January 12, 2012

Sigh...

The. AWB. Did. Not. Restrict. Sales.

I don't know how I can make this any clearer. The AWB easily *tripled* AR-15 and AK sales. It merely required that all those new AR's/AK's being manufacture and imported had to have smooth muzzles, pinned rather than screwed on brakes, and pinned stocks.

Do I need to post BATFE sales figures? AR and AK ads from the late '90s/early '00's? My AK receipt from 2003? Those were the boom years for those guns.


Rifles of any type aren't significantly represented in U.S. homicide stats. Period. All rifles combined don't even reach 3% of recorded homicides most years.

You are in serious denial if you think that rifle homicide at <3% means that nontraditional looking rifles are a Menace To Society...


Yep. The thing about guns is that if they are taken proper care of and not shot too much (or have worn-out parts replaced as needed), they last for many decades, or even centuries. Some will wear out, and those that don't will be passed down to heirs or sold back to gun dealers to re-enter the lawful retail market, just like civilian guns have done for the past 300 years. You are acting as if this is new, or as if a rifle with "Rock River Arms" on the side is qualitatively different from one that says "Winchester".

I currently shoot a rifle that is 107 years old. There's no reason my grandchildren's children can't enjoy shooting it a century from now, either.


No, not happening. The "open carry" movement started as pushback against California's lack of equitable concealed carry licensure, and were it not for that would IMO not exist.

Clinton's harshness on gun ownership was an attempt to triangulate law-and-order conservatives by looking "tough on crime". That was a serious miscalculation, as Clinton pointed out in his autobiography, and Dems paid for it by losing the trifecta for a decade.


Please don't put your delusions about what "real" gun owners think in my mouth. I haven't tried to use you as a sockpuppet; please extend the same civility in return.


Since the gun-control lobby is primarily focused on banning the lawful and responsible ownership of the most popular civilian guns and rolling back CCW licensure, rather than specifically addressing diversion to criminal hands, I don't think you can exactly blame gun owners for that.

You wish to radically change the status quo, and enact sweeping new restrictions on the Title 1 civilian guns we may lawfully own. The answer to that is no. If you wish to discuss methods to reduce diversion from the legal market to the illegal one, let's talk.


Revisionist history that was eventually reversed in academia and shot down in U.S. v. Heller, which is now the law of the land. The 2ndA is an individual right that protects guns "in common use for lawful purposes." Next case.


The intent of the 1994 law was look "tough on crime" to law-and-order conservatives without alarming gun owners too much (hence the sunset clause and the fact that the law didn't actually ban any guns). Even so, it was a vast overreach, and the backlash all but destroyed the U.S. gun control lobby, gave us 49-state CCW, and made "assault weapons" the top selling guns in America by September 2004.

If you want to lobby for a far more restrictive law, in what is now a vastly less favorable political climate than in '94, when the guns you wish to ban now define the mainstream of the shooting sports, then go right ahead. Gun owners will ultimately thank you for it, as your movement follows the WCTU and the Temperance Party into the political dustbin.


You are free not to own one. It's a free country. But if you wanted the gun control lobby to remain relevant, you might want to try to have your positions reflect reality in 2012, rather than a Field & Stream fantasy from 1951.

As a movement, though, taking the position that the dominant sporting rifles in the United States have no sporting purpose, or that the top selling civilian rifles in the USA are not civilian rifles, is sheer idiocy from a pragmatic standpoint. It was exactly that sort of blind groupthink that led the gun control lobby to fall on the AWB sword a decade ago. I suppose I should be relieved to see that you guys are determined to stay on that sword until your movement bleeds out.

Meh, whatever. I'll keep shooting matches, going to the range, and taking friends and my kids shooting with the guns I supposedly can't do those things with. No worries.


I think you must have accidentally deleted some words here.

FWIW, re: Roosevelt, I notice that Eleanor Roosevelt was a competent handgun shooter, owned a revolver, and had a New York concealed carry license. I see that the Hanley-Fake bill was an attempt to repeal the Sullivan Act; I'll bet there is a deeper backstory there than your source is telling.


Ah, notice the date: 2004. Back before Senator Kerry lost gun-owning Dems again, just like Gore had in 2000, just like the congressional leadership did in 1994, and before the DLC/DNC leadership began soul-searching to discover how they had managed to alienate gun-owning Dems so badly.

It wasn't until circa 2006 that the party began to get informed on the issue, discovered that (oops!!) "assault weapons" are civilian rifles (and the most popular ones, at that), and began to backpedal on the AWB, such that by 2008 the American Hunters and Shooters Association was confidently assuring gun owners that Obama had no interest in pushing for another AWB. They were right.

Legislating 19th century firearm aesthetics is dead. Handgrips that stick out are here to stay. Deal with it.

