Obama and the Left....Excell as Salesmen for Firearm Manufactures

[Shadow Wolf]

It addresses the issue that politicians really do threaten to ban guns.

Some guns, yes, but not an entire blanket ban that lives up to the paranoia of the government taking everyone's guns.

 

[Revoltingest]

Some guns, yes, but not an entire blanket ban that lives up to the paranoia of the government taking everyone's guns.

Bernie's threat does rise to that level.
You can argue that he mis-spoke or that he was pandering, but nonetheless he said it.

 

[Shadow Wolf]

Bernie's threat does rise to that level.
You can argue that he mis-spoke or that he was pandering, but nonetheless he said it.

No he didn't. Bernie is probably the last left-winged federal-level politician that would call for a blanket gun ban. He has a favorable voting record when it comes to gun owning rights, hunters and competition shooters especially have nothing to worry about from him, and his wording in that interview is so vague that all we can do is look at his voting record to estimate what he may mean.

 

[Revoltingest]

No he didn't. Bernie is probably the last left-winged federal-level politician that would call for a blanket gun ban. He has a favorable voting record when it comes to gun owning rights, hunters and competition shooters especially have nothing to worry about from him, and his wording in that interview is so vague that all we can do is look at his voting record to estimate what he may mean.

I heard him.

I wonder if Trump could get away with denying having said the things he said?

 

[Sapiens]

Some problems with those articles.....
- They don't address the utility of having a gun for concealed carry. Naturally, the gun will be in the home when the owner is there. But the benefits accrue when outside the home. The full picture requires considering the in-home risks balanced against the outside benefit.
- They presume the household is prone to domestic disputes & suicides. Statistics will greatly differ in homes like mine.
- Per Kleck, guns are used in self-defense on the order of a million times per year. His critics say it's a tenth of that. Taking the most conservative approach, this would mean 100,000 cases of self defense, which is far more than the number of murders.
- They don't take storage methods into account, eg, lying around vs in a safe.
- What would the consequences be of having fewer guns for self-defense? Would violent crime increase because people are less able to defend? Would our statistics approach those of Brazil, which has much stricter gun control, but much higher violent crime rates?
- One wonders what other mistakes a medical researcher would make in analyzing gun deaths, compared to a criminologist.

Such studies don't give any useful info about how to conduct one's own affairs, or to guide public policy.
A conclusions such as eschewing guns is simplistic because storing them in a safe, & using them outside
the home could be more beneficial.

Is that number even rational? Kleck is nuts ... if there were a million such cases that means that, on average, one out of every 300 people uses a gun in self defense every year, it just ain't so. In fact, Kleck's dream world is based on self reporting, and 34% of his cases turn out to be "self-reported" by people who were, in fact, committing a armed burglary. You need better sources, like:

Evan DeFilippis:

How To Manufacture A Statistic

In 1997, David Hemenway, a professor of Health Policy at the Harvard School of Public Health, offered the first of many decisive rebukes of Kleck and Getz’s methodology, citing several overarching biases in their study.

First, there is the social desirability bias. Respondents will falsely claim that their gun has been used for its intended purpose—to ward off a criminal—in order to validate their initial purchase. A respondent may also exaggerate facts to appear heroic to the interviewer.

Second, there’s the problem of gun owners responding strategically. Given that there are around 3 million members of the National Rifle Association (NRA) in the United States, ostensibly all aware of the debate surrounding defensive gun use, Hemenway suggested that some gun advocates will lie to help bias estimates upwards by either blatantly fabricating incidents or embellishing situations that should not actually qualify as defensive gun use.

Third is the risk of false positives from “telescoping,” where respondents may recall an actual self-defense use that is outside the question’s time frame. We know that telescoping problems produce substantial biases in defensive gun use estimates because the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), the gold standard of criminal victimization surveys, explicitly catalogs and corrects for it.

Specifically, NCVS asks questions on the household level every 6 months. The first household interview has no time frame. Follow-up interviews are restricted to a six-month time frame and then NCVS corrects for duplicates. Using this strategy, NCVS finds that telescoping alone likely produces at least a 30 percent increase in false positives.

