I’m a recovering gun nut. I guess. I always found guns to be another example of cool design and often superb machining, with the additional emotional charge of: explosions.
I always enjoyed the mental and physical discipline of shooting. It’s satisfying and produces immediate feedback. I spent many many hours killing cockroaches and mice with a BB gun in the primate lab at the university. By the time I graduated, I had spent a while with .22 rifles and I bought a .22 pistol (Ruger MKII) and was cheerfully taking it apart, making new grips for it (which are still on it) polishing the action, etc. As one of my friends once said, “shooting got less fun once I stopped missing.” By the time I got into basic training (Class of Ft Dix, 1983) I qualified as sharpshooter with 403 hits out of 400 possible. I still find it amusing when right-wingers make the mistaken assumption that liberals are defenseless wimps.
However: I believe in very strong gun regulation, and it’s my opinion that some tech probably should remain out of the realm of “entertainment” with a few exceptions. For example, I think the military should open up a few “gun parks” where you can pay absurd amounts to do silly things, like fire a wire-guided anti-tank missile at an empty school bus as long as you don’t mind the $250,000 fee. Or saddle up in a main battle tank and race your buddies through an obstacle course. Unfortunately, SR-71 rides are no longer an option. I think, however, that it’s important to avoid making an argument from need for military weapons. Americans insistently and persistently lie about how they need weapons for home defense, or whatever, in spite of the fact that we are the safest society on earth, except for (drum roll) … the gun violence. On one hand, the highest cause of child death is guns, and on the other we have a horde of people who want to remove all restrictions on firearms. (those of us who’d rather carry a sword would like to thank the gun lobby for leaving us standing in the rain)
A lot of that revolves around automatic weapons. What we’d call a “machine gun” if there weren’t artificial divisions in the category, in order to dance back and forth across the lines in these very regulations. When I was in my reserve unit, I was an M-60 gunner, and my job was to haul that thing around without breaking it, firing it, or letting someone steal it. As you can imagine, they are a highly precious item in the USA of Gun Nuts. Quickly, I realized that its primary characteristic was that it weighed 15kg. Sure, it was fun to shoot, the one time each year I got to shoot it at some targets on a range somewhere. Honestly the most fun I had with it was when we were on maneuvers/bus trips and stopped for a bathroom break, I’d make a point of sauntering past some cop in the truck stop, with the M-60 over my shoulder. Like, was I there to stick up the place? By the way, if you’re interested in doing a mass shooting: join the army. Anyhow, I’ve always been on the fence about automatic weapons. Machine guns characterized WWI and shaped WWII, but after armies learned not to march around in the open, I think they were mostly a waste of ammunition except for room-clearing, for which a submachine gun is the way to go. Those are tremendous fun but are literally made for mass shooting: the idea is to clear a room of living people in a hurry, and they’re pretty good at that. In the US, we’d have them all over the place except the government has made them extremely expensive. You have to do a lot of paperwork and then find one and buy it, and then pay for the massive amounts of ammunition it can use up without hitting anything. When I was in basic I was proud of my shooting (justifiably, actually) and it was a constant reminder that while I might hit 2 targets somewhere with a 100-round belt from the M-60, I could hit 100 targets with 100 rounds from my M-16, which was a certifiable piece of worn-out junk. I’ll go out on a limb and say that even the military generally doesn’t need automatic weapons except heavy machineguns in strongpoints or on armored vehicles for support. But gun nuts still want them. It’s fun, sure. It makes a hell of a lot of noise and costs a bunch of money. [If you do all the paperwork and stuff, you can get an H&K MP5 submachine gun for around $50,000]
Now, if you’re a criminal, about to do a mass shooting, you might be expected not to be too afraid of adding a felony atop your 20-whatever murder charges, by using a bump stock or autosear or whatever. But there is a constant back and forth about how to turn semiautomatic weapons into automatic weapons, and to do it without it being “illegal.” The ATF has to keep closing the door whenever the door is re-opened. Bump stocks were an abomination, to a marksman. The entire rifle was held in a plastic frame that allowed it to bounce back and forth from its recoil, then all you had to do was hold your finger where the trigger was going to be, and it would bounce back and forth and set itself off when the trigger hit your finger. You can imagine how accurate the shooting was – hitting a crowd at a concert was possible, but probably not much else. So, congress managed to find enough spine to ban bump stocks. Part of the reason I have been going around this entire topic is to get you to realize how stupid American gun laws are – they’re banning things piecemeal, when the real questions ought to be: let’s come up with a better definition of machinegun and ban those. Not, “how do we ban the latest thing?” To analogize a bit, it’s like adopting a strategy of barn door management each time a horse goes galloping off over the hill.
