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This weekend, I visited my friendly local gun store, idly browsing for shotguns and learning about interstate purchases. Then I drove to my parents and spent the evening playing board games. It was a nice night with good food, drink and company.
Meanwhile, five minutes up the highway, some lunatic was murdering random strangers at a local shopping mall.
No one I know was killed. No one I know personally was present—though a friend of a friend was. I didn’t hear about it until the next morning. Big nothingburger, right? And yet I’ve been to that mall. I’ve been to the bar across the street with my coworkers. If I’d had an errand or three to run, instead of visiting my family, I might have been cowering in a storeroom or staring at a splatter of brains on the sidewalk.
I’m not linking to any articles. Partly for the thinnest veneer of opsec, partly because media coverage is predictably terrible. All sympathetic pictures and, as we’d say here, recruiting for a cause. Nothing good will come of this. Either we’ll force through a knee-jerk bill with symbolic limits on firearms, or we’ll (correctly) dismiss that as posturing and (incorrectly) do abso-fucking-lutely nothing.
It’s not like I can do anything about it. I don’t know what I would actually expect to work, and if I did, how could it be brought about? State, even local politics is as tribal as it gets. Enjoy your a la carte selection of two options, and one of them is out of stock.
Meanwhile, I guess the best I can do is pick up some CCW training and a good holster. Fuck.
Practically speaking, what measures will gun rights advocates actually tolerate? It seems like the only thing they can countenance is more guns.
It seems to me that there are many ways we could 'reformat' our conception of gun ownership in a way that would preserve the ability of 'the people' to bear arms while making them less available for use in crime or mass shootings (or suicide), but I find it incredibly unlikely that the current American gun culture would find it at all tolerable.
The best you can do is probably something like move to New Hampshire. The most reasonable thing you can do is nothing.
The odds of concealed carry protecting you from victimization of any kind, let alone a mass shooting, is incredibly low, if for no other reason than because a middle class defense contractor is already extremely unlikely to be victimized and the efficacy of concealed carry in stopping mass shootings is... mixed. It's a psychological prop more than anything.
Mass shootings are, frankly, more analogous to terrorism than ordinary crime. Terrorism doesn't kill very many people, but it does scare people and make them feel powerless because it is outside the 'normal' sociology of murder. Nevertheless, carrying a gun because you might get jumped by terrorists is hard to justify.
Correct. Since the entire history of gun control regulation has shown that advocates of gun control will never admit to a policy failure. Any violence that occurs is ultimately because there was insufficient gun control in place, thus no failure is actually a failure of gun control policy, it is instead a failure to go far enough.
California has some of the most stringent gun laws in the country and also one of the higher murder rates. To say nothing of fucking CHICAGO. You literally can't get much stricter than Chicago in restricting firearms, and you also can't find many places with a higher murder rate. They've tried heavy gun control and it didn't help. So can they admit that gun control has failed in this instance?
If there are no circumstances under which they'll admit the policy is failing, then in what sense can they be said to be acting in good faith?
Every single compromise gun rights advocates have made previously has been met with demands for further compromise, and nothing is offered in return.
Speaking of, NH has some of the most permissive laws and also a negligible homicide rate. Again kinda makes the point for me.
The odds of a fire extinguisher protecting you from a house fire of any kind, let alone an arsonist, is incredibly low...
You see the subtle error in reasoning here?
And because those instances are given outsized attention by the national media, who has every intention of maximizing the fear felt by their viewership.
But that's a fundamentally different problem. If it weren't terrorism it'd be something else.
Thought experiment: Set aside the 2nd and 4th amendments for a second. Suppose the United Stated banned civilian firearms, all of them. No manufacture, no sales, no ownership. All citizens must surrender their guns to the authorities. Anyone who has ever posted a gun on social media gets their house searched for contraband. Children are taught in school about the importance of turning in their parents if there are guns in the home. What does the murder rate look like in Chicago a year later? How about 10 years later? Surely you concede that there would be less mass shootings in the USA, how would random 20-year-olds be getting access to weapons after a generation of total control?
I mean,
See my other post about conservatively estimating that we could expect around 50,000 LEO casualties in trying to enforce a gun confiscation program.
PLUS the fact that guns can be 3D printed now, so it's not sufficient to confiscate those already in circulation.
I might concede this if you concede we would probably see an increase in vehicular-based massacres
Since nothing in your hypothetical has actually dealt with the issues that make mass shooters want to kill people, we have full reason to expect many of them will merely shift methods.
And if we accept the idea, for arguments sake, that we could toss out our civil rights in the name of achieving lower crime, then maybe the example of El Salvador represents a much MORE EFFECTIVE path we could follow to achieve a similar impact on violent crime.
So perhaps it looks really suspicious to zero in on the Second Amendment and impacting the rights of huge swaths of peaceful citizens in your zeal to bring down the crime rate, when there are readily conceivable alternatives that are less intrusive?
Thought experiment: let's just ignore the fourth and fifth amendment and massively incarcerate the most violent members of Chicago's population. What does the murder rate in Chicago look like a year later?
I flat-out do not believe this. At most you would get about 10 LEO deaths on the first day, and then the military gets called in to put down the insurrection. Rules of engagement are always optional. "There is absolutely no difficulty in using any level of the American security forces against the barbarians."
