Alrighty GOP, It’s Go Time, Let’s See What You Got!

DavidTC in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

My prediction – whatever law is passed will necessarily have to define semi-autos very narrowly, down to something like, “A weapon wherein the action uses energy from the recoil to eject a spent cartridge, and strip a fresh cartridge from a magazine, and place that cartridge in battery and resets the trigger.”

I would much rather we have rate-of-fire limitations.

You can’t engineer around that. Either pulling the trigger as fast as possible causes the gun to exceed the rate, or it does not.

I’d actually like ‘short-term’ and ‘long-term’ limitations. Like, you can fire off ten bullets in five seconds, but then you have to reload.

I’d also like to see velocity limitations, although admitted those _can_ be gamed by changing out ammo.

What I’d really really like to see, in an ideal world, would be some sort of mathematical formula that includes velocity, calibre, and rate of fire.

Where, for example, high velocity rifles are allowed, but they have an _extremely slow_ ‘rate of fire’, as in they are single shot and require loading in bullets one at a time. Meanwhile, for protection, you can have low-velocity, high-calibre gun with a fairly high short-term rate of fire, where you have a dozen bullets that will stop an intruder or wolve or whatever, and kill them, or at least take them down, but won’t rip them to shreds and won’t go through walls.

I think it’s pretty clear if you try to make rules _describing_ how guns work, the gun manfacturers will work around them. What needs to be describes is ‘how bullets leave the gun’, which can’t be worked around…either they are leaving the gun that way, or they are not.

‘You can have guns that expel bullets in this manner. You can have guns that expel bullets in this other manner. You can have guns that expel bullets in yet another manner. You can’t have guns that expel bullets in any other way.’

Note also the extremely stupid rules about sawed-off shotguns, a giant bunch of complicated silliness that is patched loophole on top of patched loophole to try to measure the ‘length’ of the barrel of the gun…all which could actually be easily explained by ‘shotguns are allowed to fire with this specific angle of spread and no more’. Mount the gun in a testing room, fire it, measure the angle of where the closest shot hit the floor and walls from the end of the barrel, problem solved. Who the hell cares how the gun is built?Report

DavidTC in reply to Dark Matter says:

Start applying that to other rights, speech for example, and I’m sure we’d get all sorts of obnoxious examples.

I literally just did apply that standard to speech.

Specific ways of using constitutional rights can be restricted if people are still able to fully use those rights.

You do not, for example, have a right to wander off the street into public school classrooms and start preaching your religion to students. Or into libraries, or town meetings. Likewise, you have to get permits and whatnot to peacefully assemble. The courts have repeatedly upheld time and place restrictions for speech.

The Supreme Court, in Heller, said that people have a right to own firearm to fulfill specific rights.

Well, I say, as long as the people _can_ own firearms that work to fulfill those rights, as long as it is legal to own something that can accomplish those specific things…specific forms of guns can be banned.

‘Type restrictions’, if you will.

not least what is on sale at the local gun store, or what I could get second hand.

Uh, no. What we should allow people to own does not really change because might happen to randomly be cheaper. (Which it wouldn’t be anyway.)

You would have a good point if anyone was proposing banning the cheapest form of firearms, and in fact that’s part of what pissed the court off in Heller, that disallowing all handguns (DC only allowed rifles, which start off more expensive) barred poor people from availing themselves of their rights…except the problem is that AR-15s and other goofy high-velocity low-calibre rifles are literally the most expensive sort of guns.

I expect it’d be an extremely stressful situation so a high magazine is highly desirable, I’m not sure I’d be able to reload. I’m also not sure I could hit anything in less than a dozen shots.

Fun fact about the high-velocity low-calibre rounds in that: They go through the walls of a house.

Now, a lot of bullets will actually do that if fired straight, but the thing about the low-calibre rounds is they will tumble wildly when they hit a wall and go in crazy direction, so basically, if you’re missing the person, you have no idea where the bullet is going. (Unlike larger calibre rifles or lower velocity handgun, which if they go through a wall, will at least go in a straight-ish line.)

I’m pretty certain that saying ‘I am such a poor shot that I need a weapon that lets me fire a lot of bullets quickly, even if most of them are going to go wherever’ is not an argument that will work in court for such a weapon being sold to the public, and is probably an argument that you, personally, should not own such a weapon!

And yes, how scary the weapon it is.

Looking scary probably does not count as some constitutional goal. You do not have a constitutional right to scare people with guns…in fact, such a thing is generally considered assault and illegal, although you were talking about it during home defense where it would be legal. But it’s not a right.

I’d want something long barrel because that’s probably easier to aim and harder to misuse.

The longer the barrel, the harder it is to aim it in close quarters. (And the easier it is to have it taken away from you.) The advantage of long barrels is that they can be aimed longer distances, but that doesn’t make them easier to aim closer, and certainly not if speed is an issue.

Considering your requirements, the blatantly obvious weapon for you to purchase would be a shotgun, which, although hard to ‘aim’ than a handgun, doesn’t really require you to aim at all more than ‘vaguely over there’. Also, they aren’t going to go through a lot of walls.

As an added advantage, it will cost something like a quarter the price of an AR-15.

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This is all exactly what I mean by ‘The courts may say you have a right to self-defense, but that doesn’t mean the legislature cannot decide what particular manner of self-defense you are supposed to us, as long as it works.’