Now, the latest thing is here, and it’s a doozie!
It’s called a “force reset trigger” (FRT) and it’s implemented as a replacement trigger group in an AR-15 (and doubtless other things to come). It’s sort of like a bump stock in the sense that it’s a trigger group that resets itself. This is embarrassingly stupid to have to explain, but it’ll give you an idea of the kind of fucked up legalisms Americans will come up with when they want to. I believe, in fact, that this will give you some insight into why the American justice system has proved remarkably easy to pervert with relatively small amounts of money – you just redefine what a human life is, and then abortion is murder, or whatever. The way FRTs work is this: with a normal semiautomatic rifle you pull the trigger, it goes off, and you have to release the pressure on the trigger for it to reset itself so it’s ready to drop the hammer on the next shot. An FRT uses some of the energy of the gun’s bolt cycling to push a little lever against the trigger to reset it, itself – in which case when the trigger moves back into position, if your finger is still there, the gun goes off again. It’s sort of like the bump stock cycling the entire rifle so it hits your finger and goes off, it’s just now entirely internal and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (which has become a convenience store not a regulatory agency under the current FBI director) is going to have to spend some lawyering figuring this out. I am reminded of my solution for the problem, which is to say “we don’t give a shit but your gun cannot fire more than X rounds per minute no matter how it’s done.” See the problem is easily solved. I forget what George MacDonald Fraser said the Gordons’ Highlanders could achieve with a bolt-action Enfield and practice, but if that was enough firepower to beat the Japanese all the way down the Rangoon Road, it ought to be good enough. Although, to be fair, the fighting in Burma would classify as a “mass shooting.” Anyhow, since the law hasn’t caught up to FRTs yet, as it didn’t catch up to bump stocks fast enough, they’re selling the hell out of the things until someone uses one for a mass shooting. Let’s not have a deadpool to see how long it takes for one to crop up causing a crowd of corpses.
They cost around $300. Fleece those gun nuts. I’m terribly on the fence about this, because while it’s tempting to say “just tax or price the things out of existence” then advanced weaponry is available only to the wealthy. That’s the same scenario as knights prancing about in extremely expensive armor with swords mowing through crowds of villeins with pitchforks and torches. We don’t want a situation where only rich people can defend themselves because it seems that they’re a bigger problem than the poor people. In fact if I were a billionaire, I’d start a program where any non-white person could receive a coupon good for an AR-15, as long as they signed a pledge to use it only to preserve democracy from anyone trying to gerrymander or disenfranchise voters. Or deny medical insurance claims. Or cancel social security. Etc.
Part of the reason I am not a gun nut anymore is because I realized that all that crap about the second amendment and needing guns in case the junta running the country turns malicious [hint: ask a black person when the US junta turned malicious] – that was all just an excuse for having lots of guns because guns are fun and some people enjoy shoring up their sense of self-empowerment by carrying a weapon. That aspect of weapons-carrying goes back a long, long way and there are interesting histories on the topic, such as this great book my dad gave me [wc] – Kristen Neuschel’s Living By The Sword which is about the social aspects of weapons-carrying and Europe and England and the connection between weapons and material culture. She elegantly points out over and over again how swords particularly were part of royal/imperial regalia and the province of nobility, thus were a class signifier for centuries. She does not go into it, but pretty much everything she writes applies equally to Japan and China in the same time periods. The guy with the nice sword is important. It is my opinion that a lot of that is what is going on in the US – southern whites, feeling disempowered and facing the loss of their class status, turned to gun collecting as a way of cushioning their all-important fee-fees. And, it’s convenient if you’re a racist and you want to scare someone. Americans have never figured out their class consciousness and have always stumbled around about this: “the clothes make the man” is really not an egalitarian sentiment for a citizen of a republic, but the fact that media commentators are surprised at how badly our billionaires dress is something to think about. I’m not sure what’s going on, but I’d say that in a fake republic the truly powerful prefer to look ordinary, so they have a chance of being able to blend in and pretend that they’re just in on the Democracy Game at the same level as everyone else.
