That was discussed in several posts above. It is any assault weapon. A semi-automatic is a weapon that is "immediately ready to fire another shot" and "automatically load(s) the next round" which "allows for rapid fire." An automatic weapon can fire more bullets with one trigger pull, like a submachine gun.Originally Posted by Joral
Ok, so you're covering basically every handgun and revolver out there, and a large percentage of other sporting rifles and other shotguns. In other words, it's a description so overly broad as to be meaningless except to someone whose goal is to ban everything.
"On the day the storm has just begun I will still hope there are better days to come."
@ Lenin&Marx - AR-15's were never intended to go full auto. While it is possible to convert them, it's not easy, and it requires parts that are usually pretty well monitored by the ATF when legitimately manufactured. You can't just run out to the store and get a conversion kit and it's all shennanigans from there.
Also, I wouldn't rely on Millennials banning anything. They tend to resent the helmet culture they were raised under.
@ Eric - The point that you seem to not understand is that there is no "rapid fire" function to semi-auto. "Rapid fire" can only be described as a feature of full auto guns. There has never been a full auto gun used in a spree shooting, ever. The articles you posted are by journalists and frankly, they're not trained to research enough to know what they're talking about before they talk about it, so most do not.
I tend to disagree. Being predominantly liberal as defined today, I think they understand the importance of government, and the need to regulate and control what should not be allowed in civilized society. Being raised to understand that, they understand. It is Xers, especially core Xers, who tend to go off over the edge of excess individualism.
I cannot assume that you know more than the journalists and wikipedia writers. They have described semi-automatics well enough, and what they are is pretty clear. Senators Feinstein and Schumer know too. No-one has any business with a semi-automatic; these are military weapons.@ Eric - The point that you seem to not understand is that there is no "rapid fire" function to semi-auto. "Rapid fire" can only be described as a feature of full auto guns. There has never been a full auto gun used in a spree shooting, ever. The articles you posted are by journalists and frankly, they're not trained to research enough to know what they're talking about before they talk about it, so most do not.
The gun Adam Lanza used was certainly an excellent example of what should NOT be allowed, and that is obvious from what happened. You can't deny the reports about what happened at Sandy Hook, or claim they "don't know what they are talking about." There is NO dispute about that; Lanza used a "rapid fire weapon." He fired hundreds of bullets, and every student was shot at-least several times, all within a few minutes. To twaddle and dawdle over this is irresponsible. If you denigrade journalists, like the right-wing does, you just don't want to face the facts. They are trained to know and report the facts reasonably accurately. We don't need to be experts on every detail about guns, as you and Semo seem to think. Either you are concerned with safety from lunatics with guns, or you are not. Which is it Kepi?
I don't think that is the intent of those proposing bans on the kinds of weapon that Lanza and the other mass shooters used; do you really think so?
"A semi-automatic is a weapon that is "immediately ready to fire another shot" and "automatically load(s) the next round" which "allows for rapid fire." " It loads automatically with each shot, and it can load huge magazines. What about that do you not understand? Or are you just another gun nut who wants to protect his fetish rather than protect innocent people? Good grief, there are so many of you here.
We can't "ban everything;" there are too many of you now who want your guns. We can't enforce such a ban by force. We certainly need to restrict access to all guns, as severely as possible in urban areas, register every one we can, and ban military weapons in the hands of civilians. Those are clearly-stated, unambiguous goals. Don't make them into more than they are; that is just scare tactics. It exposes you as someone afraid of losing your gun. If you have any courage at all, you would get rid of your gun voluntarily, right now, and forever.
I once was at a range during a visit to a friend in a state with liberal firearm laws (extreme opposite of my home state CA). There was a guy firing a MAC-10 with a rotary magazine. I thought to myself, not only did he cough up serious $$ for the gun, he was also full auto and going through rounds faster than I could burn up premium single malt. He was either a fool or very wealthy.
Definition
In this thread, Humpty Dumpty has triumphed. It means whatever the author of the post intends it to mean.
In other places, "rapid fire" means the gun fires rapidly. If you pull the trigger, it shoots and keeps on shooting. Thus, "rapid fire" and "automatic" or "fully automatic" have similar meanings.
