Own Worst Enemies

John Richardson points to some video that shows we are our own worst enemies. Do I think I’ll ever need ten rounds to defend myself? Probably not. Do I think I’ll ever need one round to defend myself? Probably not. But f**k you if you try to throw me in prison for carrying the number of rounds my pistol was designed to carry.

As for the people who think it takes one shot to stop an attacker, I would encourage them to stop watching movies, and immediately sell all the guns they own. They do not have a realistic viewpoint, and pretty clearly have never had any training. We’re better off without you folks as gun owners, since you aren’t part of this fight anyway.

58 thoughts on “Own Worst Enemies”

  1. The police hit rate is only about 20% of shots fired. If you have 2 attackers, the math is not on your side if the multiplier is only 10…

  2. I’d say f#*k you to anyone who tries to throw me in prison for carrying the number of rounds my magazine was designed to hold whether it be 10, 30, or whatever. They don’t get to determine my “need”. I do. Having seen how many rounds police officer throw down range under stress I damn well want more than I hope I’ll need.

  3. kahr40, So what is the right number for you? By the logic of all the opposition to these suggestions to limit the size of magazines, isn’t it hard to name the upper limit? You guys say why limit it to 10, why not 5 or 1 for that matter. You say this in an attempt to point out how silly and arbitrary such limitations are, well I ask you, why would 30 be enough, or 100 for that matter.

    Don’t some of you feel under-protected with semi-automatic weapons? I’m sure some of you feel that only a belt-fed machine gun would provide the firepower required. And what if that’s not enough?

    My point is this slippery slope in reverse cannot be allowed. You’d have some nuts with surface to air missiles and nukes even. A line must be drawn somewhere, that’s what all the talk about magazine size is about, drawing a line.

    Where’s your line?

  4. Who the living f**k are those people?

    Why do we care what they have to say? Are they instructors? Are they experts?

    This is such an amazingly cheap trick by ThinkProgress.

  5. Rocket launchers and other crew served weapons might be allowed…good luck trying to convince the manufacturer to sell you one because they don’t want to be the ones that “sold the weapon to the nut.”

    (actually, heck, under the NFA, you CAN own rocket launchers)

    Nukes?

    If the Norks and the Iranians are having such a hard time getting nuclear MATERIAL, what makes you think your next door neighbor is going to get one? Isn’t there an international agency regulating or at least making sure the material itself doesn’t fall into the wrong hands?

  6. the “restricted to law enforcement and military use only” thing on most websites is a private company policy and not a legally binding statement. You’d probably have to ask friends within the LEO/Mil community for access to these items and then again, they would have to know you pretty well before they would trust you with these items. Plus those friends might catch on to you pretty quickly if you were up to no good.

    Denial of service is a constitutionally protected right. But then again, you cannot force companies to actively deny service to everyone.

  7. Each one of those people think a gun is a magic amulet whose mere presence sends criminal scurrying away in fear ……

    Man 1 – have 30 guns but none are loaded …. my unloaded guns locked in the safe protects me.

    Woman 1 – One Shot One Kill …… when I was in ‘Nam on secret missions for the CIA, I only humped 3 rounds of ammunition. If I needed to kill more than 3, I’d wait till they lined up in a row and take out 20, WITH ONE ROUND. I work at Main Street Gun Store. Come on by and I’ll show you a CIA secret technique on how to kill someone with my pinkie.

    UGH! These folks are clearly not gun carriers. They probably just left the Fudd lunch honoring Joaquin Jackson for a century of Fuddism.

    ******************************************************

    Personally, I think the anti’s are trying to distract us. There is no way McCarthy’s ban will pass the House. NONE. We are on the move with Constitutional Carry in WI and other good things in other states. Let’s not get distracted fighting a dead issue.

    I do think we need to start developing counter points to the mag ban though. Something like ..