These sorts of biases, which are inherent in reporting self-defense incidents, can lead to nonsensical results. In several crime categories, for example, gun owners would have to protect themselves more than 100 percent of the time for Kleck and Getz’s estimates to make sense. For example, guns were allegedly used in self-defense in 845,000 burglaries, according to Kleck and Getz. However, from reliable victimization surveys, we know that there were fewer than 1.3 million burglaries where someone was in the home at the time of the crime, and only 33 percent of these had occupants who weren’t sleeping. From surveys on firearm ownership, we also know that 42 percent of U.S. households owned firearms at the time of the survey. Even if burglars only rob houses of gun owners, and those gun owners use their weapons in self-defense every single time they are awake, the 845,000 statistic cited in Kleck and Gertz’s paper is simply mathematically impossible.

Despite survey data on defensive gun uses being notoriously unreliable, until recently there have been only scattered attempts at providing an empirical alternative. The first scientific attempt was a study in Arizona, which examined newspaper, police reports and court records for defensive gun uses in the Phoenix area over a 100 day period. At the time Arizona had the 6th highest gun death rate, an above average number of households with firearms and a permissive “shall issue” concealed carry law meaning that defensive gun use should be higher than the national average.

Extrapolating Kleck-Gertz survey results to the Phoenix area would predict 98 defensive killings or injuries and 236 defensive firings during the study period. Instead, the study found a total of 3 defensive gun uses where the gun was fired, including one instance in which a feud between two families exploded into a brawl and several of the participants began firing. These results were much more in line with (but still substantially less than) extrapolated NCVS data, which predicted 8 defensive killings or injuries and 19 firings over the same time frame.

Brand new data compiled by the Gun Violence Archive, a non-partisan organization devoted to collecting gun violence data, further confirms Hemenway’s suspicion that Kleck and Getz’s findings are absurd. The archive found that for all of 2014 there were fewer than 1,600 verified defensive guns uses, meaning a police report was filed. This total includes all outcomes and types of defensive uses with a police report—a far cry from the millions that Kleck and Getz estimated.

Many gun advocates will protest at this point that not all defensive gun uses are reported to the police, which is true. However, Kleck’s surveys and the NCVS reports indicate that more than 50 percent of such incidents are reported to the police. This would indicate 3,200 defensive uses on an annual basis, still well short of what surveys suggest. Further, if there actually are 50,000 defensive gun uses as NCVS’ data suggests, or more than 1 million as Kleck and Getz’s surveys claim, that would mean only 3.2 percent or 0.16 percent respectively of defensive gun uses are reported to the police. Believing that such a small fraction of incidents are reported is indulging in fantasy.

Kleck and Gertz often defend their paper by claiming that their results are consistent with the findings of other private surveys. They explain that the reliability of a survey should be judged by the degree to which it coheres with the estimates of other surveys. However, using a tool we know to be flawed, over and over again, does not increase the quality of estimates deriving from the tool—it merely produces convergence to an arbitrary number. Surveys, for example, regularly show that men have sex with women more often than women have sex with men. Survey results don’t mean anything if they don’t pass muster with reality.

 

[esmith]

I am a gun owner. I favor more restrictive gun laws, even if that means I have to give up my guns. My read of the Second Amendment is that a right of gun possession is extended to an official militia, not to anyone who want a gun.

You are entitled to your views. But you are not entitled to submit me to your views. The 2nd Amendment has been hashed and rehashed too many times to count. As it stands now the SCOTUS has ruled that we have the fundamental right to bear arms. And I can not see armed federal law enforcement officer breaking down citizens doors in search of firearms. That is unless you desire that.

There is way more chance that you will be shot with your own gun or one that belongs to one of your relatives than by a "bad guy" with a gun.

I agree the chances you will be shot with a firearm by a "bad guy" are remote. However I dispute your liberal based anti-gun rhetoric. Note firearm related deaths are down while firearm ownership is up; so how does that figure into your claim. Oh by the way from: http://www.factcheck.org/2015/10/gun-laws-deaths-and-crimes/

Researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital and the Harvard School of Public Health looked at gun laws and gun deaths in all 50 states from 2007 to 2010, concluding that: “A higher number of firearm laws in a state are associated with a lower rate of firearm fatalities in the state, overall and for suicides and homicides individually.” Their research was published in JAMA Internal Medicine in May 2013. But the study said that it couldn’t determine cause-and-effect.