This is not strictly true if one is holding a technical discussion. 'Automatic' has a technical meaning that energy from the recoil of one shot is used to load the next shot into the firing chamber. Thus, a revolver is not the same as a semi automatic, even though both fire one shot every time one pulls the trigger. Also, technically, a fully automatic weapon and a Gatling Gun are not the same, even though both are rapid fire weapons.
There are also outlier weapons. There have been a few rapid fire weapons designed using revolver technology. They were long ago and never popular, but they were there. I wouldn't be surprised that there would be exceptions to a lot of broadly true statements.
There have been lots of weapons designs and a quite extensive vocabulary used to describe them. In general, don't trust anyone supporting gun control to have mastered the vocabulary.
***
It seems like the momentum is growing to renew the assault weapon ban. Assault weapons, such as the AK 47 and the M 16 are a class of long automatic weapons very much favored by modern militaries as the bread and butter infantry weapon. The civilian equivalent is the AR-15, based on many of the same parts as the M 16, but the AR 15 is limited to being a semi automatic weapon. It shoots one shot per trigger pull, not multiple. The AR 15 is not a rapid fire weapon, while the M 16 is.
The difference is a few parts. At one point there were conversion kits that could effectively turn an AR 15 to an M 16, turning an AR 15 into a rapid fire or fully automatic weapon. I suspect said kits are still out there.
I'm not sure of the wording of the proposed assault weapon ban. An AR 15 looks like a fully automatic assault weapon, can be converted into a fully automatic assault weapon, but is a single shot semi-automatic. As such, an unmodified AR 15 has essentially identical capabilities to many other weapons with more traditional appearance which are not going to end up being banned. Equally capable guns with more wood external parts and no curved magazine will likely continue to be available.
The other problem is constitutional. If one takes prior Supreme Court cases seriously, the one gun that most explicitly cannot be banned is the M 16, the most common gun used by the US Army's infantry, the western world's preeminent assault rifle. When you combine the court cases saying the federal government cannot regulate weapons used by Army infantrymen with the recent case saying the 2nd grants an individual right, you have a problem.
The above factor is so counter intuitive in the modern era that a constitutional amendment almost seems possible. The founding fathers wrote the Constitution in an era of muzzle loading weapons, in an era when the militia filled the role commonly filled today by police and professional armies. The old rules, while they worked well enough in the old days, are by no means clearly ideal for all time and forever.
But getting a supermajority of states to endorse the change won't be a trivial exercise.
The other thing one might try is banning assault rifles knowing full well the ban is unconstitutional. The logic would be that the Constitution in this case is so obviously wrong that it ought to be ignored.
I don't like the precedent.
Last edited by B Butler; 12-18-2012 at 07:23 PM.
It loads automatically with each shot. That is the "semi-automatic" part. It enables the shooter to shoot hundreds of bullets without reloading from huge magazines/clips. That makes it "rapid fire" and that was demonstrated at Newtown and other places. It is a military weapon that should not be allowed outside the military.
The "bad precedent" is the current right-wing court that overturned the original meaning of the 2nd amendment, and has now interpreted it as an individual right because of pressure from the NRA and the Republican Party. The army and the police is our well-regulated militia, and the constitution protects its right to keep and bear arms just fine.The other thing one might try is banning assault rifles knowing full well the ban is unconstitutional. The logic would be that the Constitution in this case is so obviously wrong that it ought to be ignored.
I don't like the precedent.
The 2nd amendment is outdated and should be repealed. I close my eyes, and I can see a better day. I know, in this case it will be a long long time coming.
But we can certainly protect our kids and teachers in school and other innocent folks out shopping and watching movies from creeps and nuts with military weapons; at least by law, if not for a while in fact.
Values
Inhale. Exhale. Center yourself. Open the mind to new information. I know it is hard. You can do it with effort.
Automatic indicates that the next shot is loaded into the chamber by energy from the recoil of the previous shot. Automatics are a class of weapons distinct from revolvers, Gatling Guns or muzzle loaders which use entirely different loading techniques.
A semi automatic is a subclass of automatics that shoots a single round per pull of the trigger. An automatic or fully automatic weapon fires multiple rounds per pull of the trigger. The word 'semi' when applied to automatic implies a single shot per trigger pull.
