Debate US gun laws here — Page 2

On the first day of the new Congress, Senator Dianne Feinstein will introduce a bill banning assault weapons, and the same bill will be introduced in The House of Representatives.

The last bill banning them expired in 2004.

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"Who needs these military-style assault weapons? Who needs an ammunition feeding device capable of holding 100 rounds?" Feinstein wrote on her campaign website. "These weapons are not for hunting deer -- they’re for hunting people."

On Sunday Feinstein laid out details of the bill.

"It will ban the sale, the transfer, the importation and the possession, not retroactively, but prospectively," and ban the sale of clips of more than ten bullets, Feinstein said. "The purpose of this bill is to get... weapons of war off the streets."
Dianne Feinstein To Introduce Assault Weapons Ban On First Day Of Congress

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So the Second Amendment just gets re-written as the 28th - redundancy rules?

Not sure what you mean by redundancy. An amendment can only changed by a subsequent amendment.

Don't you remember Prohibition? The was the Eighteenth Amendment. When it was repealed, another amendment had to be passed: the Twenty-first.

That's how the Constitution works. You know that.

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That's not actually true. The current amendment contains ambiguous language that can be used about whether the right to bear weapons is for personal use or for a militia.

A new amendment would clarify that for the future.

But meanwhile, Yawper (or anyone who supports the status quo), it has been confirmed that a Bushmaster .223 semi-automatic rifle was used to kill the children, who were each shot 10-11 times.

Why is that Bushmaster .223 considered a weapon for home use, and not a weapon of mass-destruction?

I don't see any reason why a citizen needs a Bushmaster .223 for home protection or varmint control, any more than we need to have chemical, biological and atomic weapons available for him use.

Why do you need a gun that can shoot 100 rounds per minute?

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This is a naive question, but coming from a Canadian perspective, how did the NRA become such a force in the US, in the first place?

The NRA's main legislation concern is the slippery slope argument (as it is for many, many other lobbying groups).

Fully automatic weapons that fire "100s of rounds per minutes" can't be legally sold in the US without special permission at the federal level. People constantly toss around the phrase "assault weapon" with knowing what it means - it's just another hot button political catch phrase that raises hackles ("pro-life/anti-abortion", "gay marriage", etc.).

Meanwhile, activists want to sweep the whole mental health aspect under the rug while ignoring that two thirds of gun deaths in the US are suicides.

I never said I support the status quo. Any legislation needs to be well considered, not knee-jerk, and overall policy needs to address the proper core issues to be effective. The real issue is violence in the US and addressing that requires working with human issues, not inanimate objects.

Updated On: 12/16/12 at 05:06 PM

The NRA's main legislation concern is the slippery slope argument (as it is for many, many other lobbying groups).
The slippery slope is a rhetorical fallacy that often leads to undesirable ends because it relies on the faulty premise that A leading to B to C etc inherently links A to Z.

Of every school shooting that has ever taken place in the US, how many of them have been committed by a teacher or even a staff member? Not one that I can remember. If crazy people like this shooter can get a gun and bring into a school they don't really have ties to, what makes you think a teacher wouldn't have already done that? Whether or not guns are legal in schools, do you really think a teacher who wants to shoot up a classroom is going to follow those rules?

I can't think of any but that's because the ordinary teacher (read: almost none) carries guns with them. When you give every single teacher a semi-automatic weapon or whatever your proposed plan is now every teacher has easy access to something that could kill a room full of children in seconds. And there have been, I'd a venture a guess, thousands of cases of teachers who had to be dismissed or put on a leave of absence as a result of violence toward students or some sort of threat of violence. Just last year in the elementary school in my suburban (former) town a teacher was fired for punching a student and throwing books at him after the student refused to listen to her. She was dragged from the classroom kicking and screaming and shouting threats. I shudder to think what could have happened if you got your way and she had been armed with a semi-automatic weapon during her breakdown. The story was never reported on any major news outlet because she had no weapon.

Besides I didn't post this before, but the other concern is if some law is passed that gives every teacher the authority, duty, privilege or whatever you would mandate to carry a concealed weapon, all it takes is one deranged student to access the gun and again use it to kill a room full of school children.