One of the authors, Dr. Eric Fleegler, a pediatric emergency medicine physician at Boston Children’s Hospital, told the Boston Globe that “n states with the most laws, we found a dramatic decreased rate in firearm fatalities, though we can’t say for certain that these laws have led to fewer deaths.”

I am a legal, law-abiding gun owner and the NRA DOES NOT SPEAK FOR ME.

Obviously it doesn't speak for you, but it speaks for me and the million of others who deplore the anti-gun rhetoric of Democrats. You have your champions and we have ours.
I leave you with this article and I think it covers most of the points you have raised. Of course you will attempt to discredit it because it does not conform to your beliefs.
http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2014/05/foghorn/debunking-mother-jones-10-pro-gun-myths-shot/

 

[Shadow Wolf]

Obviously it doesn't speak for you, but it speaks for me and the million of others who deplore the anti-gun rhetoric of Democrats.

I know a bunch of people who are pro-2nd but yet the abhor the NRA for their refusal to acknowledge that we so desperately need an overhaul to our gun regulations.

 

[Sapiens]

You are entitled to your views. But you are not entitled to submit me to your views. The 2nd Amendment has been hashed and rehashed too many times to count. As it stands now the SCOTUS has ruled that we have the fundamental right to bear arms. And I can not see armed federal law enforcement officer breaking down citizens doors in search of firearms. That is unless you desire that.

As it stands now you are correct, I expect that with time and civilization that will change. I don't expect, even then, to have doors broken down (reactionaries are so melodramatic),. Laws will be passed with first mild and later ever harsher penalties for possession and people will turn their guns in as the risk of getting caught, and the severity of the penalty, ratchets up and surpasses the individual owners' threshold of pleasure of possession. I will happily give up my 1911 and my PS90, on Day One. I'll expect that I'll be able to keep my Charles Daley O/U 12 gauge.

I agree the chances you will be shot with a firearm by a "bad guy" are remote. However I dispute your liberal based anti-gun rhetoric. Note firearm related deaths are down while firearm ownership is up; so how does that figure into your claim. Oh by the way from: http://www.factcheck.org/2015/10/gun-laws-deaths-and-crimes/

Your link seems to make my case, but the US/UK comparison is the most telling. I M always amazed how reactionaries want to paint anything they knee-jerk against, especially if it has even a faint ordure of academics or intelligence as "liberal rhetoric," yet they remain every-ready to chug down the most illogical swill, as long as it agrees with their preconceived notions.

I am, by training and disposition a scientist, not an ideologue, I go with the most logical, the most reasonable data and analysis.

Obviously it doesn't speak for you, but it speaks for me and the million of others who deplore the anti-gun rhetoric of Democrats. You have your champions and we have ours.

I am not a Democrat, I have no champions is this argument save the families of the innocent victims who died so that gun owners can be safe in their delusions of virility.

I leave you with this article and I think it covers most of the points you have raised. Of course you will attempt to discredit it because it does not conform to your beliefs.
http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2014/05/foghorn/debunking-mother-jones-10-pro-gun-myths-shot/[/QUOTE]A few quotes:

For 2013, the 10 states with the highest firearm age-adjusted death rates were: Alaska (19.8), Louisiana (19.3), Mississippi (17.8), Alabama (17.6), Arkansas (16.8), Wyoming (16.7), Montana (16.7), Oklahoma (16.5), New Mexico (15.5) and Tennessee (15.4).

The 10 states with the lowest firearm age-adjusted death rates were, starting with the lowest: Hawaii (2.6), Massachusetts (3.1), New York (4.2), Connecticut (4.4), Rhode Island (5.3), New Jersey (5.7), New Hampshire (6.4), Minnesota (7.6), California (7.7) and Iowa (8.0).

But that report also noted weaker gun laws were common among the states with higher gun death rates: “In fact, none of the states with the most gun violence require permits to purchase rifles, shotguns, or handguns. Gun owners are also not required to register their weapons in any of these states. Meanwhile, many of the states with the least gun violence require a permit or other form of identification to buy a gun,”

But what about robberies with a firearm, or aggravated assaults? We calculated firearm robbery rates for the states, using the FBI data for 2014, and the states with the highest rates are Nevada, Mississippi, Georgia, Maryland and Louisiana. Four out of five of those states received an “F” from the groups that advocate tougher gun laws. (We discounted Illinois, which reported limited data to the FBI.)