Inhale. Exhale. Center yourself. Open the mind to new information. I know it is hard. You can do it with effort.
The founding fathers had just won a revolution in which an armed populace played a significant role. This was the peak of an era when large armies including citizens soldiers who owned and trained on their own weapons in peace time. The presence of a militia as a significant military force effected politics. The notion that citizens had rights really did flow from the fact that citizens had weapons. England was a pioneer in using militia to supplement their professional military. It started with the yew longbow, and with having to repel viking raids in an era when the professional army wasn't big enough to be anywhere a viking raid might strike. Britain armed their peasants out of military necessity. Once they were armed, the militia principle allowed the small country of Britain to challenge the large country of France, as France stuck with the older tradition of disarming the peasants.
The military necessity had political effects. The price, in the English Civil War, was that the side that favored the rights of the common man tended to have a bigger army than the side that favored royalty. The first of these rights was the right (for protestants at least) to keep and bear arms.
The justification clause of the 2nd Amendment is a values statement, "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state". The founding fathers believed a well regulated militia was necessary to the security of the free state. Bold. Underline. If one reads US and English history one can understand why this was a core value at the time. If one is incapable of comprehending the old values, one cannot comprehend either the modern gun culture or the legal history.
If one reads the Constitution, one finds that the US President is commander in chief of the militia, but the president cannot call up the militia, only Congress can do this. The militia can be called up by Congress to enforce laws, suppress insurrections and repel invasions. Thus, the militia cannot be asked to serve outside the US. Congress has the authority to write regulations and training documents such that the militia of all states learn the same drills and can operate with one another. However, militia officers are appointed by the states. This was so the militia would more likely be loyal to their state than to the untrusted federal government. The founding fathers were also distrustful of a standing federal army. It was hoped that the federal government would be unable to militarily dominate the states as the standing federal army would be badly outnumbered by the militia. Note, also, that the states needed permission from the US Congress to raise a professional standing army. There is a real distinction between the militia - all adult males of military age - and the National Guard - an paid professional force that receives training over and above that given the general population. The militia has a right to exist and to be armed that cannot be denied by either state or federal governments. The National Guard can exist only with permission of the federal Congress, and the federal President can nationalize the National Guard, trumping the authority of the state governor.
It is hard to step outside of one's own values, to look back in history, to stretch one's mind to see how people thought at the time. It is easy to assume that one's own values are Right and True and that no other values have any meaning. A lot of folk on this board and elsewhere traditionally operate in 'my values only' mode, unable to comprehend or to attempt to comprehend where other people are coming from.
You seem to be among them. The United States was a frontier culture. Federal troops couldn't be everywhere one wanted to be. An armed and organized population really was the natural defense for a free state. We have long since lacked a frontier. The general public has not been armed and trained sufficiently to stand up to professional militaries in a long time. The rules that worked in building our country are thus long obsolete.
But a lot of the old rules are still on the books. One should be aware of why they were written and the culture of the time they were written before jumping into a 2nd Amendment discussion.
One possible partial solution is for Congress to admit women into the militia, and to write training documents and other regulations governing all members of the militia that keep and bear arms. The founding fathers were not stupid. If the population was to be armed, they were also required to be trained to handle weapons responsibly. If the Constitution as written doesn't allow the banning of military infantry weapons, Congress has a bunch of authority that has not been invoked in centuries.
Still, the officers would be appointed by the states.
I am not absolutely certain that the unraveling stalemate will hold at this point. Through the 3T there wasn't a lot of movement. Yes, there was a movement towards concealed carry among the red states. In 2008 the Supreme Court repealed the Jim Crow interpretation of the 2nd Amendment, restoring the original individual right for citizens to keep and bear weapons. That the weapons they most had a right to keep and bear are military weapons suitable for use by a militia for the purpose of enforcing the law, repelling invasions and suppressing insurrections is clear enough if one reads the Constitution.The 2nd amendment is outdated and should be repealed. I close my eyes, and I can see a better day. I know, in this case it will be a long long time coming.
But we can certainly protect our kids and teachers in school and other innocent folks out shopping and watching movies from creeps and nuts with military weapons; at least by law, if not for a while in fact.