Can you 3D print gunpowder?
I do concede that. The standard economic result is that when one good is banned, some of that demand goes towards a substitute good, but not enough to completely make up for it. I would expect the new rate of vehicular massacres to be somewhere between the current rate, and the current rate + the gun massacre rate. I also suspect that "massacre-prevention software" would soon become standard on cars if this became an issue.
Oh, I am absolutely not advocating for large-scale gun confiscation. I am simply pointing out that it is both possible to do, and that it would achieve it's primary goal of reducing gun murders (and murders in general).
I think @gattsuru or Beej once pointed to a furry who had figured out how to make guncotton at home all electrochemically and such, so...sort of, yes.
Cathode_G! (cw: sfw as explosives can be on direct link, but the rest of his feed does have furry porn) Absolutely fascinating guy.
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It isn't actually that hard. It's simple drawn brass. https://www.petersoncartridge.com/technical-information/drawing-brass/
In addition, you can actually just turn a cartridge on a lathe from brass bar stock. Or mild steel. Both will work and while it's not as efficient as drawing brass, all you need is a lathe.
And each cartridge can be reloaded multiple times with equipment that is basically ubiquitous in the US.
I guess you'd be incentivizing revolvers though.
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True Velocity has apparently nailed it down for .308 and .50 BMG. The recent-ish US Army trials that produced the XM5 and XM250 almost had the 6.5x51mm be adopted in a polymer case.
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Cathode_G does also have a non-corrosive primer (as above, link has no nudity, but be prepared for furry porn elsewhere on his feed) recipe, though most disposable guns in a highly restricted regime will probably just stick with the corrosive but dead-simple matchhead.
Primers are also kinda like the lye in cathode_g's guncotton formula; they have too many industrial and home uses to effectively ban. Even China still has them in common use for construction. If you don't want to bother with chemistry or corrosive primers, there's literally millions of these things out there.
Brass cases are obnoxious, but I'm not convinced they're the right decision rather than the available one. SuckBoyTony's done some interesting things with manufacturing polymer cases, and there's a lot of design space ignoring cases entirely that's largely unexplored because it makes so little sense these days. If you're custom-casting and electroplating bullets in mass, you could start experimenting with wacky designs like the Daisy V/L, Activ-style shells, or gyrojets, or truly caseless ammo... but unless you have absolutely no access to spent brass, it's mostly just coming up with new ways and reasons for the ATF to shoot your dog.
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There is a 3d2a guy working on electronically primed polymer cased ammo. Very much a hobby project on a shoestring budget. One of the NGSW program entries used polymer ammo but the army went with Sig (to go with their Sig pistols and Sig LPVOs), you can buy polycased 308 ammo right now. The other area people go to for impractical is barrel rifling which at this point is mostly solved with electrochemical machining, at least for the lengths of things like the FGC which are designed around zero access to firearms parts regimes.
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How does the military respond to disparate Americans shooting at LEOs knocking on their own doors?
Again a question of scale. How precisely do you expect the U.S. to successfully occupy itself?
Good. Then we can agree that gun deaths would decrease under a heavy gun control regime (although likely a massive spike given the aforementioned issue with enforcement) but there's as always the question of whether that simply results in further encroachments by the government once it has taken this step.
Simply put, I don't want to live under the rule of a government that doesn't trust its' citizens enough to allow them firearms.
If you shoot at the cops, they know your address. After the first week all patrols will be accompanied by Predator drone air support. You'll have two Hellfire missiles crashing through your roof in minutes after opening fire. If they can't get officers to shoot at Americans in person, they can sure as hell get some loyal private to sit at the drone terminal in Alexandria.
So "shoot while they're knocking at someone else's door" is the equilibrium strategy, then? At least "one of us got shot before we killed the shooter" can be spun as a heroic story; "one of us got shot before some kid at a desk bombed innocent people" (not to mention the crime scene where evidence of the bullet trajectory used to be) is the sort of thing that makes you look for a better job than "sucker who draws fire on the civilian-bombers' behalf".
And that's assuming no other collateral damage, which is ... a stretch. The 1985 MOVE bombing was horrifying enough to show up in the news last year, even though all the "this is unconstitutional", "pay millions of dollars to the victims", etc. decisions were made decades ago. This does not scale up.
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And when friendly fire or kid bits end up on national news?
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You know this is comical. Its like when Biden says something like, "what are you going to do about nukes." You can't fricken drone strike a single family house (let alone a single person's apartment) without causing mass collateral damage. Plus, the fact is you can't just siege Joe in 1F until he shits himself to death when there are 10000 Joes, nor can you snipe him when he leaves 1F without eviscerating all the other civil rights that exist. You'd be treating suspected gun owners worse than indicted criminals skipping bond.
All, in the end, probably for little benefit. Ask thyself, would the average gun control advocate accept this compromise (assuming it was ironclad): You get 10 years of doing your thing. But, if in year 10 the homicide rate of America is greater than any of Germany, England, or France all gun control laws enacted since 1900 are repealed permanently. Would they accept? Of course not. Nor for 20 or 25 years. Probably not even 50. This would all be rational, even though most of them would be dead, or nearly so at T=50. Because they would lose that bet. I mean, unless they engaged in a massive genocide program and somehow managed to gerrymander that to not be included in homicide.
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