We then did the same rate calculation for aggravated assaults with a firearm in 2014. The top five states: Tennessee, South Carolina, Arkansas, Louisiana and Delaware. The last state was the only one not to receive an “F.”

... and that's from your quoted source.

Do keep in mind that your big gun in this argument , is just a popgune. The JAMA article that said, "... it couldn’t determine cause-and-effect." and Fleegler's similarly observation that “in states with the most laws, we found a dramatic decreased rate in firearm fatalities, though we can’t say for certain that these laws have led to fewer deaths.” are naught but the standard boilerplate warning whenever there is a statistical correlation (which is usually enough for the general public) with a clear causality (which is a nicety required by science).

 

[Altfish]

Well I guess I should have said What you fail to understand is that here in the US we have always valued our rights to own firearms. Make you happy?
No guns are not dangerous, people are dangerous. A gun is an inanimate object that is incapable of doing anything without human interaction.

Cars are not dangerous it is the people who drive them that cause the accidents. So, the government makes people pass a test, makes them hold a license, prosecutes them for driving under the influence or driving too fast.

 

[Revoltingest]

Is that number even rational?

Just as with studies which claim my home is more dangerous with my gun than without,
Kleck's results don't pass my smell test. But in reading criticism of his work, opponents
say he's an order of magnitude too high. This still leaves over 100,000 cases/year of
guns being used in self defense.

Kleck is nuts ...

That's too glib.
But if he were, so are the authors of the anti-gun studies I criticize, for their ignoring the scenarios I listed.
So instead of "nuts", let's just say that some works deserve further examination.

.....if there were a million such cases that means that, on average, one out of every 300 people uses a gun in self defense every year, it just ain't so. In fact, Kleck's dream world is based on self reporting, and 34% of his cases turn out to be "self-reported" by people who were, in fact, committing a armed burglary. You need better sources, like:

Evan DeFilippis:

How To Manufacture A Statistic

In 1997, David Hemenway, a professor of Health Policy at the Harvard School of Public Health, offered the first of many decisive rebukes of Kleck and Getz’s methodology, citing several overarching biases in their study.

First, there is the social desirability bias. Respondents will falsely claim that their gun has been used for its intended purpose—to ward off a criminal—in order to validate their initial purchase. A respondent may also exaggerate facts to appear heroic to the interviewer.

Second, there’s the problem of gun owners responding strategically. Given that there are around 3 million members of the National Rifle Association (NRA) in the United States, ostensibly all aware of the debate surrounding defensive gun use, Hemenway suggested that some gun advocates will lie to help bias estimates upwards by either blatantly fabricating incidents or embellishing situations that should not actually qualify as defensive gun use.

Third is the risk of false positives from “telescoping,” where respondents may recall an actual self-defense use that is outside the question’s time frame. We know that telescoping problems produce substantial biases in defensive gun use estimates because the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), the gold standard of criminal victimization surveys, explicitly catalogs and corrects for it.

Specifically, NCVS asks questions on the household level every 6 months. The first household interview has no time frame. Follow-up interviews are restricted to a six-month time frame and then NCVS corrects for duplicates. Using this strategy, NCVS finds that telescoping alone likely produces at least a 30 percent increase in false positives.

These sorts of biases, which are inherent in reporting self-defense incidents, can lead to nonsensical results. In several crime categories, for example, gun owners would have to protect themselves more than 100 percent of the time for Kleck and Getz’s estimates to make sense. For example, guns were allegedly used in self-defense in 845,000 burglaries, according to Kleck and Getz. However, from reliable victimization surveys, we know that there were fewer than 1.3 million burglaries where someone was in the home at the time of the crime, and only 33 percent of these had occupants who weren’t sleeping. From surveys on firearm ownership, we also know that 42 percent of U.S. households owned firearms at the time of the survey. Even if burglars only rob houses of gun owners, and those gun owners use their weapons in self-defense every single time they are awake, the 845,000 statistic cited in Kleck and Gertz’s paper is simply mathematically impossible.

