What's behind the surge in gun sales isn't the idea that militias will need to overthrow a tyrannical government but rather that what happened back in the early 90s with Clinton - new gun restrictions - will make certain currently available weapons unavailable.

Wait a second. Isn't one of the gun lobby's heavy arguments against banning handguns that such bans won't work because you just can't keep the loonies from their beloved guns - that anyone who wants one will still be able to get one? Seems to me we have a bunch of loonies here demonstrating that they believe the exact opposite - that "restrictions will make certain weapons unavailable".

Hey, let's try that with Saturday Night Specials. It's worth a "shot".

Largely incorrect. Even disagreeing with the right to private ownership of firearms, it is unobservant and disrespectful to believe that hunters - the primary owners or Remingtons - are loonies. They are people with a hobby that you do not like. That is a long way from saying they are crazy.

Your observation is wrong too. The gun owners that are buying guns are doing so through lawful means. Yes, restrictions in the law do make it harder for people to legally buy guns. However, criminals do not consider themselves bound by the law. Any in depth reporting, police, and FBI reports show that criminals acquire guns through illegal methods, whether through straw buyers (finding somebody who meets all legal restrictions) or robbery. Indeed, in countries with more restrictive laws guns used by criminals get traded around and are used by many criminals for many individual crimes.

This shows that reducing the supply for criminals is harder than it seems. Remove the legal supply and the illegal supply gets extended. The amount of guns out there is also huge, so for the next decade your "plan" may bear no fruit.

Other than that, spot on.

Hunters have nothing to do with it. No one is proposing a ban on hunting weapons. The NRA always makes the same phony argument, that the feds are going to take away your deer rifle. Well, bull.

And you know perfectly well that you or I or anyone with some nice green cash can go to a gun show and buy a gun of almost any kind, no questions asked. Legality hardly enters into it.

You overestimate the skill of those hunters: a 30-round clip and full auto is usually necessary at ranges over 25 yards. And the grenade launchers work great against heavily dug in rabbits.

Without gun shows, how are we supposed to get our next Columbine?

mikestand:

Wait a second. Isn't one of the gun lobby's heavy arguments against banning handguns that such bans won't work because you just can't keep the loonies from their beloved guns - that anyone who wants one will still be able to get one? Seems to me we have a bunch of loonies here demonstrating that they believe the exact opposite - that "restrictions will make certain weapons unavailable".

Hey, let's try that with Saturday Night Specials. It's worth a "shot".

The belief is that you cannot keep _criminals_ from getting guns.

The gun buyers' fear is that in the future they might not be able to buy them without risking felony convictions. Most of the gang members, in contrast, aren't worried about the risk of a felony conviction because they already _have_ felony convictions and anyway are not in the market for the kind of jobs for which felony convictions are an obstacle.

And you know perfectly well that you or I or anyone with some nice green cash can go to a gun show and buy a gun of almost any kind, no questions asked. Legality hardly enters into it.

Obviously, you've never been to a gun show. Your statement could be true for some shows -- but it is equally true for the classified ads in most newspapers. It is false for the gun shows I attend, where every transfer requires a form 4473 be filed with an FFL holder.

It isn't illegal for a private citizen, in legal ownership of a firearm, to sell that firearm to another private citizen in most states. California, Massachusetts, Illinois and possibly a couple of which I'm unaware, require the registration of these "secondary sales."

The gun buyers' fear is that in the future they might not be able to buy them without risking felony convictions. Most of the gang members, in contrast, aren't worried about the risk of a felony conviction because they already _have_ felony convictions and anyway are not in the market for the kind of jobs for which felony convictions are an obstacle.

You hit the nail on the head. Most guns owners are also law abiding citizens. Making something legal or not does not affect it's availability (think drugs and alcoholic).

Faustling: You also err in thinking there is a significant difference between "hunting" guns and the guns banned in the 1993 Assault Weapons Ban. There isn't.

The term `semiautomatic assault weapon' means--
`(A) any of the firearms, or copies or duplicates of the
firearms in any caliber, known as--
`(i) Norinco, Mitchell, and Poly Technologies Avtomat
Kalashnikovs (all models);
`(ii) Action Arms Israeli Military Industries UZI and
Galil;
`(iii) Beretta Ar70 (SC-70);
`(iv) Colt AR-15;
`(v) Fabrique National FN/FAL, FN/LAR, and FNC;
`(vi) SWD M-10, M-11, M-11/9, and M-12;
`(vii) Steyr AUG;
`(viii) INTRATEC TEC-9, TEC-DC9 and TEC-22; and
`(ix) revolving cylinder shotguns, such as (or similar
to) the Street Sweeper and Striker 12;
`(B) a semiautomatic rifle that has an ability to accept a
detachable magazine and has at least 2 of--
`(i) a folding or telescoping stock;
`(ii) a pistol grip that protrudes conspicuously beneath
the action of the weapon;
`(iii) a bayonet mount;
`(iv) a flash suppressor or threaded barrel designed to
accommodate a flash suppressor; and
`(v) a grenade launcher;
`(C) a semiautomatic pistol that has an ability to accept a
detachable magazine and has at least 2 of--
`(i) an ammunition magazine that attaches to the pistol
outside of the pistol grip;
`(ii) a threaded barrel capable of accepting a barrel
extender, flash suppressor, forward handgrip, or silencer;
`(iii) a shroud that is attached to, or partially or
completely encircles, the barrel and that permits the
shooter to hold the firearm with the nontrigger hand
without being burned;
`(iv) a manufactured weight of 50 ounces or more when the
pistol is unloaded; and
`(v) a semiautomatic version of an automatic firearm; and
`(D) a semiautomatic shotgun that has at least 2 of--
`(i) a folding or telescoping stock;
`(ii) a pistol grip that protrudes conspicuously beneath
the action of the weapon;
`(iii) a fixed magazine capacity in excess of 5 rounds; and
`(iv) an ability to accept a detachable magazine.'.
<link>

I don't remember the last time I needed a bayonet, flash suppressor, folding stock, grenade launcher or banana clip, but probably you are accustomed to a different style of hunting.

