The sense that these were "military grade" weapons was motivation, though I'd argue it was mostly rooted in aesthetics. Actual M16s, unlike the civilian market AR-15s, are selective fire, and thus were already very heavily restricted.
You mean by, say, blaming voters for the decisions made by an EM who took over the government from the officials that they actually elected? Yeah, people seem to do that sort of thing a lot.
I'm really confused now, because I was agreeing from the start that the AWB was dumb because it was trying to ban things on the basis of aesthetics. I was, perhaps foolishly, taking notme's question seriously and trying to explain why so many people wanted (and in some cases still want) to do such a silly thing
You appear to be arguing that the term "assault weapon" was invented when the 1994 AWB was passed, but that wasn't the case. The idea that just because a marketing category is focused on aesthetics and too vague to be sensibly used as the basis of legislation[1] doesn't mean that it's something that nobody understands when you use the term. C.f., say, "hardcore pornography".
[1] Which is why they wound up with the weird checklist with bayonet lugs and stuff! You can't just ban guns that "look tactical" or whatever.
I know that the stories in the Bible are not real, but the outlook present in those tales provides a worldview and philosophical perspective that is worthy of consideration.
Sure, but it's primarily worthy of consideration because it is regarded as significant by billions of people, and informs their worldviews and philosophical perspectives (and culture and literature and so on) in many, often complicated ways. There doesn't seem to be any equivalent importance to the alt-right.
They existed as a marketing category prior to existing as a legal description, and they refered to a class of real things, which were (and are) primarily a matter of aesthetics or, I guess, ergonomics.
"'Assault weapon' is too vague to make the basis for a good law, and even if it weren't, such a law would be very silly," is not remotely the same statement as, "There is no such thing as an 'assault weapon'."
I think that may well be the case now, since support for the AWB is now in the minority, but at one point those kinds of bans were really popular[1] and what opposition there was came, understandably enough, from people who actually owned or wanted to own the weapons in question.
[1] Example: George W. Bush was in office when the ban lapsed in 2004, despite a promise to renew it during his 2000 campaign. For a while there, the AWB had genuine bipartisan support.
One, because--as I mentioned above--they were a highly publicized symbol of gun violence at a time when gun violence was at a crisis level, and then were reintroduced to the public consciousness through the AR-15's association with the Newtown attrocity. In both cases, the "military" and "bad ass"/"manly" aesthetic had an effect not only on the people assault weapons were being marketed to, but also people who only really think about guns when they hear about people being murdered with them.
Second, the assault weapon is increasingly a part of the uniform for many of least hinged members of Team Red, like the guys who think they need to carry guns to protest a local mosque or who decided to occupy a federally owned bird-watching center and hold it by armed force.
If your only familiarity with a class of weapons involves the fact that they look intimidating, they are involved in rare but horrible murderous outrages, and that they're the favored fashion accessory of a bunch of wingnuts who probably shouldn't use scissors unsupervised, let alone firearms, well, it's an easy mistake to make to decide they're bad and dangerous, and you aren't harming anybody's legitimate interests or rights by banning them.
"Assault weapons" really aren't the type of weapons people use to shoot each other now, and they weren't twenty years ago, either. The type of weapon people used to shoot each other then, as now, is the handgun.
Of course "assault weapon" is a dumb term. It was a marketing term in the '80s that became the flashpoint of a moral panic over gun violence in the early '90s. What could be possibly be dumber?
I read this piece several times, and it took that many times to realize that the crazy details that Voegeli was mustering in defense of Trump supporters[1] were obscuring an even crazier premise. His argument is literally that the fact that Trumpistas are supporting an obvious knave that only an ignoramus or a bigot would want in the White House is evidence that their concerns are not ignorant or bigoted.
[1] E.g., one of the recent, memorable politically-motivated mass shootings was commited by jihadist lunatics rather than white supremacist or anti-abortion lunatics. This calls the fundamental legitimaticy of our government into question!
Voegeli himself seems to think that 15 murders, out of a population of almost 320 million, calls the legitimacy of the government into question, simply on the basis of the fact that those 15 murders were perpetrated by immigrants. They certainly aren't indicative of broader trends in rates of violent crime, which continue to be quite low. I'm not sure why I shouldn't dismiss Voegeli's own stated concerns as illegitimate and primarily attributable to bigotry.
To the extent that Voegeli is right about what's actually animating Trump's supporters, his own piece provides a pretty damning indictment of them.
No I’m suggesting that within certain inner city communities there is an acceptance of using guns to settle arguments that gun control hasn’t and won’t fixed.
Suggest all you want, but the numbers you cite seem to be doing nothing to actually support your suggestion, at least not without a great deal more argument.
My understanding was that "assault weapon" was originally a marketing category, too, prior to "assault weapons" being a political flashpoint and leading to the (really quite dumb) 1994 AWB and its various state-level clones.
Are you suggesting that if roughly 400 people, out of a population of just under 3 million, do something over the course of a year, that's a sign that those 3 million people think that thing is culturally acceptable?