January 12, 2012

Or as a competitive shooter.

Here's a local IPSC match in Sweden.

January 12, 2012

Thoughts, at some length...

Yet? The rifle crime rate is going *down*, not up, and the overall violence rate is going down and has been for quite some time.

The shift toward smaller-caliber, higher-capacity civilian rifles has been going on for decades; my local Walmart sold Colt AR-15's and Norinco AK's circa 1988, and the AR first hit the market circa 1961 (JFK owned one). But the greatest increases in AR/AK ownership occurred 1994 to the present, and have coincided with a long decline in rifle crime and of gun violence in general.

I'm certainly not going to argue post hoc ergo prompter hoc here---I think it was other social factors at work---but more widespread "assault weapon" ownership has certainly not been associated with an increase in violence. Quite the contrary, actually.


Anywhere concealability (and to a lesser extent, portability) are irrelevant, rifles do make more sense as both offensive and defensive weapons than handguns do. That condition may be found across large parts of Africa, parts of Mexico, etc. The fact that the Warsaw Pact flooded large portions of the Third World with mass produced AK's (real ones, not civilian lookalikes) during the Cold War certainly didn't hurt the rifle/handgun balance, either.

The more developed and organized a region becomes, though, the more things shift from rifles toward handguns when out-and-about, as people trade range and capacity for concealability, portability, and convenience. I'd point out that rifles were once the personal weapon of choice in *this* country, too, back when it was almost exclusively rural.


Why would they? Rifle availability on the criminal market has not increased in the last 50 years and isn't increasing now. Any criminal who wanted a box-magazine-fed semiauto rifle or carbine in 1910, or 1940, or 1970, or 1990, or 2000 could get one. Thing is, they don't often choose them, for the reasons I've described at length in this thread.

But don't just take my word for it; look at period of sharpest increase in AK/AR sales, e.g. beginning in 1994 and continuing to the present day, and plot it against rifle homicide and overall homicide rates. Violence rates peaked well before the sales surge began and have been declining steadily since.


Well, by any objective standard, handguns in criminal hands *are* more of an issue than rifles and shotguns are. That, historically, is why handguns are more tightly controlled by Federal and most state law than rifles and shotguns.

You do need to distinguish between handguns in criminal and noncriminal hands, though; failure to do that was one of the gun control lobby's big strategic mistakes.


Umm, civilian AK's were legal 1994-2004; the Feinstein law banned no guns. AK's and 20/30-round magazines were just as legal in 1997 or 2002 as they are now.

The catch was that after 1994, *new* guns with folding stocks had to have the stocks pinned or tack-welded in the open position, the muzzle brake (if present) had to be pinned on rather than screwed on, the little protrusion on the bottom of the gas block couldn't be finish-machined, etc. But civilian AK's weren't banned, and neither were folding stocks; it's just that if you put a folder on a post-1994 AK, you could have theoretically gotten into trouble if someone noticed that the gun was post-'94.

My own AK and magazines are ban-era; here's how to tell by looking.




What aspect? The square-ish receiver? Curved magazines? Handgrip placement? Folding stock?

To understand what drove the actual military AK, you have to look at what it was designed to replace, namely the PPSh submachinegun and the Mosin-Nagant rifle. The AK-47 was designed to exactly split the difference between the two guns, allowing both of them to be phased out in favor of a single compromise design. At the flick of a switch, it could either spray bullets at 10 rounds per second, or fire one aimed shot at a time, therefore fulfilling the submachinegun and rifle roles passably well.

Civilian AK derivatives have only the one-shot-at-a-time mode, like other civilian rifles, and lose the rapid-fire capability. They retain the original's legendary reliability, durability, looks, and ergonomics. The intermediate cartridge gives it less recoil and higher capacity than larger caliber rifles and makes it cheaper to shoot, and the basic construction makes it affordable on a working-class paycheck.

From a civilian standpoint, you can think of it as a ruggedized Winchester Model 94 in .30-30 feeding from 20- or 30-round detachable magazines, and capable of similar accuracy and terminal ballistics. Excellent reliability, good capacity, decent performance, excellent price (mine was $379 in 2003). A Ruger Mini Thirty (same capabilities) was going for $600-$700 at the time.


An AK or AR doesn't "outgun the police." Police officers have access to Title 2 restricted machineguns and submachineguns, Title 2 restricted assault rifles (including actual M16s and M4s), restricted armor piercing ammunition, grenades, armored vehicles, body armor, yadda yadda yadda. A medium-caliber Title 1 civilian rifle doesn't "outgun the police" just because it looks like a police/government Title 2 automatic weapon.

