The Virginia House of Delegates approved an assault weapons ban on a party line vote Friday.
Fairfax County Democratic Del. Dan Helmer’s bill would end the sale and transfer of assault firearms manufactured after July 1, 2024. It also prohibits the sale of certain large capacity magazines.
“This bill would stop the sale of weapons similar to those I and many of the other veterans carried in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Helmer said.
The pro-gun community does not support this ban
The pro-gun community fought this for years, despite claiming they were “just a range toy” even after their role in the deadliest mass shooting America had ever seen.
So let’s not pretend the pro-gun community are reasonable people making reasonable concessions.
I wasn’t doing that. The guy I replied to wanted one specific thing to be illegal, I explained to him that it’s already illegal. Whatever else you’re reading into my post isn’t there
The push back against full auto and bump stocks is particularly interesting because there are two advantages to full auto:
1: Haha that was fun for two seconds
2: There’s a crowd of people I want to shoot into and accuracy doesn’t matter.
From a cold blooded logical perspective full auto on small arms is mostly useless for hunting, self defense, and military needs alike. If you want to argue for burst fire, fair enough, but there’s just no need for full auto or imitations.
I think that realistically the push back is because the full auto ban undermines a lot of their rhetoric.
After high profile mass shootings such as the Saint Valentines Day Massacre – which includes the kind of photo you’ll never see on a Wikipedia page about Sandy Hook or Ulvade – killed 7 people, fully automatic weapons were deemed an unacceptable public risk without stricter regulations.
Like you say, they have functionally zero redeeming qualities and are far more useful to criminals than to “responsible gun owners”. The laws have stood for a long time, the sky hasn’t fallen and full auto weapons aren’t turning up in mass shootings or organised crime. The regulations worked and they weren’t even an outright ban.
But now people are asking why we can’t do the same thing, for the same reasons, with semi-automatic weapons and the pro-gun community desperately doesn’t want that for various self-aggrandizing, baseless reasons.
They know that “some weapons should be more tightly regulated because of the risk they pose to the public but not these ones” is a much weaker position than “no weapons should ever been regulated”, so they opt for the latter.
If they actually succeeded, we would absolutely see those weapons used to create higher levels of violence, but the pro-gun community is fine with sacrificing more innocent lives for their hobby, especially if they get 2 seconds of fun at the range.
It was actually never determined if he used bump stocks or not. Some of his rifles had them but not all and the consistency and firing rate isn’t typical of bump firing. There is a very real possibility that he just had illegally modified machine guns. During the course of the investigation the ATF was specifically prohibited from inspecting his weapons to determine if any modifications were made and the official report never actually stated one way or another if he did in fact use the bump stocks.
The pro-gun community opposes this because the intent of 2A was always to protect the ownership of militarily-useful arms.
The gov’t already has the right to raise and provide arms for an army, as part of article 1 of the constitution; claiming that 2A protects the gov’t’s right to arm itself, when it was already granted that right earlier in the constitution, is laughable. Militias were groups of armed citizens, separate from the army, and they were often expected–and legally obligated in some cases–to provide their own arms in serviceable condition, and to train themselves in their use.
The way to effectively curtail violence without curtailing rights is to change the circumstances that lead to violence. Yes, you can cut out lung cancer, and even possibly do a lung transplant, but it’s far, far easier to prevent lung cancer by not smoking than it is to cure it after you’ve been smoking for 50 years. Same with violence; look at the factors that lead people to pick up and use a gun illegally, then work to prevent those, and you’ll have a greater net effect.
Isn’t it cool how the intent of the amendment happens to align exactly with what the pro-gun community wants, which in turn aligns exactly with what is most profitable to the gun lobby?
It’s a good thing it does too, otherwise you’d have to say things like “I want to play with a full auto and I think the consequences will happen to people I don’t care about”.
So do the gun laws in America mandate that a gun is kept in serviceable condition and it’s owner is trained in how to use it? Or have we shrugged off “intent” before the second paragraph?
And while you spend the next 100 years doing that, the best way to minimize the amount of violence those people can inflict is to not sell them semi-automatic weapons after token checks that routinely fail.
I hate to break it to you, but gun control isn’t about stopping all violence forever and never has been. It’s about turning a murder into a black eye.
The fact that you slipped so effortlessly into that straw man makes it clear that you let pro-gun groups tell you what gun control is and then never thought critically about it.
I would fully support laws that required people to train in the arms that they choose to own, and provided the ammunition and expertise as part of income taxes that everyone is supposed to pay. I think that would be great. Heck, let’s bring back marksmanship to schools; there used to be rifle teams in high schools, and I think that we should bring that back along with archery. We are a country that’s heavily armed, but often sorely lacking in the skill to use those arms, and we should fix that to bring the people more in-line with the intent of the 2A.
Yes, ownership is a right, but that right also carries responsibilities. Guns aren’t magic talismans that protect you simply by having one.
This isn’t a straw man; I’m steel manning your argument. Your best claim is that you would give that right back once all violence had been eliminated. But that’s an impossibility; even countries that have exceptionally low murder rates, with or without firearms, continually attempt to exert greater control over ownership of the tools of violence whatever those tools are. I’m acquainted with people that live in Finland, a country that has a murder rate that would be the envy of any politician in the US, but each murder committed with a firearm–legally owned or not–sees calls for more and more restrictions on the ownership of arms. What is a murder rate that you would consider to be acceptable such that you wouldn’t attempt to restrict the ownership of firearms of any kind by individuals?
Congratulations, you are now a gun control advocate. Be sure to tell your pro-gun friends and all the lobby groups that claim to represent you.
Everything that followed this sentence was just another straw man.
You also talk about an “impossibility” with the confidence of someone who doesn’t care if they’re wrong because it won’t change their views either way.
Countries like Australia have relaxed their gun laws in order to make recreational shooting more accessible, so i guess it’s not impossible at all.
What they don’t do is go back to selling semi-automatic weapons to known domestic abusers and people struggling with psychosis because that’s a level of complete fucking idiocy that only America’s pro-gun community can hit.
Again, since you refused to answer the question:
It’s also useful to point out that NZ enacted sharp restrictions after the Christchurch murders, and then realized that they were functionally useless, and have since relaxed and are on the cusp of abolishing those same laws, Because the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze.
Well you see since I’m not pro-gun, I don’t think in terms of “all of these murders are acceptable”.
Instead, whenever the laws failed, I would look at what could have been done to prevent that failure. If there truly was nothing that could have been done and no way of knowing, I would accept that.
But nope, we’re not allowed to do that with guns. We just have to accept failure after failure because there is no amount of violence that will ever make the pro-gun crowd accept minor inconvenience.
Guns sold to people with a history of domestic abuse? No change. Guns sold to people who shoot children in the head for ringing a doorbell? No change. Guns sold to people who let toddlers get their hands on them? No change.
Sorry, this can’t be true since you insisted it was an impossibility and surely you wouldn’t be a melodramatic liar?
So, what you’re saying is that the murder rate is not important to you, because you oppose the individual ownership of firearms, regardless of whether or not they’re used to harm other people. Is that correct? So when you cite the murder rate as being your reason for banning firearms, that’s not your real reason at all. On the other hand, if it is your real reason, then you must have a number that you consider to be acceptable. Is it 1? 100? Or does any single person using an item or right in a way that is either illegal or harmful to other people sufficient cause to ban that <<thing>> or eliminate that right?
Nope, and you’re probably perfectly aware it isn’t. But I won’t waste my time clarifying in a dead thread so do your pathetic little downvote and I’ll see you next school shooting.