And then you bring up the classic argument any opponent of gun control brings up, people who want to have guns to do something wrong will have guns no matter what. Sure, that could be true but why make it easier for that individual to obtain them? Also, if someone could be prosecuted and their weapons taken from them because they were illegal, it would make it more difficult to plan and execute mass attacks. Taken to its logical extension, why should just about anything be illegal if criminals will do it anyways? Why outlaw murder if people who want to murder will murder anyways? The purpose of laws is to deter reasonable from committing the act and then punish the people who do commit the act. Laws banning murder deter a lot of people from murdering just as laws banning specific types of guns would deter a lot of people from possessing them. Laws against murder also allows us to punish murderers who have committed an act society deems undesirable just as laws banning certain types of dangerous firearms would allow us to punish people who have committed an act many view as undesirable.

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Is it ok when police accidentally shoot innocents (like NYC pedestrians) in the course of an incident?

Updated On: 12/16/12 at 05:57 PM

Silly analogy. Police are trained in gunfire.

Can we agree that if James Madison were to see a Bushmaster .223, he would say, "F*CK, no! That's not what I meant by my Second Amendment!"

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AbbyNormal, do you realize the first shooting victim in the Connecticut incident was an avid gun owner, in her own house with her own guns?

Silly analogy. Police are trained in gunfire.

Not silly at all. If Bloomberg is so hot for gun control the first thing he should do is issue tasers to the entirety of his armed police force.

Do you not realize it was not the avid gun owner who committed this crime? It was her crazed son who got them illegally. So because she didn't lock up her guns when she should have means that everyone who owns guns legally shouldn't be able to have them anymore?

Oh and pal joey, you have original talking points? That's actually made me laugh out loud. All you do is spout what you hear on msnbc, I wouldn't exactly call that having original talking points.

Did it ever occur to you pal joey that people who have concealed permits have to be trained? I think it's the law everywhere, but I'm not sure. I know that's the case in my state. They don't just give carry permits to anyone.

What a horrific argument. In Arizona, Alaska, Wyoming, and Vermont, one doesn't need a permit to carry a concealed weapon. 35 states allow open carry of guns without a permit. 34 states allow the purchase of ANY gun (that is legal under federal law) without any permit. I have no idea what state you live in but "mandatory training" to purchase, possess, and carry a gun is an exception and is far from the rule. Meanwhile, police officers undergo extensive training that not a single state I can find requires for the average hand gun owner. There's not even a comparison between what a police officer does to get weapons training and what an ordinary civilian does.

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Police are trained to fire guns at non-moving targets. Once in motion, it comes down to how good they are with a gun. That's a fact. That's why accidents happen. You can run well, or you can shoot well. You can't do both at the same time.

As for guns in schools, how many school shootings are committed by current students who decide enough is enough and come in to kill? If they knew there were guns in the building, all the better. Take out one teacher without a class and have access to a much better weapon. All teachers and all classrooms aren't used all day.

In other words, put guns in classrooms and you make a smorgasbord for a student or outside assailant who wants to kill children. Why restrict guns when you can make them more readily available for possible criminals? They'll get them anyway, right? Why not have a glass encased rack at the front door with a sign that says "break glass in case of school shooting?"

As for guns in school as a deterrent, there was a great special called Kids Who Kill that featured a school shooter. He went to a school with armed security guards. He was still able to kill the principal and a half dozen students before the security guards got to him. No one stopped him when he was clearly carrying large weapons into school and people still died. In fact, the principal in this case died because he attempted to stop the student from firing at students. Then more students were killed.

I don't understand what is so hard to understand about this scenario. If there are more guns available to protect people, there are more guns available to do harm to people.

It's especially true in a school. Students go all over the place. If they're told not to do something, they do it. We had to start handing out suspensions for going into the catwalk without permission because the kids refused to stop after being warned of the dangers of going up there. You're not going to be able to hide the availability of school-issued guns from students. Some of the students who want to push limits are going to find the guns and do stupid things. That's all we need. More accidental shootings.

But god bless America, at least the teachers will be packing to do a head shot on an assailant possibly trying to run away. Sure, they're already up all hours of the night grading papers and making lessons plans, but surely they'll find the time to practice shooting guns with enough regularity to be able to make that tricky double tap kill shot. It looks so easy in the Hollywood movies that maybe a child could do it with the class gun. Maybe that will be the new reward in pre-K. You're not the birthday girl or hall monitor; you're the gun slinger for the week. Congrats!