Because that seems like a very strange argument to be making.
Of course this has it’s own issues (all the crazy people could form their own club and be crazy together), but I’m just laying out ideas here, not hammering out concrete policy.
I think that's fair, and the broader idea of making gun owners be better able to advertise their businesses and clubs instead of being relegated to the seamy side of things in the manner of strip clubs sounds like a positive devopment. It's certainly got to be healthier along every axis than having the public face of gun culture be some open-carry activist walking around strapped in Kroger's so they can protect themselves from the Whole Wheat Bandit.
Of course, over the course of the past few months I've come to the conclusion that the "cultural bundling" that Ken White's editorial talked about is actually the fundamental problem with the debate. As long as privately-owned guns are being viewed as just a part of the Team Red uniform, folks on Team Blue are (with some justification) likely to reject the idea that they should have to incur any costs to keep them widely available. and folks on Team Red are (again, with some justification) likely to reject any restrictions on them as being about counting coup in the Culture Wars, rather than realizing public policy benefits.
As someone who's shallowly but broadly opposed to many gun control measures beyond improvements in background checks, but really detests the way most pro-gun activist groups conduct their business, I expected to be annoyed by this article. I was, indeed, annoyed by it, but not the way I expected.
Frankly, of the two recommendations in this post, the idea of tying handgun ownership[1] to membership in private clubs just seems like a spectacularly bad idea. If we're talking about an actual right here, one guaranteed by the Constitution, you've just made individuals exercising that right dependent on an unaccountable private organization which sounds to me like a recipe for keeping guns away from socially marginalized people.[2] This is fine if you think that guns are a cute hobby, or for that matter something that no one should have ever, but if owning them is a right, it sounds like the exact opposite of what you want to do. I understand and maybe agree with the policy goal here, but the means sounds like a disaster in the making.
[1] Which is, in the minds of the Courts and most GRAs I've encountered, fundamental to self-defense and thus the actual right to own firearms.
[2] I'm forced to think of the periodic stories I see about gun shop owners declaring they won't sell guns to Muslims, or for that matter liberals, for reasons that I'm sure the owners in question somehow believe make them sound like something other than complete cretins.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Gun Violence: A Cultural Study”
The sense that these were "military grade" weapons was motivation, though I'd argue it was mostly rooted in aesthetics. Actual M16s, unlike the civilian market AR-15s, are selective fire, and thus were already very heavily restricted.
On “A Tragedy with Many Fathers”
You mean by, say, blaming voters for the decisions made by an EM who took over the government from the officials that they actually elected? Yeah, people seem to do that sort of thing a lot.
On “Gun Violence: A Cultural Study”
I'm really confused now, because I was agreeing from the start that the AWB was dumb because it was trying to ban things on the basis of aesthetics. I was, perhaps foolishly, taking notme's question seriously and trying to explain why so many people wanted (and in some cases still want) to do such a silly thing
On “The Year of the Alt-Right”
My only regret is I don't have any IRL friends who would get this joke.
On “Gun Violence: A Cultural Study”
You appear to be arguing that the term "assault weapon" was invented when the 1994 AWB was passed, but that wasn't the case. The idea that just because a marketing category is focused on aesthetics and too vague to be sensibly used as the basis of legislation[1] doesn't mean that it's something that nobody understands when you use the term. C.f., say, "hardcore pornography".
[1] Which is why they wound up with the weird checklist with bayonet lugs and stuff! You can't just ban guns that "look tactical" or whatever.
On “The Year of the Alt-Right”
@Roland Dodds:
Sure, but it's primarily worthy of consideration because it is regarded as significant by billions of people, and informs their worldviews and philosophical perspectives (and culture and literature and so on) in many, often complicated ways. There doesn't seem to be any equivalent importance to the alt-right.
"
I agree pretty strongly with this. These guys are looking more and more like a white-supremacist PETA.
On “Gun Violence: A Cultural Study”
They existed as a marketing category prior to existing as a legal description, and they refered to a class of real things, which were (and are) primarily a matter of aesthetics or, I guess, ergonomics.
"'Assault weapon' is too vague to make the basis for a good law, and even if it weren't, such a law would be very silly," is not remotely the same statement as, "There is no such thing as an 'assault weapon'."
"
I think that may well be the case now, since support for the AWB is now in the minority, but at one point those kinds of bans were really popular[1] and what opposition there was came, understandably enough, from people who actually owned or wanted to own the weapons in question.
[1] Example: George W. Bush was in office when the ban lapsed in 2004, despite a promise to renew it during his 2000 campaign. For a while there, the AWB had genuine bipartisan support.
"
One, because--as I mentioned above--they were a highly publicized symbol of gun violence at a time when gun violence was at a crisis level, and then were reintroduced to the public consciousness through the AR-15's association with the Newtown attrocity. In both cases, the "military" and "bad ass"/"manly" aesthetic had an effect not only on the people assault weapons were being marketed to, but also people who only really think about guns when they hear about people being murdered with them.