I have been thinking some thoughts about mass shootings, for the last decade, which I consider to be common sense but unsupported by statistics or sociology or any of that. I’m trying to decide if it’s worth putting the ideas out here for comment, or not. Or is this a topic we are so sick of it’d be like talking about Turnip’s trade policies?
I did not want to go into at length above, but I have a fairly simple theory about why some of us enjoy guns and explosions; it’s not purely media: it gives our adrenal gland a little kick. Or shooting at something and hitting it gives us a little squirt of dopamine. That’s all it takes! If you can derive satisfaction from putting a bullet in a bullseye, then you’re going to derive more satisfaction from putting a small cluster of them in a bullseye. It’s a self-rewarding behavioral feedback loop. [Please remember I’m a bit of a skinnerian so psychological explanations that depend entirely on cognitive states are hard for me to swallow]
Good god yes. Anything other than Trump, please.
My background with firearms is extensive – between hunting, military service and police work, I’ve basically shot almost every kind of gun that a single human can carry around. I am a pretty good rifle shot, I used to be an excellent pistol shot (by police standards, which are low, not Olympic ones). I did some competition in ‘tactical/defensive’ shooting for a while when I still worked in that field and a pistol was a tool, rather than a toy. With all of that, I had somehow managed never to handle or fire a lever action gun. When I picked up my first 1892 pattern lever action, I was blown away. While there are other kinds of guns that are arguably better for some purposes (none of which are important in my life), I’ve never handled a firearm that just felt as comfortable and ergonomic to use. A lever action carbine in a large calibre has been my go-to bush gun ever since.
Which is probably why I fall down on the gun control debate into this position: civilians do not need to, and should not, own firearms capable of semi-automatic fire or with detachable magazines. Take away those two features and you pull the teeth of most mass-shooters, and seriously limit the dangerous-ness of much of firearm-related crime. You also do so without meaningfully affecting the ability of people to hunt or engage in marksmanship practice.
For what it’s worth, I also quite recently discovered PCP airguns while addressing a severe packrat problem at my house. I now almost never bother to take the firearms out of the safe, shooting the airguns is just as much fun and 1-2 orders of magnitude cheaper per shot (and the sound doesn’t distress my dogs).
I think there’s something else there too. It’s also feelings, but it’s feelings of power and agency. In your culture (and a little in mine up here) the gun is a totem of power. The tool that the ‘good guy’ uses to enact his will and triumph over ‘bad guys’. The people buying exceptionally expensive ‘tactical’ firearms have a particular vision in mind when they commit vast sums of their income to these weapons. Those visions are individual and will vary, but they’re always power fantasies. “self/family defense” is often quoted as the reason to justify the purchase, but the hollowness of that excuse can be exposed by asking the fantasist when the last time they replaced their first-aid kits was, or how many/what type of fire extinguishers they’ve bought, or when they last tested their AFCI/GFCI circuit breakers. They’re only interested in defense against things they can kill – injuries, electrocution and fire just aren’t fun enough to be worth defending against.
I think some of the mass-shooting style gun violence, as well as a lot of the ‘vigilante’ gun violence can be traced back to this issue: because owning the gun doesn’t actually confer any power. It’s just a thing they have to own and pay for and clean and tote around from place to place. It doesn’t make them feel better, it doesn’t make their life better. It just sits there, occupying space and capital and doing nothing at all for them. When they take it out and play with it, it isn’t really satisfying – they’re just putting holes in paper and paying for the privilege.
If you ever want a look into the mind of these folks, go on a deep dive through the scenarios that people craft for IDPA or other ‘tactical’ firearms competitions. You’ll see pretty quickly what their fantasies look like. As (then) a working cop, I was always weirded out by how many people wanted to pay money and invest time to train for scenarios that would be vanishingly rare occurrences for a police officer, and essentially nonexistent for civilians. Also the number of times I saw the word “thug” used to describe a target began to really bother me.
ah, but if eldn mtlk has an ar-15 and five thousand guys outside his gate have blunderbusses, who wins? might still work out fine, as insulting as the vibe is.