Despite survey data on defensive gun uses being notoriously unreliable, until recently there have been only scattered attempts at providing an empirical alternative. The first scientific attempt was a study in Arizona, which examined newspaper, police reports and court records for defensive gun uses in the Phoenix area over a 100 day period. At the time Arizona had the 6th highest gun death rate, an above average number of households with firearms and a permissive “shall issue” concealed carry law meaning that defensive gun use should be higher than the national average.

Extrapolating Kleck-Gertz survey results to the Phoenix area would predict 98 defensive killings or injuries and 236 defensive firings during the study period. Instead, the study found a total of 3 defensive gun uses where the gun was fired, including one instance in which a feud between two families exploded into a brawl and several of the participants began firing. These results were much more in line with (but still substantially less than) extrapolated NCVS data, which predicted 8 defensive killings or injuries and 19 firings over the same time frame.

Brand new data compiled by the Gun Violence Archive, a non-partisan organization devoted to collecting gun violence data, further confirms Hemenway’s suspicion that Kleck and Getz’s findings are absurd. The archive found that for all of 2014 there were fewer than 1,600 verified defensive guns uses, meaning a police report was filed. This total includes all outcomes and types of defensive uses with a police report—a far cry from the millions that Kleck and Getz estimated.

Many gun advocates will protest at this point that not all defensive gun uses are reported to the police, which is true. However, Kleck’s surveys and the NCVS reports indicate that more than 50 percent of such incidents are reported to the police. This would indicate 3,200 defensive uses on an annual basis, still well short of what surveys suggest. Further, if there actually are 50,000 defensive gun uses as NCVS’ data suggests, or more than 1 million as Kleck and Getz’s surveys claim, that would mean only 3.2 percent or 0.16 percent respectively of defensive gun uses are reported to the police. Believing that such a small fraction of incidents are reported is indulging in fantasy.

Kleck and Gertz often defend their paper by claiming that their results are consistent with the findings of other private surveys. They explain that the reliability of a survey should be judged by the degree to which it coheres with the estimates of other surveys. However, using a tool we know to be flawed, over and over again, does not increase the quality of estimates deriving from the tool—it merely produces convergence to an arbitrary number. Surveys, for example, regularly show that men have sex with women more often than women have sex with men. Survey results don’t mean anything if they don’t pass muster with reality.

What I conclude is that all statistical studies should be questioned.
(Note that I doubted even the pro-gun one I referred to.)
The danger-in-the-home claim just doesn't match the reality I see with acquaintances,
none of whom have endured an improper death, but who have used them in self defense.

Hey, you're pretty good at this conversation stuff!
Not once have you accused me of watching Fox.

 

[Underhill]

The AR-15 has a magazine, not a clip.

The definition isn't all over the place. They are designed for military use, have full-auto/select fire, magazine fed, and have an effective range of about 330 yards. The StG 44, AK-47, the less common AK-74, M16, AMP-69, Colt C7, AR-18, FAMAS, or SAR-21. The letters "AR" do not even stand for assault rifle, but rather ArmaLite Rifle, the name of the arms manufacturer that makes the AR-numbered rifles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assault_rifles
By strict definition, a firearm must have the following characteristics to be considered an assault rifle:[2][3][4]

• It must be an individual weapon;
• It must be capable of selective fire, which means it has the capacity to switch between semiautomatic and fully automatic fire.
• It must have an intermediate-power cartridge: more power than a pistol but less than a standard rifle or battle rifle;
• Its ammunition must be supplied from a detachable box magazine;
• And it should at least have an effective range of 300 metres (330 yards).

Maybe so, but by that definition, the AR-15 and AK-47 do not meet the definition and those that do barely exist in private hands. And these are the two most targeted by the anti gun crowd.

 

[esmith]

Maybe so, but by that definition, the AR-15 and AK-47 do not meet the definition and those that do barely exist in private hands. And these are the two most targeted by the anti gun crowd.

