Death and Terror On The Strip...

[Gob]

A history of mass shootings...

[Econoline]

• • Actual lone wolves issue rare joint statement: "Stop comparing us to white terrorists"

  ALGONQUIN PROVINCIAL PARK, ON—Two North American grey wolves held a press conference today to discuss the media's incessant use of the phrase "lone wolf" when describing white perpetrators of mass shooting.
  
  "It's difficult for us to be here together but this is important," Wolf A began, immediately lunging at Wolf B's throat, pinning him to the ground.
  
  Avoiding eye contact, Wolf B continued, "Being forced to live away from my pack is, like, hard enough. I really don't need bad publicity on top of it. Also, saying we're the same as terrorists is just bad facts."
  
  "It's inaccurate," Wolf A added. "We can't say definitively that young, white men are more likely than others to carry out mass murder, but multiple studies, as well as reality, have shown that white men do commit mass shootings at a disproportionate rate relative to the rest of the population."
  
  Wolf A paused briefly to lick his balls. "Frankly, it's insulting to wolves to keep calling these shooters —who are obviously part of a larger human problem — 'lone wolves'".
  
  "Furthermore, unlike lone wolves, these shooters are deeply ingrained in your society. They're absorbing the messages in your media, participating in online forums, and forming communities."
  
  "Must be nice," Wolf B said quietly. "I'm so lonely."
  
  "This is obviously a massive, widespread crisis of masculinity and racism. We realize wolves have superior vision, but seriously, you guys can't see that?"
  
  "Sure, we prey on the weak and feeble, but the way we kill is useful!" Wolf A said as he bared his teeth. "The herd that remains is stronger and healthier. Your so-called lone wolves slaughter innocent people for no reason. We're animals, but we're not monsters."
  
  "There is literally a gun store in Pennsylvania called Lone Wolf!" Wolf A barked. "That's messed up."
  
  "Oh hey, and like, if I could say one more thing?" Wolf B asked. "The Wolf of Wall Street is also pretty offensive. We're nothing like that."
  
  Wolf A then bit Wolf B on the shoulder, and both wolves urinated on the microphone before sprinting into the woods in opposite directions.

[rubato]

rubato - The last few posts were in response to the above post from liberty, which included the statement

Yes, I know. I was responding to the post right before mine

Re: Death and Terror On The Strip...

Post by Big RR » Wed Oct 04, 2017 12:47 pm
Your photos of rim fire casings make a pretty good case against these reloads, but I just checked and there are a number of videos online how to make re rim fire reloads; maybe some casings are better than others? I can't look at them in my office, but might try to look at them later.

And expressing surprise that anyone was bothering.


yrs,
rubato

[rubato]

I had not heard of bump-stocks before so I had to look them up. They do turn a semi-auto into a full-auto weapon so why are they not illegal in all 50 states? I saw that Dianne Feinstein has tried to get them banned but been defeated by the NRA and the GOP.


yrs,
rubato

[Econoline]

Q

They do turn a semi-auto into a full-auto weapon so why are they not illegal in all 50 states?

A

I saw that Dianne Feinstein has tried to get them banned but been defeated by the NRA and the GOP.

Yup.

[dales]

The device in no way modifies the trigger ass'y (hence one is not converting said firearm to full-auto)---- it only uses the gun's recoil to "bump" the trigger as rounds are fired.

At least that's my limited understanding of the device.

[liberty]

Sure, but I was raising it in response to Liberty's post stating that it would be hard for an amateur to make cartridges, so regulating ammo might be better than guns (which he maintained could be easily fabricated).

I didn’t say easy, but it would depend on what you wanted to make and how much quality you wanted; at any rate, it would be easier than building an airplane which has been done.

[Big RR]

Point taken. I guess I should say "more easily fabricated than cartridges". I presume this is what you meant?

[Burning Petard]

Full auto--the gun fires continuously until it has no ammo or there is a mechanic failure. (overheats, fails to extract fired brass or chamber a new cartridge because for any one of a number of problems) when the tiger is pulled back and held back.

Semi-auto--the loaded and cocked gun fires once when the trigger is pulled, ejects the fired brass and chambers a new cartridge then waits until the trigger is released and pulled again, repeating the cycle.

Bump stock--a modification to the 'furniture' of the firearm that includes springs that move the entire mechanism with recoil. Efectively, the firing mechanism of the semi-auto firearm functions as normal, but the shooter's finger remains more or less steady, while the firearm 'bounces' back and forth against the trigger.

This process CAN BE DONE without any 'bounce stock' with the firearm unchanged in any way from its condition when it left factory. It requires practice, but the gun is held loosely and the body of the shooter is used to bounce the recoiling weapon against the trigger finger. Either way, the weapon moves around and not much reliability against a human size target at anything beyond a short distance. But when the 'target' is thousands of people in a big field, accuracy is not needed. Baseline accuracy for a rifleman has long been defined as 'one minute of angle' That means consistently putting the bullet into a spot one inch in diameter at 100 yards. Modern military sniper kits do much better. But in the Las Vegas massacre, that was irrelevant. The target was huge and the only requirement was to put lots of bullets into an area in a short period of time.