The thing that’s important in your scenario, Bébé Mélange, is the numbers. That’s what the gun-obsessed prepper types don’t get. It’s also why individuals can’t fight the government, no matter how well equipped or trained they might be.
It doesn’t matter if the five thousand folks outside Melon Husk’s residence have blunderbusses, spears, or just socks with rocks in. It’s the numbers that matter. Even when your enemies are better armed than you – that just means that after you (or your surviving friends) over-run them, now someone on your side has those weapons.
Look at the conflict in Myanmar for example. Rebels were 3d printing guns, but mainly as a tool to ambush Junta military or police officers and recover their weapons. And it works. Progressives shouldn’t ignore guns as tools, but we shouldn’t get caught up on the idea that superior weapons will lead to superior results. If the guns are around, sooner or later the side with numbers on their side are going to possess them. Build community, not specific tools.
love the thinking, sh.
I’ve got a lot of conflicted thoughts and feelings about firearms, rights, bearing arms, self-defense, and associated topics…
Prior enlisted USMC infantry, so fairly extensive M-16/M-4 training, was a SAW (squad automatic weapon(M249)) gunner for a bit, later a medium machine gunner (M240), and then a light armored vehicle scout, with the typical reassignments and attachments and whatnot.
I don’t want to own/be responsible for a firearm. I don’t really need it, and I definitely don’t need the stress that owning/using it responsibly would bring. Lately, with the political atmosphere, I’ve been questioning that… Not that I think I’m going to overthrow the government or whatever, but maybe we need to emulate the Black Panthers, and have a community of armed (and trained) individuals that show up when something questionable is going down, and encourage people/institutions to act properly. So long as that is possibly legal…
If it actually comes to all-out war, I feel fairly confident that there will be a lot of outside interests/nations supplying weapons/ammo/food/gear/etc. to their preferred faction, and active combatants won’t be limited to what they personally had on hand/stockpiled as of the date of declaration of hostilities or whatever.
I’ve never used a bumpstock, so maybe I’m incredibly wrong, but when I read about how it works, it struck me as something that would be pretty much useless, outside of indiscriminately shooting into crowds (as already brought up…) or just stupid stunts at the range with your buddies.
I don’t get this fixation on rate-of-fire over accuracy fetish. I could empty a 30-round magazine with an M16 in a few seconds with reasonable close-range accuracy. And I wasn’t an exceptionally accurate shot or quick trigger finger.
Using a machine-gun (in my experience, light-to-medium) was a much more niche application (mostly defensive, but plenty of offensive capabilities as well….but carrying the ammo was definitely an ordeal… I still remember getting yelled at after a range for not running further and faster, while carrying literally 50lbs of ammo as the riflemen carrying ~6lbs of ammo. :/personal
Another thing that bothers me, is the lack of concern/repercussions as to firearm safety. As much as I hated my 4-year military stint, I feel like one of the few things they did well was firearm safety – pretty much any time enlisted folk were carrying weapons around, there was an overabundance of NCOs roaming around just looking for any opportunity to jump down someone’s throat over unsafe firearm handling. It’s not that difficult, and if you think it is, you aren’t in any condition to be carrying/handling a firearm. If you can’t carry it responsibly, you are in no condition to be able to deploy it effectively.
Those jackasses that fumble their wallet while in line in Walmart and have a negligent discharge – they should absolutely not be allowed to possess a firearm. let alone carry it.
I think it’s really concerning we have more limitations on the first amendment than the second…
Sorry, that got really long, and I didn’t even need to segue into the whole issue about firearms being unrestricted while there are felony-level bans on silly shit like “throwing stars”, “nun-chuks”, “switchblades”, “daggers”, etc.
Comedian Jim Jeffries has a great routine about gun control. There’s a lot of good stuff in it, but at root it revolves around the following observation: people against gun control only really have one argument against it, and it goes like this:
“Fuck off – I like guns”.
I didn’t say it was a good argument, but it’s all you’ve got.