    1) If your plan is to wait for a gun man to empty his mag, then 11 people will have been killed while you hang out. Waiting for reload, is a bad strategy. There is only one good strategy of all bad options, immediate attack. Running away and cowering will get you killed.

    2) Why 10 rounds? Because Bill Ruger’s gun were limited to 10 rounds and he didn’t want to keep losing business to GLOCK. Ok anti’s, prove that 10 rounds is the appropriate number for self defense and if its so appropriate, why doesn’t the limit apply to the police?

    3) Many violent crimes involve 3 or more actors who are jacked up on drugs. If you were protecting your daughter from them, explain how at that moment 10 rounds would make sense.

  8. What policy decision wouldn’t that work for?
    “Your vehicle has the ability to go 25, 50, 75 mph over posted speed limits. Do you expect to ever need to drive above 100 mph?” Probably not.

    “Do you think you’ll ever get an abortion?” Probably not.

    “Leading doctors say that if you need a bone marrow transplant, they like to use at least 5E^7 cells. Other doctors say 2E^7 are plenty. Do you think you really need 5?” Probably not, just based on your question and having no outside knowledge.

  9. Writing doesn’t work. We need to get in their faces … work campaigns, attend political meetings, get involved, etc.

  10. Naive (anonymous) quotes by “hunters” and “gun-owners” about how they favor “common sense” restrictions irritated me this morning somewhere on the Internet. I refuse to comment anymore on those types of blogs since it only feeds their purposes. I don’t believe for a second if those “anonymous” quo-tees were to understand the full breadth and scope of exactly the types of “common sense” restrictions that the anti’s propose, that they’d be changing their tune. Just wait ’til the anti’s come for that fine hunting shotgun (because its an assault weapon) or deer rifle (because its a sniper rifle).

    I’m becoming more and more active day by day. Get active in your local political party as well — register. You then get to go to the caucus and can really start to affect the political train.

  11. Rodney King riots: shopkeepers in Firebase Koreatown were firing over the heads of rioters to drive them away. With 30 round magazines, you can afford to fire 2-3 shots as a threat, because you have enough rounds left to kill so many rioters that the rest will go elsewhere A five round magazine means that you have to start killing with the first shot.

    If you will never need a dozen or more rounds, why did the deputy sheriff that taught my wife and I emphasize the importance of reloading? He emphasized that you should always have four magazines on you, and six more in the car. (He carried a Colt Government Model, so he was expecting the need for 35 rounds on his person.)

  12. You need 1 more round than is required to stop the threat of imminent death or serious bodily injury. No one in the history of man has ever known what that number was though. And no one has ever had the last thought before dying of “I wish I hadn’t carried so many bullets.” But the converse thought happens all to often.

  13. Next, government busybodies decide that most kitchen fires can be put out with 1/3rd of the contents of the fire extinguishers. They decide that nobody needs more than 1/3 capacity and ban any more.

  14. @MikeB: How many rounds would you limit us to carrying? Not per magazine, period. Once NJ is forced to allow carriage of firearms and I start carrying in public, how many rounds would you permit me to carry?

  15. @mikeb – Do you think Reginald Denny would have appreciated a pistol with a 30 round magazine? Do you think he would appreciate one now that he is disabled and doesn’t have the manual dexterity to reload quickly?

    Why would you deny someone who was disabled effective self defense?

  16. I think he was noting that in a mob situation, you may need to use a warning shot. It’s the difference between “that could have been me” and “that was him, not me”.

    I don’t advocate breaking the speed limit, but sometimes you have to pass someone.

  17. Ian, I’m not very hot on the magazine capacity restrictions. I don’t think they would help much. Frankly I find it surprising that some gun control folks are so into it. We’ve got bigger fish to fry in my opinion.

    If I had to say, I think 12 or 14 would be the right size magazine for a normal handgun. One backup mag, no more.