As the old commercial goes....Sorry Charlie, Well at least partial wrong. The AK-47 is a fully automatic weapon, it can be fired in semi-auto mode (1 round per trigger action) and full automatic(will empty it's magazine with one pull of the rigger). This model is the original USSR weapon put into service in 1949. This weapon was produced throughout the world and is the favorite weapon of terrorist and rebel armies(?). The reason for this is it is cheap, reliable, and doesn't require much if any maintenance. Now the average citizen of the US can only buy a AK 47 clone (semi-auto only) unless you go through a ton of paperwork and there are a lot of does and don't associated with a Class III weapon. In addition a "civilian" can not own a Class III weapon manufactured after 1986.
As I have said before there is no such firearm that is an "assault rifle/weapon" in the vernacular of firearm manufactures throughout the world. "Assault rifles/weapons" is a term used by politicians and those that have little or no understanding of firearms other than they look scary and they are only meant to kill people., However, the over-usage of the term has found it's way into our language. However, those of us that really understand weapons the term is, for all practical purposes , incorrect and undefinable.

 

[Underhill]

As the old commercial goes....Sorry Charlie, Well at least partial wrong. The AK-47 is a fully automatic weapon, it can be fired in semi-auto mode (1 round per trigger action) and full automatic(will empty it's magazine with one pull of the rigger). This model is the original USSR weapon put into service in 1949. This weapon was produced throughout the world and is the favorite weapon of terrorist and rebel armies(?). The reason for this is it is cheap, reliable, and doesn't require much if any maintenance. Now the average citizen of the US can only buy a AK 47 clone (semi-auto only) unless you go through a ton of paperwork and there are a lot of does and don't associated with a Class III weapon. In addition a "civilian" can not own a Class III weapon manufactured after 1986.
As I have said before there is no such firearm that is an "assault rifle/weapon" in the vernacular of firearm manufactures throughout the world. "Assault rifles/weapons" is a term used by politicians and those that have little or no understanding of firearms other than they look scary and they are only meant to kill people., However, the over-usage of the term has found it's way into our language. However, those of us that really understand weapons the term is, for all practical purposes , incorrect and undefinable.

I actually knew all that. But the vast majority of AK's Americans have and talk about are either clones, or Imported models that have been converted to semi-auto only. I've shot at least one AK and a couple AR's (AR-15 and the larger AR that shoots .308... I forget the model). I don't claim to be an expert, but I know more than most.

This was my point. What is an "Assault Rifle" and what Americans (and American politicians) think of as assault rifles are two very different things.

 

[Sapiens]

I actually knew all that. But the vast majority of AK's Americans have and talk about are either clones, or Imported models that have been converted to semi-auto only. I've shot at least one AK and a couple AR's (AR-15 and the larger AR that shoots .308... I forget the model). I don't claim to be an expert, but I know more than most.

This was my point. What is an "Assault Rifle" and what Americans (and American politicians) think of as assault rifles are two very different things.

Assault rifles are like pornography, hard to define but you know it when you see it. My PS90 is clearly an "assault rifle" especially if I fit a shorter barrel.

 

[metis]

As I have said before there is no such firearm that is an "assault rifle/weapon" in the vernacular of firearm manufactures throughout the world. "Assault rifles/weapons" is a term used by politicians and those that have little or no understanding of firearms other than they look scary and they are only meant to kill people., However, the over-usage of the term has found it's way into our language. However, those of us that really understand weapons the term is, for all practical purposes , incorrect and undefinable.

However:

An assault rifle is a selective-fire rifle that uses an intermediate cartridge and a detachable magazine. Assault rifles were first used during World War II. Though Western nations were slow to accept the assault rifle concept after World War II, by the end of the 20th century they had become the standard weapon in most of the world's armies, replacing battle rifles and sub-machine guns. Examples include the StG 44, AK-47 and the M16 rifle...

In a strict definition, a firearm must have at least the following characteristics to be considered an assault rifle:

• It must be an individual weapon
• It must be capable of selective fire
• It must have an intermediate-power cartridge: more power than a pistol but less than a standard rifle or battle rifle
• Its ammunition must be supplied from a detachable box magazine
• And it should have an effective range of at least 300 metres (330 yards)

Rifles that meet most of these criteria, but not all, are technically not assault rifles despite frequently being called such...