That the definitions are stupid isn’t an accident, it’s a method Republicans use in several areas. If you can’t get rid of something entirely then make the law around it bad. Make the law excessively complex, make the definitions impractical, get nitpicky over details that don’t matter, channel money to overhead instead of function. Then you can campaign on the government policy being bad, even though you were the ones that made it bad.
Uh, am I in moderation? I did not get the notification that my comment is in moderation and also the comment did not show up. I thought it might be a glitch on my side and it still did not show up. If it is a technical glitch, it might show twice later on.
Well, I tried to post several times and I do not know what the problem is. Marcus, if those comments show in the spam, you decide what to do with them.
Now my comment showed up, trying again:
@Marcus “I qualified as sharpshooter with 403 hits out of 400 possible.”
Could you please elaborate on how? I know nothing about guns and sharpshooter qualifications but getting more points than possible seems, well, not possible. Is it a typo?
I always thought that the ban on “automatic weapons” should focus on the speed of shooting and not the technicalities. I also agree with JM that these laws are deliberately bad. Similarly, the anti-knife laws in the UK are also IMO at least in part intentionally bad. Everyone who thinks about it knows they do not actually solve the problem, they serve just as a pretense for low-information voters to make them believe that the problem is being solved instead of ignored.
Found it, my brain confused JM with another commenter who is probably in moderation. My bad, I do apologize.
IMO any attempt to ban fully automatic weapons without banning semi-automatic ones will just result in this loophole abuse. But then I’m from Australia
There also seems to be a lot of toxic masculinity in this culture
For some definition of “possible.” I am not familiar with the process and do not know how that works.
Here’s a guy who found a hobby and a cause in shooting:
Mini dragons have invaded Marco Island. One man’s on a quest to stop them with an air gun
The next step in ‘Murican technology: an AI-drive trigger that decides how many rounds you ought to shoot.
From what I have seen there is a complex interaction here. As armies moved to smaller caliber rifles for soldiers the machine gun came back to being important for things other then suppression fire. This is a trade off that has played through multiple armies in multiple wars. Small caliber weapons mean more gear and ammunition can be carried but means the soldiers have more need of support for long range fire, taking out groups and vehicles.
The war in Ukraine may be blowing that entire equation out of the water. The Ukrainians are switching to drones for most tasks that a machine gun would have done. It’s very possible that in the next decade the squad machine gun will be replaced with the squad drone operator.
(Currently no comments held for approval)
The only person I’ve got blocked on this blog is John Morales.
such a short list. i got more people blocked than i even know; borrowed a list and added several to it after the fact.
dangerousbeans@#12:
There also seems to be a lot of toxic masculinity in this culture
Yes. It’s part of a very odd self-propagandizing campaign Americans have participated in. It includes stuff about how great we are, what a model democracy we are, city on the hill, etc.
Charly@#10:
@Marcus “I qualified as sharpshooter with 403 hits out of 400 possible.”
Could you please elaborate on how? I know nothing about guns and sharpshooter qualifications but getting more points than possible seems, well, not possible. Is it a typo?
I did it the traditional way; I cheated. Here is the trick.
The way range qualifications work, you are given however many 20-round clips of ammunition to shoot at your targets. The targets for qualification are paper, so the hits are counted from the number of holes. There is also a provision for misfires – Ft Dix is pretty sandy, and sometimes a round misfires because it does not fully seat in the chamber. When that happens, the shooter works the action and ejects the misfire. So, there are a few live rounds often lying around a firing position. I emptied my first clip, then quickly loaded in a couple of ejected live rounds, and took some extra shots. When the counts came in, there was some discussion, and I suggested that maybe the guy at the firing position next to me had accidentally hit my target instead. I was already known to be the top shot in my platoon, so it seemed reasonable that I had scored a perfect score (I had done so before) and the extras were someone else’s work. So I was scored as a 400.
The range training came a few weeks into basic, and I had already concluded that the army was a stupid enterprise I didn’t plan to be involved with long-term, so I didn’t feel bad about messing with the system. There were a few other times when I – creatively rearranged rules in unexpected ways. I think my team’s score in the night maneuvering course probably lasted until the base was shut down. Normal scores were on the order of 20-25 minutes and we did it in 5.
