After a long hiatus, the Loughner shooting has caused the anti-gun crowd - largely and thankfully silent for a number of years, to knee-jerk back into action. It seems as if they have conveniently forgotten the reason that they were marginalized in the first place. And that reason is that their arguments were spurious and that to most humans in this country capable of coherent thought they were obviously retards of truly galactic proportion. Even Mrs. Gifford knew this, she owned a Glock herself.
I see that once again a bill has been introduced to limit magazine capacity of weapons, riding a wave of grief and shock at the Gifford shooting to magically transport us back to 1994 when a similar bill took effect and remained in effect for the next 10 years.
I'm not even going to get into the broader pro-gun arguments delving into the Second Amendment. I'll try to keep it very simple because the people that argue against gun ownership by law-abiding citizens are usually at a severe disadvantage from the start as they usually know next to nothing about the very objects they are so opposed to. They trot out liberal professors from the halls of academia to give arguments based on flawed and doctored statistics. For instance, the inclusion in "accidental child death" statistics of anyone under 21 years old (sorry, a 19 year old gangbanger being shot by a rival gang isn't the same as a 5 year old that finds daddy's gun and shoots himself by accident) and suicides (people who would have otherwise slashed their wrists, ate a bunch of sleeping pills, or jumped off a bridge) included in "criminal shooting" numbers. It has always been thus. A network of lies, ignorance, and distortion spouted by people who wouldn't know a Lee-Enfield from a Kalishnikov if these pieces were stuffed separately for comparison into their collective poop-chutes. It's same old, same old - the absurd shit being stated now is the largely the same old absurd shit they spouted 15 and 20 years ago.
Right now one can pull up articles talking about "31 round" magazines (the extra 1 is in the chamber, and has nothing to do with the magazine used) by these most-learned and distinguished authorities, and verbiage that gives the impression that prior to the 1980's next to nobody had autoloading pistols until the Glock came around, utter nonsense. Do you know what the "1911" means with regard to the Colt .45 - probably the most popular and common pistol on earth? It means it's been around since 1911, fools. People owned all kinds of autos in the 80's; I was there. If you are going to argue against something, at least give people the common courtesy of knowing something about the subject. These are the same people that considered Teflon - a lubricant - capable of making a bullet penetrate body armor and that a pistol-grip on a long gun makes it somehow "more deadly".
The same idiots that considered the Winchester 'Black Talon' a "cop-killer" when their currently and more discretely marketed 'Golden Sabre'
has the exact same ballistics. Tell me, how is a hollow-point bullet going to penetrate body armor? Name for me a single armor piercing round that has a hollow point. A hollow point is designed to expand on impact, idiots. And do you know what Teflon is? It's not Tungsten or depleted Uranium. It's a fucking greasy plastic that has nothing at all to do with piercing armor.
After the VT massacre, Congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy initiated a weapons ban. One that included a prohibition against barrel shrouds. When questioned whether she knew what a "barrel shroud" was in her own legislation, she had no idea. She stated that she believed it was "a shoulder thing that goes up". These are our leaders, ladies and germs - legislating against things that they can't even fucking define:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18200226/Regardless of your stance on guns, wouldn't you like people that introduce legislation to at least have a clue as to what the hell they are talking about?
Let's focus on the magazines for now. The argument, at it's heart (and since the woman - who looks like she hasn't been laid since Johnson was president - introducing the new bill admits that in today's climate a magazine capacity restriction is about all that has much of a hope of passing), is that if only we didn't have magazines that held so many bullets nutcases couldn't kill so many people. Pie-in-the-sky stupidity as always.
Unlike anytime previous, however, we have a wealth of data to see if this idea holds much water. Mass shootings are tragic and command outrage and media attention, but surely it is most reasonable to look at total killings, total violent crime rates, and trends rather that one nutjob or even several nutjobs. The so-called "assault weapons" ban of 1994-2004, while containing many absurd elements like a ban on
bayonet lugs (when was the last time you heard of anyone being killed by a mounted bayonet? Yeah, that happens
all the time..) provides tons of data pertaining to how such magazine limits worked to prevent actual violent crime. Let's look at actual FBI data, not knee-jerk reactive nonsense.
Logic would say that with the sunset of the so-called "Assault Weapons Ban", which prohibited firearms used in less that 2% of violent crime based largely on cosmetic appearance, that the country should have gone all to hell. One year before the ban - 1993 - the total number of violent crimes for the year was 1,926, 017. Adjusting for population increase we should expect that with the sunset of the bill we should see even more violent crime now that the wicked "assault weapons" and high-capacity magazines are once again available. Particularly as gun ownership is at an all-time high and concealed carry permits are being issued left and right even in states like mine where they were nearly unattainable in the past. The country should have turned into the wild wild west, right?