This is a 4T. While up to this time I have not thought that the NRA would sit down with the Democrats and write a constitutional amendment to modify the 2nd, at this point it seems almost possible.
Ah, see again you understand neither the letter or spirit of the second amendment. Since I already largely answered that a few months ago in another thread (in response to one of your posts no less) I will post it again:
What you have to understand is that the whole hunting/sporting argument while certainly valid has nothing to do with the second amendment. It was not included so far up front in the bill of rights to protect hunting. Hunting was considered a natural law that superseded really anything humans could conjure up for rights. Feeding your family was an expectation not a right. The second amendment was included for a very specific purpose; to provide an armed and organized militia which could be called on to defend the nation from all threats foreign (this next part is especially important) and domestic. By including this particular amendment the founders knew that as long as the second amendment stood, it would be nearly impossible for tyranny (which they spilled blood to remove) to ever really hold sway over the country. The wording of the amendment is really very clear. It spells out the reasons for denying infringement against weapon ownership; that a free state must have citizens with the means available to defend it. Not military, not police, not a National Guard but citizens. The militia can be trained, organized and otherwise regulated (uniforms or required equipment for example) by Congress but what they can't do is infringe on the right of civilians to own arms.That is a definition of militia but of course, that isn't the definition the United States uses (this has all been discussed on these forums before).
Now, we know from the writings of several of the founding fathers of what they had in mind with the second amendment and it mostly disagrees with your suggestion, but let's for the sake of argument assume that the second amendment refers strictly to "militia."
Well let's look at US legal code. The Militia Act of 1792 defined the militia (as opposed to a dictionary definition of a militia) as "every free able-bodied white male citizen between the ages of 18 and 45." It even described the weapons and gear that it required these citizens to own.
Now let's fast-forward to 1903 which saw the Militia Act of 1903 passed. This is the act that created the modern day National Guard however this act also created another militia called the "unorganized militia" or "reserve militia" which is the same able-bodied male citizen" (Including blacks now. See? Progress!) and is very much in line with the traditional meaning of the term as used in the United States.
There is some interesting history surrounding this particular law. Do you know why it was written? It has nothing to do with firearm rights or even a need for a National Guard. During the civil war there was a great deal of confusion over federal army forces and state militias which were little more than private armies controlled by state governors. Often it was unclear who these units answered to on the battlefield. This act created a true National Guard, raised by each state but that ultimately answered to the federal government.
But why the separation between "organized" and unorganized" militias? Return to the wording of the Militia Act of 1792 for a bit. It essentially meant that every man in the described age group was by definition a conscript in the state militia, was subject to training and also was required to provide their own equipment. By the 1900's most men simply didn't want to be bothered with the burden of training and maintaining equipment (most already didn't, in violation of the law), thus a legal separation was created. You were either paid militia (National Guard) or unorganized militia (everyone else). This law is still on the books today. So to the non-military (non-senile) men of this forum who are US citizens and who fall between the ages of 18 and 45, in case you didn't know, you are part of an unofficial army of the United States.
Of course all of this silly legalese that crops up every time there is a shooting is a pointless exercise. Those of you who have a problem with firearms are welcome to try to change the constitution at any time. Of course that requires you go through that pesky democratic process thing... Hmmm... Well, as this country has proven time and time again, there are plenty of ways to get around democracy.
Who is the militia? Well me, your husband, your sons (if you have any of age), your neighbors, young hip urbanites, farm boy yokels... That Congress actively shirks its responsibility to keep the militia trained and organized is not my problem. I will even suggest to you that if there were active training of the militia then you would see an enormous drop in violent crime and an increase in civility, cooperation and civic responsibility. Imagine the cooperation you would foster among neighbors who train and coordinate with each other on even a semi-regular basis. Older men teaching younger men how to be personally responsible, free citizens and the duty they share in protecting that freedom...
Of course we don't do that in this country anymore and we won't do it now. There are far too many lazy, apathetic citizens and the well-entrenched political, financial and bureaucratic herds to keep egging them on with a big assist from a bunch of ignorant media tools. Slaves are big business you understand, and armed slaves... Well those are a big fucking inconvenience.
