things right. The proof is in the pudding and America is a great nation because of it. They weren't perfect however, and were still humans who made mistakes. I think the 2nd is not an outright mistake, but something that wouldn't have been written as it was if they had the ability to see what the future held.

But you guys have it mostly right, 99% of gun owners are mostly responsible, and being able to defend yourself in your own home is a good thing. I just think that countries like Japan, with strict gun laws and extremely low gun crime rates have done it better.

The biggest difference between the US and Japan and most other counties with strict gun laws is that we have always had a much higher rate of violence and gun ownership. We have more guns here than Japan or Australia has people. Assuming we adopted a policy similar to Japan, how many years would it take to get over 200 million guns off the streets? Law abiding citizens might hand their's over, but they will continue to be easily accessible on the black market for decades. That leaves armed criminals free to do as they wished with minimal risk from their victims. We'd be sacrificing the ability of our citizens to protect themselves (violence of all kinds is much higher here than in Japan) for an idea that would take at least half a century just to see if it even worked. Maybe it was the right choice for Japan, but it isn't for us.

 

[Pia]

A semi-auto rifle in an intermediate caliber is easier to aim and will stop a threat more reliably than a pistol, and is more accurate and precise with much less recoil than a shotgun.
...

Great, thorough post from Alex C. I agree on everything in it, but to spidey's "AR15=best" assertion I would argue a pistol-caliber gun like the UMP45 would be even better.

Why?
First, noise and recoil behavior. You might not have time to grab full hearing protection, or might not want to use it for various reasons. Rifle indoors without hearing protection equals permanent hearing loss, and tactical disadvantage in the form of short term pain and poor hearing. Pistol calibers are friendlier, and the .45 in particular is easily suppressed while losing no stopping power or reliability. Even with good hearing protection, for an inexperienced user the recoil and blast difference between rifle and pistol calibers would be significant.
Secondly, handling. Rifles become progressively more obnoxious and lose power when shortened, but pistol calibers keep behaving nicely and you can have a gun that is compact even with the suppressor on. A weaker user would benefit from the lighter weight and closer center of gravity of the pistol caliber gun. One-handed use is easier; significant indoors where you might want to manipulate doors/phones/switches, or need to fence with the offhand in a pinch.

Considering the downsides, the availability and cost of this type of gun are probably at the top of the list. Vests are not issue. The chances of someone wearing one is remote to begin with, and even if they were, I'd hardly feel undergunned with 25 rounds of .45. Long guns in pistol caliber are stupidly easy to control. 5+ followup hits to the same spot per second is easy even with a clunky Glock conversion; catching all of them on the chest can't feel very good. The stability of a long gun makes head or pelvis shots reasonable if you need to take them.

 

[spidey07]

Heh, hence why I qualified my statement with "quality round"

 

[Cerb]

Good carbine rifle rounds (30-30, FI), and the wealth of .357 and .45 carbines out there, are easily enough to show that plenty of people do realize that. Guns like the AR-15 are particularly liked because they have a, "Lego," quality to them, allowing you to have a sported up one, that's different from the other guy's sported up one, without being a gunsmith.

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I think the 2nd is not an outright mistake, but something that wouldn't have been written as it was if they had the ability to see what the future held.

Sure. They should have either made a standing population-wide militia a requirement, or removed that clause, and made specific restrictions about standing armies.

I just think that countries like Japan, with strict gun laws and extremely low gun crime rates have done it better.

They can't do it at all, though. Japan, FI, is a super-homogeneous culture. Like most European countries, they have little tension between groups, and largely handle their economic disparity well. Meanwhile, I could go just a few miles, and find people that I simply cannot understand. I can go another few miles in the other direction, and find the same. Then, we've had a federal government that itself is disconnected from the people, but good enough at manipulation to keep the people barely satisfied. In an environment in which the government is either quite beholden to its people, or commonly gets refreshed, gun rights as a political need are more or less N/A.

Being from the U.S., and having some knowledge of history, I support the 2nd amendment as a hedge against government tyranny. The last major uses it had were not the 1860s. They were not the 1770s, either. They were as late as the 60s. Every community of non-WASPs willing to stand up to the KKK was exercising their rights, the way they were intended (when the local government are all in a violent hate group, that's government tyranny). The Black Panthers, having few other options, were, despite all else that went on (and caused their demise), exercising their 2nd amendment rights as intended, against government tyranny. It's not limited to dictators and statists.

We haven't had anything so major in the age of the internet, but I'm not sure it couldn't happen. Would instant information transfer, and thus faster public knowledge, be enough to stop the next FBI and/or BATF mass murder? Given that information that made the Travon Martin case look like it just might not be a murder, I'm not so convinced. At the least, the people shouldn't have to make it easy for them; and IMO, should be encouraged not to, if just to help deter them.

For the record, I also think 300 hp+ cars are unnecessary, and while I wouldn't outright ban them, for the sake of energy conservation and pollution reduction, I would hope people would make a choice to not use them. My wife and I had a VW Rabbit for a few years, and now we don't have a car at all.

My 100 HP car is easily far more polluting, by way of emissions, than any new 300+ HP street car, as an example. Just like larger magazines and scary black bodies on guns, it really doesn't make much difference. New cars in general cause great pollution, especially hybrids, just by being made and sold. Don't take the gut reaction as the whole story, in either case.