My dad was (is) a Marine.

This is my rifle (spoken while holding up rifle)
This is my gun (spoken while grabbing the crotch)
This one's for killing (spoken while holding up rifle)
This one's for fun (spoken while grabbing the crotch)

Machine guns are firearms. You can buy pre 1986 machine guns in the USA (I'm not sure what form you have to fill out). The 1986 cutoff is fairly pointless.

I don't consider bazookas, grenades, mortars, etc. firearms. To me a firearm is essentially a rifle that fires cartridges. But if the US government considers them as firearms then that is what they are for legislative purposes.

I believe there is case law regarding what scope of arms they were referring to in the 2A and the result was any common firearm. This currently includes almost all pistols and rifles, both automatic and semi-automatic (with the exception being automatic guns must have been made before 1986 - I believe this limit should be removed).

I'm very much against restricting semi-automatic rifles. There are no good reasons for restricting them. It is unconstitutional. They are not the "weapon of choice" for mass shootings, pistols are. The lethality of them in mass shootings is the same as that of pistols (someone ran an analysis just recently). This last point surprised me a little.

https://www.reddit.com/r/gunpolitics/comments/d7ypcv/no_mass_shootings_carried_out_with_semiautomatic/

I'm for background checks (i.e. for second hand sales which are the only sales left without a background check) as long as the service is cheap and no records are kept (i.e. it isn't used to create a de-facto registration database).

Public health wise, talking about firearms is a red herring. If I were to drop a bucket load of money into stuff in the USA it would be into making health care and mental health care cheap and available and reducing poverty. This would have more affect on mortality and morbidity rates then any gun legislation will. And yes, I would give fully subsidized health care to the poor.

By now you should be asking yourself what planet someone comes from where they support the 2A and free health care at the same time.

I believe your typical American, no matter their political persuasion, cares about his fellow American. I'm sure you agree that trying to paint either side as demons who don't care is nonsense.

People shouldn't care about what type of guns or the number of guns - there seems to be no correlation between gun ownership rates and homicide rates in the USA:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_States_by_state#/media/File:Gun_Ownership_Related_to_Gun_Violence_by_State_(United_States).sv
g

(the line of best fit would have a positive slope if there was a correlation)

There is a correlation between weapon type and firearm murder - pistols (of all sorts) account for approximately 89% of all firearm murders (where a firearm type is specified in the police report). Rifles (of all sorts) are about 5%. Shotguns (of all sorts) are about 3%.

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-2017/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-8.xls

This wiki has better data than you presented - you can isolate gun violence from other violence:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_States_by_state

"Odd, you seem to be saying you're afraid of the violent, gun toting democrats who are 99% more ready and better armed for violent political civil war than Republicans....but you also claim Republicans have all the guns and are better shots and ready to go.....which is it?"

The data says that Republican voters (or those that lean that way) have a firearm ownership rate of double that of Democrats.

If the majority of terrorist attacks in the USA are by right wing terrorists as you suggest, then it seems odd you'd say in the same breath that the left are ready for violent political civil war. If they have less arms and less willingness to engage in violence (which I actually believe is a good thing) then they are hardly "99% more ready and better armed".

The military voted Republican at about twice the rate of voting Democrat at the last election. So the left doesn't have that going for them either.

Why is the Republican party so afraid of the NRA? How much money can they donate and lobby? Why can't the anti-gun side mobilize and match the donation like 2~3 folds and dangle the money to the GOP to silence the NRA? Of course it's a gross oversimplification of the issues (NRA can go "mental" and threaten any Republican's families, etc. if I go all cynical), but money is a good start...

Ban assault rifle, raise the price of guns. the manufacturers still make as much money.

Amendment right? Well what about my right to own a nuclear baseball? Anthrax and Agent Orange? It isn't it my right to have them? Stop with the BS amendment right argument.

And if I can just add, don't let your dog stick it's head out of the car window when moving. It's totally not good for the eyes. Just the wind alone, not to mention bugs and debris.

And NEVER EVER give your dog an assault rifle. It's bad for their ears.

Reply to multiple previous comments:



Re:
"Literally no different from a pistol other than it can have better accuracy and sometimes higher caliber"

.38 (9mm), .40, .45 are the calibers you will see used by police pistols

.223 (5.56mm), .300, .308, are the calibers you will see used by police rifles

Unless an officer is using a personal firearm at work, the pistols should all be higher caliber.

The major difference is muzzle velocity damage.
The pistol cuts a tunnel the diameter of the [expanded] bullet.
The rifle leaves an exit wound multiple inches across, and at point blank will grenade the exit side of the target, painting the wall with gibs.





Re:
"Can you tell me why you believe it's "not a great idea" when the criminals already all have guns too?"

Because police should be there to protect citizens lives, at the cost of their own if needed. (Hence the "hero"/"Public Servant" status they so like to remind us of)

If they protect their own lives, at the cost of citizens if needed, then they become a part of the problem they are supposed to be solving.

Just imagine the uninvolved bystander down the street struck down for no fault of their own.

The better path forward is full head to toe level 4 body armor for police, not heavier police firepower in packed suburbs.

That way they have the option to hold fire and assess the situation without shitting their pants and hosing the place down with lead "just in case, so they minimize the risk of getting hurt".

Full L4 body armor means that when things like the VT shooting happen, the police don't pitch tents outside and wait for SWAT (who actually has armor) to show up while people are likely getting killed inside.