So Deb, I would suggest that you hold your Congress-person "accountable" to do their constitutional duty if I actually thought that would do any good. I could also suggest that if you don't like it then change the constitution if you think you can, however I don't see why anyone would waste that kind of time and energy. As Bob already demonstrated, government can strike down or reinterpret constitutional rights whenever it suits their need or desire. But I guess that is the sort of thing that happens when you have an unregulated militia eh?
Last edited by Copperfield; 12-18-2012 at 10:23 PM.
How old are you? Are you sure that you're old enough to call us kids?because, of course, copperfield can do it all himself. as i suspected, he's a sovereign entity. answerable to no one but himself.
sorry, kid. we don't live that way in the real world. i believe in government of, by, and for the people. that's why we have elections.
we live in a representative democracy, not the jungle.
Not to be disrespectful but I think the article, "So you think you know about the second amendment" that I posted, is more factual than those who do not have a degree in the law.
About the author:
Before joining The New Yorker, Toobin served as an Assistant United States Attorney in Brooklyn, New York.
Toobin is also the senior legal analyst for CNN, which he joined in 2002 after seven years with ABC News. In 2000, he received an Emmy Award for his coverage of the Eliàn Gonzàlez case. His most recent book, “The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court,” was published in 2007. Toobin is also the author of the books “Too Close to Call: The Thirty-Six-Day Battle to Decide the 2000 Election,” (2001), “A Vast Conspiracy: The Real Story of the Sex Scandal That Nearly Brought Down a President,” (2000), and “The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson,” (1996).
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/bi...#ixzz2FSVsJsx7
"The only Good America is a Just America." .... pbrower2a
IF they are in the police, the army, the national guard; things that didn't exist when the 2nd amendment was written. And, all the militia we need.
What you think we need is irrelevant. The bill of rights does not suggest any particular thresholds that when met, would render rights null and void nor does it contain expiration dates.
One can also use that logic to suggest that things like computers and the internet didn't exist when they wrote the first amendment and as such should these things should be restricted.
Boy oh boy. You give me an opening for what I wanted to say. Thank you Bob
I read posts here over the last several days. Nowhere have I seen one person say, well you know, this incident has made me take a second look. Maybe we need to tighten restrictions on guns. Enough is enough; it could have been MY child. I don't see a lot of "opening" of minds here.
A senator from Virginia hears his 3 daughters say, "what are you going to do about this," and although he is an NRA member with a shooting range on his farm, he says the SAME thing on national TV that I (who supposedly "doesn't know what he's talking about" and "is not open to NEW information") have said here. Which is: These military weapons, slightly modified to avoid the law, do not belong on our streets. It is time, in the wake of what has been happening, to see some opening now from the pro-gun folks. If we don't see it here, you gotta wonder just what the percentage of total yahoos is that we have on this site.
Talk about the ultimate non sequitur.
It's hard to think what would cause more violations of our rights than to have citizen militias running around. I think you can do better than that about coming up with more lousy excuses for not restricting guns. I'll believe you are serious when you give away that gun under your bed.
From what I've been reading on various sites, some NRA members have had the courage to do some soul searching and are rethinking their choices in regards to weapons. Also, the NRA is supposed to come out with a statement this Friday. That should be interesting.Boy oh boy. You give me an opening for what I wanted to say. Thank you Bob
I read posts here over the last several days. Nowhere have I seen one person say, well you know, this incident has made me take a second look. Maybe we need to tighten restrictions on guns. Enough is enough; it could have been MY child. I don't see a lot of "opening" of minds here.
A senator from Virginia hears his 3 daughters say, "what are you going to do about this," and although he is an NRA member with a shooting range on his farm, he says the SAME thing on national TV that I (who supposedly "doesn't know what he's talking about" and "is not open to NEW information") have said here. Which is: These military weapons, slightly modified to avoid the law, do not belong on our streets. It is time, in the wake of what has been happening, to see some opening now from the pro-gun folks. If we don't see it here, you gotta wonder just what the percentage of total yahoos is that we have on this site.
Let's keep hoping that there will be some healthy adjustments to this gun issue. As you have mentioned, Feinstein has some good ideas.
"The only Good America is a Just America." .... pbrower2a
@ Eric -
You realize what you support is logistically impossible, right? The government can't even control marijuana through enforcement. Trying to disarm the US is a much bigger operation, and would be completely cost prohibitive and impossible.