Current police doctrine cannot handle this situation. The police did what they were trained to do. The good guys gathered below the shooters firing position and waited for the experts to get there--the SWAT Team. By the time that team gathered in the hallway outside his room, he had stopped shooting out the windows and was shooting at the door. He had already killed more than 50 and wounded another 500+ while his position was located and the experts assembled.

So now we have a cost/benefit analysis to run. At what general area do we abandon a criminal law philosophy of punishment and retribution for actions, and move to prevention of actions as the immediate objective? We have decided that child sexual molesting is so intolerable that we incarcerate people for the possession of pictures. What other crime do we arrest people for simply looking at pictures of a crime committed by others? Do we make it illegal to possess the picture from our war in Vietnam of the man holding a S&W Bodyguard pistol at arms length, showing the moment of impact when the bullet strikes the head of the man beside the shooter?

What are we willing to pay for security? It IS complicated. So far American society in general has not been able to reach any consensus on this.

snailgate

[Jarlaxle]

The device in no way modifies the trigger ass'y (hence one is not converting said firearm to full-auto)---- it only uses the gun's recoil to "bump" the trigger as rounds are fired.

At least that's my limited understanding of the device.

Spot on.

[ex-khobar Andy]

Fascinating analysis, SG. In the end, there is a price we all pay to live among others. Low price = libertarian society where anything goes ( e.g., you can drive down my street at 100 mph if you want, and you are fine as long as you don't hit anyone). I try to read The Tragedy of the Commons and David Foster Wallace's piece from The Atlantic just about every year to remind myself how to be a human being and to pay that price willingly.

[Sue U]

O hai, New York Times, what's on your mind today?

Opinion | Op-Ed Columnist
Repeal the Second Amendment

Bret Stephens OCT. 5, 2017

I have never understood the conservative fetish for the Second Amendment.

From a law-and-order standpoint, more guns means more murder. “States with higher rates of gun ownership had disproportionately large numbers of deaths from firearm-related homicides,” noted one exhaustive 2013 study in the American Journal of Public Health.

From a personal-safety standpoint, more guns means less safety. The F.B.I. counted a total of 268 “justifiable homicides” by private citizens involving firearms in 2015; that is, felons killed in the course of committing a felony. Yet that same year, there were 489 “unintentional firearms deaths” in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Between 77 and 141 of those killed were children.

From a national-security standpoint, the Amendment’s suggestion that a “well-regulated militia” is “necessary to the security of a free State,” is quaint. The Minutemen that will deter Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un are based in missile silos in Minot, N.D., not farmhouses in Lexington, Mass.

From a personal liberty standpoint, the idea that an armed citizenry is the ultimate check on the ambitions and encroachments of government power is curious. The Whiskey Rebellion of the 1790s, the New York draft riots of 1863, the coal miners’ rebellion of 1921, the Brink’s robbery of 1981 — does any serious conservative think of these as great moments in Second Amendment activism?

And now we have the relatively new and now ubiquitous “active shooter” phenomenon, something that remains extremely rare in the rest of the world. Conservatives often say that the right response to these horrors is to do more on the mental-health front. Yet by all accounts Stephen Paddock would not have raised an eyebrow with a mental-health professional before he murdered 58 people in Las Vegas last week.

What might have raised a red flag? I’m not the first pundit to point out that if a “Mohammad Paddock” had purchased dozens of firearms and thousands of rounds of ammunition and then checked himself into a suite at the Mandalay Bay with direct views to a nearby music festival, somebody at the local F.B.I. field office would have noticed.

Given all of this, why do liberals keep losing the gun control debate?

Maybe it’s because they argue their case badly and — let’s face it — in bad faith. Democratic politicians routinely profess their fidelity to the Second Amendment — or rather, “a nuanced reading” of it — with all the conviction of Barack Obama’s support for traditional marriage, circa 2008. People recognize lip service for what it is.

Then there are the endless liberal errors of fact. There is no “gun-show loophole” per se; it’s a private-sale loophole, in other words the right to sell your own stuff. The civilian AR-15 is not a true “assault rifle,” and banning such rifles would have little effect on the overall murder rate, since most homicides are committed with handguns. It’s not true that 40 percent of gun owners buy without a background check; the real number is closer to one-fifth.

The National Rifle Association does not have Republican “balls in a money clip,” as Jimmy Kimmel put it the other night. The N.R.A. has donated a paltry $3,533,294 to all current members of Congress since 1998, according to The Washington Post, equivalent to about three months of Kimmel’s salary. The N.R.A. doesn’t need to buy influence: It’s powerful because it’s popular.

Nor will it do to follow the “Australian model” of a gun buyback program, which has shown poor results in the United States and makes little sense in a country awash with hundreds of millions of weapons. Keeping guns out of the hands of mentally ill people is a sensible goal, but due process is still owed to the potentially insane. Background checks for private gun sales are another fine idea, though its effects on homicides will be negligible: guns recovered by police are rarely in the hands of their legal owners, a 2016 study found.