Second, the assault weapon is increasingly a part of the uniform for many of least hinged members of Team Red, like the guys who think they need to carry guns to protest a local mosque or who decided to occupy a federally owned bird-watching center and hold it by armed force.
If your only familiarity with a class of weapons involves the fact that they look intimidating, they are involved in rare but horrible murderous outrages, and that they're the favored fashion accessory of a bunch of wingnuts who probably shouldn't use scissors unsupervised, let alone firearms, well, it's an easy mistake to make to decide they're bad and dangerous, and you aren't harming anybody's legitimate interests or rights by banning them.
"
"Assault weapons" really aren't the type of weapons people use to shoot each other now, and they weren't twenty years ago, either. The type of weapon people used to shoot each other then, as now, is the handgun.
"
Of course "assault weapon" is a dumb term. It was a marketing term in the '80s that became the flashpoint of a moral panic over gun violence in the early '90s. What could be possibly be dumber?
On “William Voegeli: The Reason I’m Anti-Anti-Trump”
I read this piece several times, and it took that many times to realize that the crazy details that Voegeli was mustering in defense of Trump supporters[1] were obscuring an even crazier premise. His argument is literally that the fact that Trumpistas are supporting an obvious knave that only an ignoramus or a bigot would want in the White House is evidence that their concerns are not ignorant or bigoted.
[1] E.g., one of the recent, memorable politically-motivated mass shootings was commited by jihadist lunatics rather than white supremacist or anti-abortion lunatics. This calls the fundamental legitimaticy of our government into question!
"
Voegeli himself seems to think that 15 murders, out of a population of almost 320 million, calls the legitimacy of the government into question, simply on the basis of the fact that those 15 murders were perpetrated by immigrants. They certainly aren't indicative of broader trends in rates of violent crime, which continue to be quite low. I'm not sure why I shouldn't dismiss Voegeli's own stated concerns as illegitimate and primarily attributable to bigotry.
To the extent that Voegeli is right about what's actually animating Trump's supporters, his own piece provides a pretty damning indictment of them.
On “Gun Violence: A Cultural Study”
notme, now:
Oh, of course you aren't. Where would anyone ever get such an idea?
notme two posts upthread:
notme about an hour ago:
"
Suggest all you want, but the numbers you cite seem to be doing nothing to actually support your suggestion, at least not without a great deal more argument.
"
My understanding was that "assault weapon" was originally a marketing category, too, prior to "assault weapons" being a political flashpoint and leading to the (really quite dumb) 1994 AWB and its various state-level clones.
"
Are you suggesting that if roughly 400 people, out of a population of just under 3 million, do something over the course of a year, that's a sign that those 3 million people think that thing is culturally acceptable?
Because that seems like a very strange argument to be making.
On “Reflections on Gun Control”
@Oscar Gordon:
Of course this has it’s own issues (all the crazy people could form their own club and be crazy together), but I’m just laying out ideas here, not hammering out concrete policy.
I think that's fair, and the broader idea of making gun owners be better able to advertise their businesses and clubs instead of being relegated to the seamy side of things in the manner of strip clubs sounds like a positive devopment. It's certainly got to be healthier along every axis than having the public face of gun culture be some open-carry activist walking around strapped in Kroger's so they can protect themselves from the Whole Wheat Bandit.
Of course, over the course of the past few months I've come to the conclusion that the "cultural bundling" that Ken White's editorial talked about is actually the fundamental problem with the debate. As long as privately-owned guns are being viewed as just a part of the Team Red uniform, folks on Team Blue are (with some justification) likely to reject the idea that they should have to incur any costs to keep them widely available. and folks on Team Red are (again, with some justification) likely to reject any restrictions on them as being about counting coup in the Culture Wars, rather than realizing public policy benefits.
"
Apologies for replying a bit late.
As someone who's shallowly but broadly opposed to many gun control measures beyond improvements in background checks, but really detests the way most pro-gun activist groups conduct their business, I expected to be annoyed by this article. I was, indeed, annoyed by it, but not the way I expected.
Frankly, of the two recommendations in this post, the idea of tying handgun ownership[1] to membership in private clubs just seems like a spectacularly bad idea. If we're talking about an actual right here, one guaranteed by the Constitution, you've just made individuals exercising that right dependent on an unaccountable private organization which sounds to me like a recipe for keeping guns away from socially marginalized people.[2] This is fine if you think that guns are a cute hobby, or for that matter something that no one should have ever, but if owning them is a right, it sounds like the exact opposite of what you want to do. I understand and maybe agree with the policy goal here, but the means sounds like a disaster in the making.
[1] Which is, in the minds of the Courts and most GRAs I've encountered, fundamental to self-defense and thus the actual right to own firearms.
[2] I'm forced to think of the periodic stories I see about gun shop owners declaring they won't sell guns to Muslims, or for that matter liberals, for reasons that I'm sure the owners in question somehow believe make them sound like something other than complete cretins.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.