Reginald Selkirk@#14:
The next step in ‘Murican technology: an AI-drive trigger that decides how many rounds you ought to shoot
I can imagine the AI counting on its fingers … “one, two, three, four, five, six…” and 3 on the other hand, another 6 on the third hand…
sonofrojblake@#6:
“Fuck off – I like guns”.
That’s what I call the “aesthetic argument” – “I like them, they’re pretty, they are fun…” I actually think it’s the only argument that holds water. If someone complains that guns are inherently dangerous (they can be!) I can reply that mine are always kept locked in a safe and often the firing pins or bolts are removed and are in a lockbox elsewhere. I don’t make any arguments about how they’re useful for hunting; I hate hunters. Or for home defense; people don’t do home invasion attacks out here. etc.
I suppose I could have turned that into an Argument Clinic episode – the aesthetic argument is pretty hard to refute in reasonable cases I.e.: imagine we are ordering pizza and one of us wants pineapple on it. Well, its an aesthetics issue and it’s impossible to make an objective argument that pineapple on pizza is a moral issue. Now, guns, of course, can be a moral issue. Even keeping them in my safe, as I do, I suppose someone could force me to open it, in which case I question how responsible I would be for it. But also I would be happy to have a professionally managed shooting range where people could store guns in a safe there, under guard, and enjoy a shooting outing in a safe overseen place where the guns are checked in and out. Or even rented. [Basically the strategy I am using there is to be perfectly reasonable, and let someone else be the jackass]
lochaber@#5:
maybe we need to emulate the Black Panthers, and have a community of armed (and trained) individuals that show up when something questionable is going down
I think it’s going to wind up that way. We haven’t got ICE out here but I’m frankly surprised that so far they have gotten away with rolling up on someone’s door and questioning them without a warrant or showing a badge or proof that they are an empowered law officer. I am not interested in getting active, unless they start rounding up friends of mine, but the first time someone does a citizens’ arrest on some ICE crew who refuse to identify themselves, then it gets interesting. Perhaps, as many say, that would be the trigger for outright combat but ICE is pretty seriously outnumbered and I don’t think they are particularly competent.
The 40s nazis got a lot of work done with their einsatzgruppen and according to Kogon and Snyder (separately) those were often made up of local police and racist psychos. The SS, too, but something like half of the murders were done by the victims’ neighbors until the camps like Dachau came online. Well, I hate my neighbors and if they want to start murdering strangers, I could exert myself and try to think of a way to be unpleasant.
I didn’t even need to segue into the whole issue about firearms being unrestricted while there are felony-level bans on silly shit like “throwing stars”, “nun-chuks”, “switchblades”, “daggers”, etc.
In Pennsylvania, making a “dagger” or “stilletto” is a felony. Making a katana or a spear is not. Although a knife-maker can make a dagger or stilletto if it is being sold to a collector. All of these concepts are vague.
I see that the Brits have banned “ninja swords” as opposed to, one assumes, swept-hilt Spanish rapiers (which are much deadlier, anyhow) … and don’t get me started on smallswords. Those things are so freaking nasty it’s not even funny; those triangular blades can punch right through a skull and they are light, long, and fast.
When I went to pick up my carry permit I asked the state trooper if a carry permit changed my carry rights for any form of blades and he said, “no.” But it turns out that concealed blades are the illegal thing, so I think I could probably walk about with my katana in my obi, but I really don’t see any need for any of that kind of thing.
The American “self defense” theory is utterly strange. On instagram and youtube I often get videos of how to use your peanut M&Ms to disarm an attacker who has a knife, assuming they come at you slowly in a predictable way. I am sure there are places where bar fights happen, but not that much in places where I go. I have seen adults fight exactly twice in 62 years – both related to automobile fender benders, both in Paris, France. I was a kid watching from across the street. I have never seen a knife drawn in real threat. The only times I have had anyone threaten with a gun, it was cops and a crazy guy in my platoon in basic.
@marcus
Canada has even stranger piecemeal weapons prohibitions. In addition to a huge catalog of specific firearms, we’ve banned: balisong knives, manrikigusari/kusari (specifically and by name), nunchaku, shiruken, rings with blades on, blowguns, and even spiked wristbands of all things, although I never heard of any goth kids getting arrested for theirs.