Meanwhile, Millennials are liberal, but they're a different brand of liberal. 2T and 3T values won't all hold, and given how civic generations tend to trend, public bans tend to be among the first things chucked out. If there's a possibility of any sort of ban on fire arms, that window of opportunity will be closed by 2014 at the latest, and frankly I don't see anyone pushing anything but economy in that time frame.
I bash journalists because they're bad at their jobs, and they disseminate poor information because of it. It's on all sides. They're not doing their jobs, and have settled for a job in sales instead.
You can do better than that Eric. Perhaps you should accuse a few more folks here of being creeps and child murderers. That's more your style after all.
You've seen and engaged in more violations of rights here than you've seen from the so-called citizen militia's.
A Proposal
Again, you seem incapable of listening. The founding fathers believed a well regulated militia was necessary to the security of a free state. That you are at odds with the founding fathers is clear, but your personal opinion has nothing to do with rule of law or the Bill of Rights as it exists today.
Let me throw up a plausible proposal.
To keep the conservatives happy, there might be an acknowledgement that the individual right to bear arms exists, that citizens without criminal records, insanity, certain injunctions against violence, or similar indications of irresponsibility, do have a right to keep and bear arms suitable for hunting and self defense purposes.
To keep the progressives happy, the government is given an acknowledged power to limit the size of magazines, and to limit or ban possession of fully automatic (more than one shot per pull of the trigger) military grade weapons by civilians.
To make this absolutely stick, it would have to be put in a constitutional amendment. There are multiple Supreme Court cases that say the government may not restrict military weapons. The 2nd Amendment would have to be rewritten without reference to the militia (adult fit male citizens) to make it explicit that military weapons are not protected by the right. During the Prohibition multiple Supreme Court cases allowed the government to suppress the Thompson submachine gun and sawed off shotguns, two weapons used by gangsters but not by the US Army. Following these precedents today would be problematic.
Culture changing amendments are generally passed at the 4T 1T cusp. We're a little early, but we might be far enough into the 4T mood that it could happen. It never could have happened a decade ago. It's too soon to tell. There are hints of movement in the immediate aftermath of Sandy Hook, but I don't know how long the moment will last.
To be more specific, we'd have to call a maximum magazine size. Six rounds was traditional in the old west. A lot of modern weapons have slightly larger magazines. The number might best be made slightly larger to avoid the need to modify a lot of existing weapons. I wouldn't see the number getting larger than ten. If one is going to get something ratified by a bunch of red states, the number would have to be selected carefully.
I'll note one of possibly many details that might complicate things. As marriage and domestic violence laws currently work, if the woman wants divorce, she will often perjure herself, claiming a nonexistent violent act as a way to get immediate possession of the home and an injunction to keep the significant other away. For very good reason, the law by default protects the woman. However, such a move invokes 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(8)(C)(ii), a federal statute which prohibited the transportation of firearms or ammunition in interstate commerce by persons subject to a court order that, by its explicit terms, prohibits the use of physical force against an intimate partner or child.
This might be thought reasonable, but it might be polite to inform people that his right to possess a weapons had gone away. One of the more important gun cases, US v Emerson, came out of just such a situation. A guy wound up on felony gun charges as he was falsely accused by his wife then not informed he had to turn in his guns. The judge got ticked off enough by the situation that he interpreted the Second Amendment as written, leading to lots of appeals by southern courts into the meaning of the Second. If one is going to strip a citizen of an individual right, one needs much more due process than a single witness who benefits from the testimony.
There are lots of details with devils in them to be looked at.
Basically anything not a muzzle-loader.
"Rapid fire" is relative, naturally. An automatic rifle fires on the order of 10+ bullets a second. A thirty-round banana clip will last all of three seconds in an AKM on automatic fire mode, for example. This is what people like Eric think of when they hear the words 'automatic fire'. The kind of stuff Rambo and Ah-nold use, that in the real world is good only for indiscriminately killing bunched-up crowds of terrified civilians, or suppressing fire.