Full L4 body armor means that when police open a door to a bathroom with an intruder inside (or a vacuum), they don't have to be thinking "kill or be killed".





Re:
"You are assuming it's a high velocity rifle. It's likely only 9mm, meaning minimal impact and penetration"

The video shows shots of the rifle magazine. It's not a 9mm pcc (pistol caliber carbine) magazine. It's the standard form factor. Meaning it is likely to be one of common the off the shelf calibers for that form factor :
.223/5.56
.300 blackout
6.8 spc
.224 valkyrie
6.5 grendel
None are 9mm. And other than a subsonic .300 blackout variant (used with suppressors/silencers), all pack a world more hurt than a 9mm.






It's true that a faster/heavier round will pass through more walls, and more houses.

Not sure it matters though, as 9mm ball will go through plenty of sheetrock layers, and rifle ammo stands a chance at fragmenting on impact with obstacles.
Which goes farther for any given shot will depend on what each one strikes along the way, and if it's bullet is of type FMJ/ball or HP or frag or penetrator or whatever.

-scheherazade

You are assuming it's a high velocity rifle. It's likely only 9mm, meaning minimal impact and penetration.

A .40 cal pistol with hollow point rounds can do exactly what you describe as well. Just because it's a "rifle" doesn't make it any more deadly or dangerous.

There's a very big difference between a pistol round and a high velocity rifle round. The rifle could easily penetrate a several typical suburban houses and still kill someone down the block in another house. A pistol (or shotgun or sub machine gun) isn't nearly as likely to do that and is just as effective for killing folks that need killing at close range.

I assume the officer is trained on it and knows that, but if folks start shooting, things tend to go wrong.

I can't say I approve of the police using a rifle in a house in the suburbs. That's not a great idea.

I agree with the utility guy, I don't think someone shot it. At that range and with the glancing angle, I can't see any typical rifle punching clean through that much steel and leaving the paint on.

Of course I have no other explanation, and there could be some dude down there who owns a .50 rifle and armor piercing ammo who really hates the water company for some reason.

If so, I wonder if ...googling....~ 50g of lead in 250,000 gallons of water is over the safety limits.

And the rifle had a child?

I had heard the song was written about a black powder rifle (you know how soldiers sometimes name their rifles after women). The child is the bullet, and "bam-ba-lam" is fun way to pronounce "blam" as in a gun firing.

It never seemed smart that a military rifle would loudly announce it's out of ammo.

Bit of a spoiler for those of us only two lieutenants/sub-bosses into the game...
According to this, after we off his brothers and sister, Father survives and nukes it all anyway. Bit of a let down.

Bought FC5 on a Steam sale last week. The DLC makes it a bit easy. Starting out with free machine guns, free Barrett rifles and a free pseudo Augusta/Bell Jet Ranger gunship is a bit like cheating.

The simple point is that as soon as we realized the capability of the Zero we easily and quickly designed a plane(s) capable of combating it.

The Yak-3 didn't enter the war until 1944, at which point the war had massively turned in Western Theatre. For the bulk of the conflict, they were using the Yak-1.

The Mig 25 and Mig 31 are both interceptors, they are designed to fire from distance and evade. The Su 35 is designed for Air Superiority. We have held the edge in our capabilities for years compared to them.

Every expert I know of is skeptical of China's claimed Railgun weapon. As to why they would bother mounting it and making claims, why not? It is brinkmanship, making us think they have more capabilities than they do.

The laser rifle is a crowd deterrent weapon. It would serve almost no purpose in infantry combat because it cannot kill. Yes, it can burn things and cause pain, but that is all. Again, this was claimed to be far more effective than experts think during our diplomatic arguments over China's use of blinding lasers on aircraft. We have no hard evidence of it's capability.

Yes, Russia could sell such a missile to our enemies versus using it directly against us. The problem is that as soon as they do so, the genie is out of the bottle. It will be reverse engineered quickly and could be USED AGAINST THEM. No country gives or sells away it's absolute top level weaponry except to it's most trusted allies. Allies which, for all intents and purposes, know that using such a weapon against another nation state risks full out retaliation against not only them but the country that sold it to them.

Our carriers are excellent mobile platforms, but they are not our only way of mounting air strikes. If we were somehow in a conventional war situation, we could easily fly over and base our aircraft in allied countries for combat. Most of our nuclear capable aircraft are not carrier launched anyway. Even if somehow all of our carriers were taken out and somehow our SAC bombers were destroyed as well, we would still have more than enough land launched and submarine launched nuclear warheads to easily blanket our enemies.

My points remain:

1. It is in the greatest interest of our enemies to boast about weapon capabilities even if they are not effective yet.

2. Most well regarded experts consider many of these weapons to either be still in the research stage, early production stage (IE not available for years), or they are wildly over hyped.

3. There is no logical reason for our enemies to use these weapons or proliferate them to their closest allies unless the weapons can prevent a nuclear response. Merely mentioning a weapon that would have such a capability creates a situation that could lead to nuclear war, like SDI did. I don't know if you recall, but I do clearly, how massively freaked out the Soviets got over our SDI claims. For two years they started threatening nuclear war as being inevitable if we continued on the path we were, all the while aggressively trying to destabilize our relations with our allies. 1983 to 1985 was pretty fucking tense, not Cuban missile crisis level maybe, but damn scary. Putin has acted similarly over our attempts to set up a missile barrier in former satellite states of Russia, although we still haven't got to the SHTF level of the early 80's.