The law can thus say ‘home-defense should be done via these sorts of shotguns or handguns’, and ‘self-defense in public should be done via these sorts of handguns’, and ‘defending the State should be done via…well, the fully-automatic rifles we have prepared to hand out when the State is invaded, duh, but you don’t get those until we’re invaded’ (That ‘right’ is kinda stupid and doesn’t make much sense.), and…that’s it. Those are the three things that the court said the law had to allow, and as long as the law allows those things to happen in some sort of reasonable method, it can disallow any other methods it has a valid reason to do so, like ‘Those sort of guns are more dangerous to bystanders during those lawful actions.’.

Now, there is an entire hypothetical argument to be had if the weapons I was concerned about were better at self defense. There would be a legal argument about whether or not any such laws were the _least restrictive_ manner of projecting public safety while still allowing people to exercise their rights.

But we somehow have stumbled upon the dumbest weapons to use for pretty much everything the court have said people have a right own guns to do. And some of the most expensive weapons on top of that.

Which is why I asked ‘Is there actually anything those guns are better at?’.Report

DavidTC in reply to Dark Matter says:

Looking scary is useful for my easily foreseeable situation

That does not matter, constitutionally. There is no constitutional right to scare people with guns.

Although if you want to argue you have a right to scary-looking guns, whatever. I don’t really care. Have at it. I’m arguing about regulating the behavior of guns in firing bullets, not the look of them.

Buy any sort of still-legal gun you want and mount a little silver skull on it. Put spikes on it. Name it after a woman and spraypaint that on the side. I do not care.

It also results in me opposing the involvement of this kind of thinking anywhere in the process.

Yes, heaven forbid that the courts weigh the exercise of one party’s constitutional rights against society’s right to not be harmed by the exercise of those rights. Surely that can’t be how it works. I mean, it’s not like I literally gave an example of how people can’t just randomly exercise their freedom to assemble and petition the government anywhere at any time on public property.

Shooting through walls is a feature, not a bug. My house has two stories. If I’m shooting down then the issue is moot. If she is trying to break into my house, then I want to prevent that even if I have to shoot through things. Btw my neighbors are far enough away their risk from this would be pretty negligible.

I can’t even begin to describe how dumb it is to fire, unseen, into another floor of your house because ‘someone broke in’.

I also must point out it is nearly impossible to deliberately hit someone this way, even with ammo that does go straight. It’s even harder with these high-velocity low-calibre rounds that tumble when they hit things and go in random directions.

If you actually wish(?!) to shoot people through walls and floors (And, again, while you might wish that, it is extremely unlikely that a court will think that is any sort of constitutional right, considering how dangerously stupid shooting at people sight unseen is.), you need to use a high calibre round that will go mostly straight through walls, not the low calibre stuff that goes off in random direction.

But, seriously, you basically appear to be arguing for the right to stand on the second floor of your house and spray the first floor of your house with random bullets that go in random directions. This does not comport with any lawful or even sane definition of ‘defense of home’, and the courts do not have to allow you to do it. Even if you really want to.

Btw my neighbors are far enough away their risk from this would be pretty negligible.

Oh, I see. The distance of your neighbors means the government is required to let those weapons be sold to everyone. That makes sense.

So only some people have the right to defend themselves, and I’m not one of them.

No. People only have a constitutional right to defend themselves in reasonably sane manner that does not risk absurd levels of collateral damage. Just like people cannot use their right of religious exercise to juggle running chainsaws while walking down the sidewalk, even if their religion demands it.

Moreover, the government has a right to limit such options for defense to things that are sane in most circumstances, even if you are Mr. Hermit living out in the woods in the middle of nowhere and your sidewalk is almost completely empty. The government does not have to allow special rules about chainsaw juggling for you, nor does it have to make the rules that everyone follows comport with your specific situation.

I would argue the government has a right to make rules about this _even if_ it results in a slight decrease of efficiency of the right to self defense, but, interestingly, this does not, because, as I keep pointing out, the sort of guns I am talking about are pretty crappy choices for self and home defense anyway. (In fact, rifles in general are bad choices merely for their length.)

I’m trying to avoid close quarters, lots of things have gone wrong if she has house access.

You realize it is illegal to shoot someone who has not broken into your house or isn’t posing a threat to you, right? Castle laws apply only to inside your house. You can’t shoot someone out the window because they are wandering around in your yard, even if they refuse to leave. You must call the police and have them arrested. (Technically, you can use minimal force to eject them, but that would not involve using a gun.)

Even stand-your-ground laws, assuming your state has them, do not apply if there is a locked door between you and them. While stand-your-ground laws have had some spectacular stupid decisions made in their interpretation, like letting them apply even if the shooter started the fight, they are not dumb in that particular area: The law still requires that people shot at have some way they could hypothetically harm you, and people locked outside your house generally cannot.

Additionally, stand-your-ground requires close quarters (Because, again, it requires some sort of plausible level of harm that might come to you.), so even if you went outside to shoot them, it wouldn’t work unless you got close to them.

So what, exactly, is this hypothetical scenario? The only way that anyone outside your house could legally pose a threat that would justify shooting them from inside, or at range from outside, is if they were pointing a gun at you or your house.

Well, that seems like a really stupid hypothetical, because, duh, in the world you appear to want, there’s really no reason they wouldn’t have shot up your house before you noticed they were there. Spray it with gunfire from a distance.

Good plan you’ve got there. Solid. If your enemies do exactly the stupidest possible thing, showing up as a lethal threat that legally allows you to kill them, but stupidly not executing said lethal threat, you can spray gunfire at them and maybe kill them before they can fire back.

I also have children around.

Good things those children are locked in their room, physically unable to go downstairs or outside at night.

I mean, I assume.Report