Having said that, if a police officer shows up to a dwelling with only a pistol and the occupant has a shotgun or centerfire rifle of any sort, then yes, the officer could be considered "outgunned" until he/she goes back to the cruiser and breaks out the long gun. But the police can have rifles and shotguns that you get you or me 10 years in Federal prison for simply possessing.

But here's the crux of the matter---rifles are the least threatening to public safety of all U.S. firearms, as demonstrated by the firearm assault and firearm homicide data. Call it simplistic if you want, but when all styles of rifles combined account for only 3 murders out of 100, then anyone claiming rifles are a menace is simply selling fear.

January 12, 2012

Doing great, thanks!

Here's my superhero sidekick on his way to his most recent cardiology checkup at Duke Children's:



He's gained back most of his pre-surgery weight and is totally back to baseline in most respects, except for being on a small amount of Lasix to deal with some residual lung effusion. The heart surgery was totally successful, but they do need to go back in with a balloon catheter and dilate some stenoses in the distal pulmonary arteries, which they can't reach surgically, so I'll be taking him back to Boston Children's in a couple months for that. (We knew about that going in, so this isn't unexpected.)

His RV-PA conduit looks great and it's big enough that it should last him till the valve wears out, and it's designed to accomodate one transcatheter valve replacement (Melody valve). So it's not unreasonable to speculate that he could go 20 years on this conduit, unless calcification is worse than expected or something.

He also made out like a bandit on Christmas presents, as might be expected. Although I didn't fulfill one request....he asked me a few weeks ago for a semiauto-only PPSh to keep in the safe for range trips.

January 12, 2012

Yes, there are.

But if you are comparing rifles with and without pistols grips,

-- Accuracy is the same.
-- Capacity is the same.
-- Rate of fire is the same.
-- Conceability is similar (slight edge to straight stock).
-- Portability is the same.
-- Ease of reloading is similar.

What it comes down to is that you wish to outlaw civilian rifles that *look* a certain way, and a ban on handgrips that stick out is one way to codify that wish into law.

But have *you* considered that if rifles were as amazingly lethal and suited for criminal violence as you say they are, then rifles would account for more than 3% of U.S. murders?

January 12, 2012

Except you are very insistently confusing NON-military-grade weapons with actual

military-grade weapons---which are already very tightly controlled under existing law.

You've been had.

That was written by the lobbyist who popularized the "assault weapon" meme, in the paper that launched the whole "assault weapon ban" crusade and ultimately destroyed the gun control movement in the United States.

We are not talking about military-grade weapons. We are talking about non-automatic, small- and intermediate-caliber *civilian* rifles that (1) have handgrips that stick out, or (2) look (but do NOT function) like military grade weapons.

January 12, 2012

Let me remind you what the gun control lobby *used* to say about Title 1 rifles like mine.

Let me remind you of what the gun control lobby *used* to say about Title 1 rifles like mine.

That statement is no less true now than it was then. Rifle crime was far worse when he said that than it is now. And when he wrote that, the AR-15 had been on the market for two decades and the M1 carbine for four decades.

It wasn't until 1988, when Josh Sugarmann of the Violence Policy Center popularized the "assault weapon" bait-and-switch as a means to build momentum for a ban on handguns, that the gun control lobby embarked on the rifle-ban crusade that would ultimately be its undoing.


And how, exactly, does advocating for cosmetic restrictions on the least misused of all U.S. weapons translate into a "safer, saner society"?

How does replacing this gun:



with this gun:



change rifle misuse one iota? They are the same gun. And the black-stocked one is less concealable, to boot.


I have posted a picture of exactly one weapon of war in this thread. This one, originally designed to kill human beings at extreme ranges:



That's a military rifle made in Izhevsk, Russia for the Imperial Russian army in 1905, which was converted to M39 configuration in 1942 at the Finnish VKT arsenal in Jyvaskyla, and which likely saw action in two world wars. The sights are graduated from 100 meters to 2 kilometers, the latter for volley fire. It's also the archetype of the modern deer rifle, but it's the only military gun I own.

The other gun pics I posted are exclusively civilian guns that are not used by any military on this planet, as I'm sure you'd realize if you stopped to think about it. And the AR-15 just *any* civilian gun; it is the most popular civilian centerfire sporting rifle in the United States.


I'm not sure if you're referring to the other poster, or opponents of the "assault weapon" fraud in general, but if the latter then you simply have no idea. Empathy can be simultaneously blessing and curse, but I choose empathy and heartache over ignorance and bliss anyday.

But tell me, O empathetic one who would likely toss my ass in jail over the shape of a rifle stock, what do cosmetic restrictions on the *least* misused weapons have to do with "the suffering of others"?

January 11, 2012

No problem at all; we're all human here.

No problem at all; we're all human here. Large threads and tiny screens have lead to cross-thread confusion more than once...