Basically if you can imagine a villain in an 80s/90s action movie using a particular weapon or gun, the government specifically banned it. You can find the whole silly list here, if you’re masochistic enough to read it: https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/regulations/sor-98-462/fulltext.html. The weird non-firearm bans are towards the bottom.
The silly and stupid thing about the ways we ban guns is that there are always loopholes, and the people who do the bans rarely come back and modify them to close the hole. For example: in Canada it is illegal to shorten a shotgun or rifle below a certain barrel length (sawn-offs), but it is completely legal for a manufacturer to produce and sell a shotgun with a short barrel so long as it meets a specific minimum overall length. I’ve owned a couple of these as pack guns over the years, and I actually have a letter I got the RCMP firearms unit to produce to reinforce that they are legal, non-restricted firearms – in case I’m challenged on it by a cop who quite reasonably assumes the things are as illegal as they look.
Or Brass Knuckles – due to a quirk of how the law is written, courts have held that they’re only prohibited weapons if they’re made of metal. You can go buy G10 or other plastic equivalents at gas stations around where I live. Those would still be illegal to carry or use as we have general laws against possessing ‘weapons’ (not strictly defined), but they wouldn’t be illegal to own like metal ones would.
Notably, neither does the second amendment.
Serious question: in the footage of that woman being kidnapped off the street by masked thugs, a passing member of the public intervened, but only verbally, as that was all they appeared equipped to do.
What would have happened if they’d been legally carrying, and when the group started laying hands on the woman they’d just put a bullet in each of their heads? (It was IIRC correctly a VERY close range encounter, anyone reasonably trained would have been able to drop every single agent in that stop in the space of two or three seconds, assuming there wasn’t a LOT of backup in the car(s). )
The probable answer is the masked thugs would have started shooting back, so obviously any potential Punisher needs to factor that into their threat assessment, but I was thinking more of the legal position. Those fuckers were ON CAMERA rolling up masked, unidentified and in numbers to an unaccompanied female – if EVER there was a situation that called for a good guy with a gun to dole out some instant justice, I really can’t picture a better one. It’s literally a scenario a gun nut SHOULD be training for, isn’t it? And yet, where were they?
What would be the legal position of someone legally armed killing a law enforcement officer presenting as a masked thug?
(I can give a precedent to this question for the UK – you’d be acquitted if charged. Kenneth Noye, one of the people who handled the gold from the Brinks-Mat bullion robbery, was under police surveillance in 1985. One of the officers watching him was doing so from inside the grounds of his home, at night, wearing a ski mask. Noye stabbed him to death. He was charged with murder but acquitted on grounds of self-defence.)
For anyone who’s not seen it, it’s in two parts:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rR9IaXH1M0
sonofrojblake asked:
Derrick Foster was a former Ohio State football player in a house that was raided (drug raid). Foster says police never identified themselves. Foster was playing cards and was armed (including having a concealed carry permit), and shot thinking the house was being robbed.
Here’s a story from Radley Balko (who many of you probably have heard of): https://reason.com/2008/05/22/derrick-foster-speaks/
Here’s an indicative quote from one of the stories Balko quotes:
In the end, Foster got a plea deal, pleaded guilty to two counts of felonious assault, and was sentenced to 5 years in jail (with possibility of release after 4 for good behavior).
@sonofrojblake
Someone defending an abductee from an ICE team isn’t likely to have legal problems at all, since they’ll almost certainly be killed. Either at the scene by some of the arrest team, or hunted down and assassinated by police while they ‘resist arrest’.
In the event that they are taken alive, Ahcuah gave one example of a possible outcome. Even if they somehow manage to get in front of a jury and are acquitted, they can expend to spend several years in jail prior to trial – and to drain all of their own and likely their family’s resources in defending the case. One defense lawyer I know says the standard retainer for a relatively uncomplicated murder case would start at $500k (Canadian) and that likely runs out before you get to trial.
We had a case here in Canada where some plainclothes cops investigating a car theft (IIRC) ran up on an accountant and his family (Umar Zameer) in their car and started banging on the windows and shouting. The driver, a family man with an entirely unblemished record, thought he was being carjacked as there had been some incidents in the city recently. He panicked and tried to drive away, unknowingly running over one of the officers and killing him.