Wrong. After the sunset of the bill there hasn't been a SINGLE YEAR that was even close. In fact, the latest data from the FBI (2009) shows 1,320,000. Over 600,000 fewer incidents, despite way more people and way more guns. And in fact,
less than EVERY SINGLE YEAR that the bill was in effect. Banning high capacity magazines has thus had
no positive effect on violent crime whatsoever. The bill and the logic behind it(such as it was) was an
abject failure.
I can hear people now: "But violent crime encompasses a lot of things, what about murders specifically?"
1999 - the LOWEST of the entire 10 year period the bill was in effect - 15,5222009 - 15,241, despite shitloads more guns and shitloads more peopleDoesn't look to me like there is any precedent whatsoever for believing magazine capacity has crap to do with how many people get killed. Despite the liberal media's best efforts to give us the idea that the country has turned into the O.K. Corral, the fact is that nearly every category of crime is the lowest in decades. Go to the www2.fbi.gov and
look at the numbers yourself!
I've read that some say that the loophole of the bill - that existing magazines were grandfathered out, and that it only applied to magazines that were newly manufactured - hamstringed it's impact. This is a copout. A grasping at straws because the very logic behind the bill was nonsense. Because this argument is hypothetical they know there is no way of knowing if this would have made any difference, you cannot argue against a "coulda woulda shoulda" with empirical evidence. So we have to turn to the good old-fashioned 'horse sense' that this country used to be known for but lately seems in short supply:
- magazines, with minimal care, will last for many decades - even a lifetime.
- how do you propose that high capacity magazines can be eradicated when we can't even keep hundreds of thousands of pounds of illegal drugs (which unlike newly made magazines can be detected with dogs and the like) from entering this country?
- magazines can be easily altered
- what is to prevent a shooter from simply carrying multiple guns? The fastest reload is to change weapons.
- Do you intend to search everyone's house in the United States to try to seize the offending magazines? Good luck with that. And good luck trying to square that up with a little thing called unreasonable search and seizure.
- If a law applying to existing magazines were put into place, then when would it be enforced? After someone has already shot a bunch of people. Ooooh, scary. After being sentenced to death for multiple counts of murder and assault a psychopath is going to be sho'nuff scared that he is also being charged with a fucking magazine capacity violation.
- "high capacity magazines" and "assault weapons" are used in a tiny percentage of crime. Most of which could have been just as easily committed with a 10-round magazine or even a revolver. The Virginia Tech massacre was committed with - drum roll please -
entirely legal 10-round magazines.
A criminal, by definition, has no regard for the law. Do you gun-grabbers honestly believe that a person who is unfazed by the existing laws - thousands of years old - against murdering people is going to give a damn about a stupid magazine capacity law? On every front, such a law makes no sense whatsoever. You can't stop them from being obtained, they would make little difference as 30 round magazines for a pistol are rarely used in crimes, there is no data to support any such idea - in fact, quite the opposite has occurred, and such a law can be easily circumvented anyway. I honestly don't understand this reasoning that if one idiot shits their pants then we have to try to get everyone to wear diapers. The only people that obey LAWS are people that DON'T BREAK LAWS, so how do you imagine that passing yet another law is going to affect anything even if the "reasoning" behind it had any precedent in the first place?
I just did a magazine change and it took me 1.2 seconds. Yeah, a magazine capacity law is going to be a huge success. You "Handgun Control, Inc." idiots should just crawl back under your rock. You're a collection of freaking idiots. You know what we need to do? Enforce the damned laws we already have. It is YOUR liberal judges that let violent criminals out years before their sentence was supposed to be up, you gun-grabbing socialist twats. It is
your touchy-feely mindset that sticks evil bastards in a mental health facility for a couple years instead of a lifetime in prison or simply removing them from the gene pool.
I've had guns with "high capacity" magazines for over 30 years, and you know what? Not a single one of them has strolled out of the house of their own accord and shot a single soul. How about you punish
the criminals, instead of trying to be everyone's nanny? The stupidest laws in history were based on a single incident (which is why you can't walk an alligator on a leash), or on emotion/hysteria (which is why we have Draconian laws and taxes based upon dreaded "second hand smoke" from cigars, when a single 747 flying from LA to NYC puts out more pollutants than ALL of the cigars smoked in the US in an entire year).
Start using your pathetic brains. What we have in this country is a plethora of laws and very little common sense. A climate where it is easier to pass restrictions for the masses than demand accountability from the individual. Where it is more common to point fingers at minutae than at the actual person responsible for an outrage. The Founders of this country would weep at the utterly sackless tools we have become. Grow a pair, stop being goddamn sheep, and demand that the government stop trying to be our fucking mommy.
Labels: crime, Gifford, gun control, Loughner, magazines