    Now, that’s just ’cause you asked. Like I said I don’t think it would do much to prevent unwanted gun violence or prevent folks from protecting themselves when needed.

    jdberger, What’s old Reginald have to do with it. His is an example of the kind of frightening violence that can happen. You use examples like his to justify owning guns and getting the CCW permit, but if he’d had a Glock with a normal magazine, don’t you think that would have done the trick?

    By the way, as you already know I don’t agree that violent beatings like his warrant the response that you guys give it. You might as well worry about meteorites, I always say.

  18. @MikeB: “If I had to say, I think 12 or 14 would be the right size magazine for a normal handgun. One backup mag, no more.”

    So, when I decide to go down to the range and spend an hour or two practicing, and load up my magazines at home so I don’t have to waste time at the range doing so, and it’s a 200-round range visit (as it usually is, for me), you would have that be a violation of law? I have to pay for my range time, whether I spend it pulling the trigger or loading magazines. I’d rather do that at home, thanks much.

    The underlying concept of gun control is that everyone is both a potential violent criminal, and unwilling to break any laws but the ones forbidding violence. This is nowhere more apparent than in the attempt to restrict carriage of ammunition to prevent mass murder.

  19. And now you STILL call for restrictions.

    First it was mags, now its only ONE backup magazine or only ONE gun.

    Do you have ANY IDEA what happens in a gunfight at all? what happens if you are shot in the arm or shoulder, you ARE going to need that backup gun. Many cops nowadays carry a second gun in case their first one jams, malfunctions, or if their primary arm is disabled.

  20. Thanks, @AntiCitizenOne. I hadn’t even gotten into the whole “Two is one and one is none” meme. It holds true fractally (from the smallest to the largest)

  21. It actually can be faster to draw a second gun if you’ve practiced it enough, much like you practice reloading your firearm.

    And with Reginald Denny, I am not trusting a mob whatsoever to turn at the mere sight of a weapon. If they were insane enough to ignore the law and try and beat up someone as a group they probably might be insane enough to forget their own genetically coded self-preservation instinct. Fire at all of them until they all turn tail or there is only one standing.

  22. Oh, and if one-sided fist fights were fair and wouldn’t cause deadly harm to someone they’d probably already have it as an MMA category.

    Oh wait. They don’t. Even in MMA, they have RULES about fighting and they even stop the fights if a ref is worried. You don’t get any of that luxury on the street.

  23. I speak in hypotheticals. I own one handgun, whose design makes it impractical for concealed carry, in a state whose laws essentially restrict me to 10-round magazines for it, and am not a member of a club where I could do practical shooting anyway.

  24. They always fall back on that “perfect the enemy of good.”

    Their whole idea is that they want to create a perfect world where they don’t compromise whatsoever.

  25. @MikeB …. do you believe Loughner would follow your 1 mag and 1 gun law? If so, why?

  26. Depends, never carried for self defense so that I can’t answer other than a fully loaded firearm whatever that may be.

    For sporting clays though 25 rounds would be nice though heavy.

    For deer hunting I’d load 3-4 as it was always a a pain to unload a lever gun to cross roads and the like. Reality is
    I’ve had good shots that needed a second at close range for a humane kill.

    Only time I’ve heard one shot, one kill, is snipers and I think the real number approaches 2.

    So what we have is people talking out of their stinkhole about something they know little of. That is assuming they weren’t shills as they didn’t seem like serious hunters or target shooters on appearance or speaking.

    Eck!

  27. Has anyone considered what would have happened if the congress woman had body guards on that saturday morning/ As soon as they identified the threat moving towards them (with gun in hand) the guards woiuld be drawing their own and shooting and there would be NO THOUGHT of background or nearby people..they would have to shoot to protect the target. There probably would be collateral damage but not to the extent that actually occurred. It would be interesting to read the comments from the left if this scenario happened,

  28. “My point is this slippery slope in reverse cannot be allowed. You’d have some nuts with surface to air missiles and nukes even. A line must be drawn somewhere, that’s what all the talk about magazine size is about, drawing a line.”