The U.S. Army defines assault rifles as "short, compact, selective-fire weapons that fire a cartridge intermediate in power between submachine gun and rifle cartridges." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assault_rifle

 

[Underhill]

However:

An assault rifle is a selective-fire rifle that uses an intermediate cartridge and a detachable magazine. Assault rifles were first used during World War II. Though Western nations were slow to accept the assault rifle concept after World War II, by the end of the 20th century they had become the standard weapon in most of the world's armies, replacing battle rifles and sub-machine guns. Examples include the StG 44, AK-47 and the M16 rifle...

In a strict definition, a firearm must have at least the following characteristics to be considered an assault rifle:

• It must be an individual weapon
• It must be capable of selective fire
• It must have an intermediate-power cartridge: more power than a pistol but less than a standard rifle or battle rifle
• Its ammunition must be supplied from a detachable box magazine
• And it should have an effective range of at least 300 metres (330 yards)

Rifles that meet most of these criteria, but not all, are technically not assault rifles despite frequently being called such...

The U.S. Army defines assault rifles as "short, compact, selective-fire weapons that fire a cartridge intermediate in power between submachine gun and rifle cartridges." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assault_rifle

You can post definitions all day long. But what has been regulated as assault rifles does not meet those criteria.

http://programs.governor.ny.gov/assets/documents/RiflesthatAREclassifiedasassaultweapons.pdf

 

[metis]

You can post definitions all day long. But what has been regulated as assault rifles does not meet those criteria.

http://programs.governor.ny.gov/assets/documents/RiflesthatAREclassifiedasassaultweapons.pdf

Read my response within the context of what esmith wrote.

 

[Underhill]

Read my response within the context of what esmith wrote.

I get that. But he is half right.

Definitions are shaky things. The military has a definition. The politicians have a definition. The average guy on the street has a definition. And the NRA says there is no definition.

Who is right depends on your definition.

My point is that while the definition is open to debate, the difference between an AR-15 and my .223 semi auto hunting rifle mostly boils down to aesthetics. The only real difference is the number of shots it can hold.

I would also point out that if we base what is restricted based upon the number of attacks or the number of murders, the handgun makes the top of every list while assault rifles of the type banned by NYS barely even make the list.

 

[Shadow Wolf]

Maybe so, but by that definition, the AR-15 and AK-47 do not meet the definition and those that do barely exist in private hands.

The AR-15, no. The AK-47, on the other hand, is an assault rifle, and is the most popular and widely used assault rifles in the world. They're reliable, easy to use, very low maintenance, and very good at what they do. And the reason you rarely find assault rifles in private hands is because they are not legal to own.

You can post definitions all day long. But what has been regulated as assault rifles does not meet those criteria.

And the drug scheduling system has things entirely wrong on that, such as pot, which is classified as schedule 1, even though it meets none of the criteria and it has a great deal of potential for medicinal use. According to the feds, methamphetamine is not nearly as dangerous and it doesn't have nearly the potential for abuse as pot. Opiate medications, which kill thousands yearly, are not as dangerous as pot, which has killed fewer people that drinking too much water at once. And xanax, another one that is widely abused, potentially addictive, destructive due to long-term usage, and a fairly common suicide pill, is considered less dangerous than pot. And this is all topped by the fact that alcohol and tobacco are not even on the controlled substance list, yet the fact they are both very addictive, very destructive, and very deadly (especially tobacco).

Definitions are shaky things. The military has a definition. The politicians have a definition. The average guy on the street has a definition. And the NRA says there is no definition.

Those who are at least fairly knowledgeable about guns often have the same or similar definition as the military, which tends to be guns that are frequently and typically used in war zones. The average guy on the street probably doesn't know that much about guns, and probably lives in the city which means he probably doesn't have much exposure to guns, thus he cannot be relied on for an accurate definition. The politicians will define it as whatever they're supposed to, which is often coming from the average guy on the street who has little experience and knowledge of guns.

 

[dust1n]

The AR-15, no. The AK-47, on the other hand, is an assault rifle, and is the most popular and widely used assault rifles in the world. They're reliable, easy to use, very low maintenance, and very good at what they do. And the reason you rarely find assault rifles in private hands is because they are not legal to own.

I've shot an AK-47 and have known two people one to own one. Of course, not fully automatic.