In fact, the more closely one looks at what passes for “common sense” gun laws, the more feckless they appear. Americans who claim to be outraged by gun crimes should want to do something more than tinker at the margins of a legal regime that most of the developed world rightly considers nuts. They should want to change it fundamentally and permanently.

There is only one way to do this: Repeal the Second Amendment.

Repealing the Amendment may seem like political Mission Impossible today, but in the era of same-sex marriage it’s worth recalling that most great causes begin as improbable ones. Gun ownership should never be outlawed, just as it isn’t outlawed in Britain or Australia. But it doesn’t need a blanket Constitutional protection, either. The 46,445 murder victims killed by gunfire in the United States between 2012 and 2016 didn’t need to perish so that gun enthusiasts can go on fantasizing that “Red Dawn” is the fate that soon awaits us.

Donald Trump will likely get one more Supreme Court nomination, or two or three, before he leaves office, guaranteeing a pro-gun court for another generation. Expansive interpretations of the right to bear arms will be the law of the land — until the “right” itself ceases to be.

Some conservatives will insist that the Second Amendment is fundamental to the structure of American liberty. They will cite James Madison, who noted in the Federalist Papers that in Europe “the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.” America was supposed to be different, and better.

I wonder what Madison would have to say about that today, when more than twice as many Americans perished last year at the hands of their fellows as died in battle during the entire Revolutionary War. My guess: Take the guns—or at least the presumptive right to them—away. The true foundation of American exceptionalism should be our capacity for moral and constitutional renewal, not our instinct for self-destruction.

BTW, Bret Stephens is a conservative, not a wild-eyed commie like me. So common ground?

[ex-khobar Andy]

Taking just one sentence from this piece:

From a personal liberty standpoint, the idea that an armed citizenry is the ultimate check on the ambitions and encroachments of government power is curious.

What is also curious to me is that many of those who make this argument the most strongly are the first to stand up and praise the military and the first responders. We can't be 'dissing the military' et al by a quiet kneel when the flag / anthem is raised or played. If they love the military so much then why are they the ones telling us all the time that we need to protect ourselves against them when they come after us in our home? After all, if President Whoever is going to take it into his head that I need eliminating, I am pretty sure he won't turn up at my door but will send one of the boys. In uniform.

[rubato]

Early reports hat it that the WH is favoring outlawing bumpstocks but we will see. I don't see how a device which turns a semiautomatic rifle into out which fires like an automatic could have been legal in the first place. If it shoots like an automatic it is one.


yrs,
rubato

[Burning Petard]

What does "shoots like an automatic" really mean? Is it like the older definition for obscene from the Supremes--I know it when I see it? More than a hundred years ago the Brits trained their infantry to fire the bolt action rifle by working the bolt with thumb and forefinger, and pulling the trigger with the middle finger. They could empty the magazine in less than a minute. The M97 Winchester slide action shotgun could be operated by holding the trigger down and it would fire every time the slide was worked through the cycle.

Very hard to create a specification that human creativity will not find a way to circumvent.

snailgate

[Gob]

You know, this isn't really a sane response to this massacre.

Bump stocks are selling out across America as momentum gathers in Congress to ban the rifle modification used by the Las Vegas shooter to obtain catastrophically high rates of fire.

The devices are sold out or temporarily unavailable from all the largest gun and ammunition retailers in the US, as fear of an impending ban has sent many gun enthusiasts hoarding.

“Will I be able to order sometime soon? I want to get one before there is a push to make them illegal,” one commenter posted on the Facebook page of Bump Fire Systems, one of three major US manufacturers of the devices. The company’s website had been down for more than two days citing “high traffic volume”.

“I ordered mines [sic] the night the mass shootings happened. I hope I still get it,” another wrote.


https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... s-shooting

[ex-khobar Andy]

I was in my local Kroger today idly checking Scientific American. My eye fell on Guns and Ammo and I wondered. There were 13 gun magazines (as in pictorial weekly/monthly issues, not storage cases for ammunition rounds) and 12 car/truck magazines. I did not count things like American Outdoorsman which although it has a significant gum component, it is not purely gun focussed.

I have no idea what that tells us. But I thought it was interesting.

[Econoline]

• Dear Internet Sniper,
  
  You said, "We need our guns to protect all our other rights."
  
  No.
  
  You have it backward.
  
  Your right to free speech, your right to a free press, your right to assemble — those rights have been used to protect your right to own a gun. You use those rights every time you speak up to defend gun ownership.
  
  When was the last time you needed to use your gun to defend the right to free speech or any other right?

[dales]

Opinion | Op-Ed Columnist
Repeal the Second Amendment

Let us say for the sake of argument that the 2nd. Amendment is repealed.

There are over 300 million firearms out there.

What about those?

[BoSoxGal]

Yup - even if the impossible was possible, it’s a genie out of a bottle that can’t be recaptured.

I want to stay a few more years until my niece becomes an incorrigible teen, then I’m planning to emigrate someplace saner - maybe Croatia or Ecuador to teach English. Someplace not awash in guns and political hostility.