Will you like it as well when the Santorums and Fischers and Vander Plaats types apply it to the First Amendment?

"We believe that the Constitution contains no barriers to reasonable regulations of the press. If we can license and register cars, we can license and register the press.

Most opponents of press control concede that the First Amendment certainly does not guarantee an individual's right to own child porn or detailed plans for nuclear weapons. Yet these, like novels, manuals, and even encyclopedias, are publications.

The question therefore is not whether to restrict the press, but how much to restrict it. If that is a question left open by the Constitution, then it is a question for Congress to decide."

FWIW, I think the national ACLU is slowly coming around. Its position on the 2ndA is inconsistent with its high view of the rest of the Bill of Rights; one cannot logically find a right to privacy in the text of the 4thA, and not find a right of the people to keep and bear arms in the text of the 2ndA.

January 11, 2012

No, just the West Germans. :-b

Не, только Западногерманские, да?

Mine must be defective then, because it works like an ordinary NFA Title 1 civilian rifle. Exactly like this one, in fact:

http://www.ruger.com/products/miniThirty/models.html



Same ammunition, same range of magazine capacities, same accuracy, same rate of fire (one shot at a time), Oh, wait, that one doesn't have an evil handgrip, so it's OK.

Seriously, that total indifference to what is real---extreme rhetoric ("death spewer&quot in spite of the low level of rifle misuse, the functional distinctions between NFA Title 1 and Title 2 weapons, the fact that the guns you want to ban are less misused than the ones you don't want to ban---is exactly why your side lost the debate on this topic years ago, and why the "assault weapon" fraud eventually imploded the gun control movement in this country.

Civilian guns with protruding handgrips---AR's, Kel-Tecs, civilian AK's, FN's, what have you---are no longer just "in the mainstream" in the United States; they ARE the mainstream, thanks in part to the 1994 non-ban. In most of the country, you can once again buy AR-15's at Walmart, and AR/AK/M1A ammunition probably outsells all other centerfire rifle calibers combined.

Yet gun crime, and rifle crime, are about as low now as they've been in the last 50 years. Think about that.

January 11, 2012

You *do* have to index a rifle at any realistic distance.

First, point blank range:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point-blank_range

It means, in shooting, the distance at which drop due to gravity hasn't become a major factor yet, and in forensics and popular culture it has come to mean ~1 meter from the muzzle, almost a contact shot. Beyond that distance, indexing (coarse, then fine) is necessary as distance increases. And yes, you *do* have to aim a rifle; that bullet is within 1/30 degree of the sight line laterally, and within three inches vertically, for two hundred yards. There is a reason that even when using automatic weapons at inside-the-room distances, the military and SWAT use Aimpoint and Eotech sights.

I've mentioned, I shoot USPSA matches. Due to the layout of our local range, stages are usually *close*, as in 2 to 20 yards, with lots of movement. Blasting away without aiming will make a lot of noise and a big fat zero on your score, but I'd love to take you to the range yourself and let you try it. It doesn't work like it does in the movies. Your scenario has not played out in the real world, and shooting real guns at a range would quickly demonstrate why.

FWIW, if you look at the worst mass shootings in the United States, the common denominators tend to be slow, deliberate shooting (enabled by trapped victims and a long delay for countervailing force to show up), and lots of reloading from a large stash of spare magazines (often low-capacity ones; the Virginia Tech shooter reloaded more than a dozen times). "Surprise trench coat ninja with a rifle at arm's length" just isn't what one generally sees, and there are reasons for that.

So again, we circle back to the fact that rifles, including pistol-gripped rifles, are the least misused class of firearm in the United States. There is simply no getting around that fact; the meme and the facts do not correlate.

http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2010/crime-in-the-u.s.-2010/tables/10tbl20.xls

[font face="courier new"]Total murders...........................12,996.....100.00%
Handguns.................................6,009......46.24%
Firearms (type unknown)..................2,035......15.66%
Other weapons (non-firearm, non-edged)...1,772......13.63%
Edged weapons............................1,704......13.11%
Hands, feet, etc...........................745.......5.73%
Shotguns...................................373.......2.87%
[font color="red"]Rifles.....................................358.......2.75%[/font][/font]

Or, with the "type unknowns" rolled into the other categories using the same breakdown:

[font face="courier new"]Total murders...........................12,996.....100.00%
Handguns.................................6,950......53.48%
Other weapons (non-firearm, non-edged)...1,772......13.63%
Edged weapons............................1,704......13.11%
Hands, feet, etc...........................745.......5.73%
Shotguns...................................431.......3.32%
[font color="red"]Rifles.....................................414.......3.19%[/font][/font]

Based on that, please explain how protruding rifle handgrips are such a menace in the real world, to the extent that requires banning the most popular civilian rifles in the United States.