I don't remember the last time I needed a bayonet, flash suppressor, folding stock, grenade launcher or banana clip, but probably you are accustomed to a different style of hunting.

Can you remember (or better yet, identify statistically) the last time you heard about someone being bayonetted? Killed by a folding stock or a flash suppressor? I assume, perhaps invalidly, that you object to a "banana clip" (meaningless term, really) on the grounds of its "high" capacity to carry ammo -- but I haven't found any viable studies that indicate that capacity leads to more violent crime.

Bottom line, there really is no such thing as a "semiautomatic assault rifle." The first assault rifle, known as the "Sturmgewehr 44" was developed for the German Army in the eponymous year. From its inception until about 1990, "assault rifle" had a very defined meaning among firearms experts. It was a rifle capable of fully-automatic or semi-automatic fire that used ammunition more powerful than the pistol ammunition used by a submachinegun, and less powerful than rifle ammunition used by "main battle rifles" (the M-1 Garand used by the U.S. in WWII is such a main battle rifle - -it is a semiauto).

"Semiautomatic assault rifle" didn't come along as a term until politicians got involved -- they realized that semiautos that looked like their military counterparts looked "scary" to people who don't know much about firearms. Functionally, there is no difference at all between the semiauto version of the AK-47 and the "non-assault rifle" made by Remington as a 740 or 7400 (depending on generation) or any of a dozen semiauto shotguns made since about 1911 -- all of them do the exact same thing mechanically. They fire one shot each time the trigger is pulled. They do that whether they cosmetically resemble an M-16, or they look like the shotgun used as the teaser photo for the article that leads to our current conversation.

Why was the term semiautomatic assualt rifle coined and accepted? Irrational fear of appearance -- in other words, paranoia.

"Bottom line, there really is no such thing as a "'semiautomatic assault rifle.'"

Even though they don't exist, they are incredibly useful for killing people.

<link>

I've never seen anyone use them for killing deer, however.

I have a friend who regularly uses an AK-47 in the deer woods. Its cartridge, the 7.62x39mm cartridge, is ballistically very similar to the .30-30, and no more lethal than the .30-30. Are you gong to argue that those ballistics aren't hunting ballistics? I know a lot of deer hunters who will disagree with you.

You cite an article from a 12-year-old magazine about the U.S. arming both sides in Mexico's drug war. More recent data seems to indicate that between 5 and 17 percent of the guns used illegally in that conflict came from the United States. They're sourcing the rest of them elsewhere.

Of course, narco-dollars don't have to be invested in semi-auto AK-47s; they can buy the real thing that fires both in both full and semiautomatic modes.

"Semiautomatic assault rifle" is a null term -- please explain to me the difference, other than cosmetic, between a semiautomatic assault rifle and any other semiautomatic rifle?

Faustling:

I don't remember the last time I needed a bayonet, flash suppressor, folding stock, grenade launcher or banana clip, but probably you are accustomed to a different style of hunting.

As far as civilian use, whether criminal or law-abiding, is concerned, those are all cosmetic features. Nobody is committing drive-by bayonettings or launching rifle grenades at each other. None of them make the rifle function differently in any way from grandpa's semiauto deer rifle. The banana clip makes a difference, but that's not what the law addresses: there's no such thing as a rifle capable of accepting only a small-capacity detachable magazine, only rifles that are not commonly marketed with high-cap magazines.

And amusingly enough, the article you cited only confirms the point about "assault weapons," even if the author is too ignorant to appreciate it. All those automatic M-2 carbines headed for Mexican gangs? Not a single one of them was produced for or at any time available to the civilian market. And the parts supposedly bought at gun shows to make a full-auto M-16? They were running somewhere in the ballpark of $10k a pop last time I checked, a bit over the budget of the average Mexican gangbanger, I expect. If Mexican gang members are machine-gunning each other and the police in the streets, they're doing it with guns that were stolen from the police or, more likely, the military, or smuggled in from someplace with a corrupt government and lots of surplus military arms.

And to cap the irony, the really amusing thing about the whole "high-powered assault rifle" nonsense is that one of the defining characteristics of an assault rifle is that it shoots ammo that is *less* powerful than the sort of cartridges normally used to shoot deer. The Germans and Russians figured out in the course of WW2 that overkill was a military liability. (It isn't overkill in hunting because, unlike combat, the object in hunting isn't to disable the target and/or cause it to die hours or days later, but to kill it right then and there so it can be retrieved.) The main reason you can't use an AR-15 for deer hunting is that in most states the law mandates a heavier cartridge than the 5.56mm for deer.