He was charged with first degree murder, police essentially lied in their testimony in order to shade the evidence and make it seem like he had (for no reason at all) intentionally run over someone he knew was a cop. He spent a lot of time in pretrial detention, and eventually was acquitted by a jury. The judge in the case was so scandalized by the dishonesty of the police witnesses that she actually apologized to Mr. Zameer after the acquittal.
If Zameer had had a criminal record, or if there wasnt surveillance camera footage that conclusively disproved the perjured testimony of the officers, he’d probably be doing life with a 25 year minimum parole period. And that’s just what they do to you if you accidentally kill one. Think of the reaction if it was intentional. You only need to look at what the LAPD did when they were hunting Christopher Dorner. They were utterly indiscriminate in their use of force against anyone they even thought might be the guy they were hunting.
All of that is to say: if you’re going to come at the cops, don’t miss, and be in a disguise.
At the time of the Dorner incidents, I realized that a very effective terrorist tactic in the US might be for a few teams of unobtrusive shooters to go to a city, assassinate a few cops, and move on before the police’s inevitable massive and indiscriminate response. Similar to how guerilla attacks against the NAZIs produced massive reprisal against local civilians, the police would likely take out their frustrations against the local population – similar to the cop-riots during the George Floyd/BLM protests. Someone wanting to show people the true nature of modern policing might think on this for a while
Yep, killing gang members usually results in their mates fucking you up. Cops are just another gang with a bigger uniform budget. You fuck with them, they fuck with you back
On the terrible regulations; here in Victoria Australia I’m allowed to make short single edged blades, no long blades or double edged blades. Rondel daggers, legal despite being designed for stabbing people in plate armour. Marking knife with two edges?
Does a wood turning gouge count at one or two edges? How about a 30cm sushi knife, is that long?
I’m tempted to make a miniature sword and surrender it to the cops as a prohibited weapon
As @snarkhuntr notes above, Canada’s gun laws are sadly almost as stupid. A fact which one of my friends (who was a reservist herself) has been known to rant about. And while we don’t have a ‘Second Amendment’ as an excuse up here, we’ve still had conservative politics actively mess up gun control attempts. (For example, the ‘long gun registry’ that we had for several years, which a previous conservative PM got rid of, over the complaints of the RCMP.)
Unsurprisingly, in Canada, most of our illegal guns were smuggled across the border from the U.S., where they may or may not have been legal.
Me, I grew up in rural British Columbia, learned how to shoot with a .177 pellet pistol when I was young, and my high school had a gun range. (Said high school was a private school founded pre-WWI, so that’s not as surprising as it might seem.) Nowadays I live in the middle of Toronto and I don’t own a gun, because I just don’t need one.
And yes, restrictions on other weapons can be almost as stupid. Or patchwork. Around SF convention times there are always discussions giving legal advice to cosplayers on what counts as a ‘weapon’, along with stories of things like the guy who was carrying around a big axe and that wasn’t illegal but the switchblade he had in his pocket was.
(For example, brass knuckles are legal in Louisiana but not in New York State. I ended up working that into an ‘urban fantasy’ story I was writing: a werewolf hunter with silver-plated brass knuckles had to toss them to dispose of the evidence after a dust-up in western New York.)
Also, I’ve long held (I don’t remember where I first heard this, but it fits so well) that the U.S. is basically an extremely class-conscious society living in denial of that fact. The entire ‘American Dream’ is all about the denial of the barriers to crossing class boundaries, and that denial is one of the things that makes those barriers even harder to cross. Believing that their aren’t any real barriers makes it easier to justify victim-blaming narratives, and thus easier to justify not doing anything to help people who are in trouble, so of course the people currently on top are all for keeping up the delusion.
In other words, a lot of the U.S. economic issues are the result of the U.S. being a class-stratified society in practice, but refusing to admit it or to avail itself of the tools to moderate the problems.
Yeah, but the US is also an extremely racist society living in denial of that fact, and an extremely sexist society living in denial of that fact . . . and so on and so forth.
The current administration is pushing out so much shit everywhere that it’s hard to keep track of everything, but I really wish that someone would have pushed back on the DEI EOs — “Why is there this automatic presumption of lack of merit in women and Black people being hired?” “Does someone have to say that they have a bias, or can it just be demonstrated in their consistent pattern of actions and choices?” And so on.