Contrast that with a semiautomatic which, realistically speaking if aim is absolutely no concern (and since we're comparing to suppressing fire, that's only a fair comparison) even the fastest shooting is going to be limited by the speed and endurance with which the shooter can flex and release his trigger finger over and over again. The numbers I generally see used by people who want to be scary are like "one shot a second" -- which seems, to be honest, a little unambitious (though I've never tried for myself to see how fast I could go). But still you're talking about on the order of ten times slower than the automatic fire that people like Eric think of when they talk about rapid-fire.
As someone (possibly me) tried futilely to explain the Eric some time earlier, one shot a second is a feasible rate of fire -- again, continuing to assume suppressing fire, and not actually aimed at anything in particular -- for even a bolt-action rifle with some practice. Which is damn near as far from an automatic weapon as you could get. But it's not about facts and things with some people. Facts and things are just obfuscations and impedances to the real, if intentionally noncoherent, point, if you dig.
"Qu'est-ce que c'est que cela, la loi ? On peut donc être dehors. Je ne comprends pas. Quant à moi, suis-je dans la loi ? suis-je hors la loi ? Je n'en sais rien. Mourir de faim, est-ce être dans la loi ?" -- Tellmarch
"Человек не может снять с себя ответственности за свои поступки." - L. Tolstoy
"[it] is no doubt obvious, the cult of the experts is both self-serving, for those who propound it, and fraudulent." - Noam Chomsky
This rifle
Can take those same huge magazines.
With some practice, a person using it can fairly easily get to the point where he can shoot once a second. With a couple pairs of those huge magazines, he could theoretically fire over a hundred bullets in well under three minutes. This is not a fast-firing gun under any rational sense of the term. Three minutes is, after all, a hundred and eighty seconds. A long, long time on the scale of tiny movements.
Hell, a six-shooter fired by a guy who knew what he was doing, would be able to get off a hundred rounds in five-seven minutes.
That is to say, 'semi automatic' does not exclusively mean 'fast-shooting'. It is, rather a technical term meaning 'shooting with fewer separate manual operations' -- rather than being fully manual, the action is somewhat automated (it in some small degree performs a series of several certain step-motions as a consequence of one distinct input motion). Words mean things.
Last edited by Justin '77; 12-19-2012 at 12:04 AM.
"Qu'est-ce que c'est que cela, la loi ? On peut donc être dehors. Je ne comprends pas. Quant à moi, suis-je dans la loi ? suis-je hors la loi ? Je n'en sais rien. Mourir de faim, est-ce être dans la loi ?" -- Tellmarch
"Человек не может снять с себя ответственности за свои поступки." - L. Tolstoy
"[it] is no doubt obvious, the cult of the experts is both self-serving, for those who propound it, and fraudulent." - Noam Chomsky
Yeah, someone did. His name was Adam Lanza. It was probably faster than once per second.
Too fast to be allowed on the streets.This is not a fast-firing gun under any rational sense of the term. Three minutes is, after all, a hundred and eighty seconds. A long, long time on the scale of tiny movements.
There's a commercial on TV now like that. "I know what 60 seconds is" says some child, about the age of the Newtown victims in fact.
He'd better have a license and pass an elaborate background check, and endure a waiting period (I say). Or maybe not allowed to have one.Hell, a six-shooter fired by a guy who knew what he was doing, would be able to get off a hundred rounds in five-seven minutes.
Yes, I think I get that, and have gotten for some time now what we are talking about-- that should not be allowed. Yes.That is to say, 'semi automatic' does not exclusively mean 'fast-shooting'. It is, rather a technical term meaning 'shooting with fewer separate manual operations' -- rather than being fully manual, the action is somewhat automated (it in some small degree performs a series of several certain step-motions as a consequence of one distinct input motion).
These guys seem to be able to shoot them faster. Others don't. It may depend more on how carefully you aim.
http://youtu.be/zAhw7LaSe0k
http://youtu.be/eQTFOwZnero
http://youtu.be/CIiwwZid9DM
http://youtu.be/X_8rqrbFmBw
Last edited by Eric the Green; 12-19-2012 at 12:37 AM.
Nor are they any more lethal than a good bolt action rifle.
After all, this military-style rifle...
Killed far more Germans than this automatic submachinegun...
Last edited by Copperfield; 12-19-2012 at 03:41 PM.