    If someone has the cash and connections to acquire a nuclear weapon – exactly what can the government do about it?

    Nukes are nation served weapons. They are beyond the budget, means, and interest of individuals. The same is true of SAMs.

  29. Oh, and you’re worried about hand grenades?

    The Polish Home Army did great with some home-made ones until Stalin decided not to help them…

  30. “jdberger, What’s old Reginald have to do with it. His is an example of the kind of frightening violence that can happen. You use examples like his to justify owning guns and getting the CCW permit, but if he’d had a Glock with a normal magazine, don’t you think that would have done the trick?”

    Did you see the video of the attack on Reginald Denny? There was a pretty large crowd attacking him or standing by and cheering.

  31. @mikeb
    “My point is this slippery slope in reverse cannot be allowed. You’d have some nuts with surface to air missiles and nukes even. A line must be drawn somewhere, that’s what all the talk about magazine size is about, drawing a line.”

    The whole nuclear/chemical/biological weapons is a red herring. Who seriously thinks we should personally own nukes? How would you use it in self defense like you would a gun? Weapons of mass destruction are indiscriminate weapons and cause massive amounts of damage to a wide area, comparing them to personal arms is asinine. Yeah, there probably are some people who’d like them, but I don’t think any prominent group has said that they shouldn’t be restricted.

    As to magazine size, I think anything law enforcement or the military has access to should be fair game for citizens as well. The entire point of carrying for self defense is because you’re preparing for unforeseen circumstances, so how would you know if 10 rounds would be enough? You can’t assume that there will only be one attacker, or that all your shots were perfectly accurate and hit vital areas. You can take anything to the extreme of course and use that rationale to carry dozens of magazines, but I don’t think its someone else’s business to decide just how much is enough.

  32. @MikeB,

    You asked where the limit is. For me, I have no problem with any weaponry which is man-portable and discriminate being widely available for civilian usage.

    Any semiauto firearm which is manportable and discriminate is fine with me regardless of mag capacity. It could have 3000 rounds for all I care. It doesn’t change the functioning of the device at all. In fact, the larger the round capacity the less likely it is to be man-portable.

    Fully auto weapons are in a grey area. They are arguably not discriminate, but reasonable people could disagree on that point I suppose.

    RPGs are man-portable, but are not discriminate weapons. They explode in an area of effect and are not particularly accurate. Same with grenade launchers. So I don’t have a huge problem with some restrictions on them.

    So, no slippery slope.

    The only thing that throws a kink into this methodology is the increasing availability of precision guided munitions. Even a few decades ago, the idea of anti-tank guided missiles, MANPADS, or other such weapons being available to anyone other than the US, Russia, or a handful of other high-tech militaries was implausible. Today those weapons are getting cheaper and more available around the world to every insurgent or militia or tin-pot dictator (cf the last Israel-Hezbollah spat). While these weapons are man-portable, and because they are guided they are discriminate, I’m not certain that they should be treated the same as a semiauto rifle. But arguably there may be a stronger case for allowing civilian ownership of a discriminating precision guided ATGM than an indiscriminate RPG.

  33. “Today those weapons are getting cheaper and more available around the world to every insurgent or militia or tin-pot dictator (cf the last Israel-Hezbollah spat). While these weapons are man-portable, and because they are guided they are discriminate,”

    Just out of curiosity: what are the cost of these weapons? There’s a reason that Barrett Light .50s are so seldom used for liquor store robberies or gang drive-bys, and it isn’t regulation. I think it might have something to do with the cost of the weapon and the ammo.

    Similarly, I rather doubt that any gang, no matter how much meth it sells, is going to be buying nuclear weapons in the near future.

    Let me know when the 100 gigawatt X-ray laser pistol comes on the market. I suspect that it is going to be a bit out my price range.

  34. Markie Marxist sez: “The ten-round magazine ban gives our Marxist/warrior/hero/criminals a better chance that the law-abiding gun owner will run out of bullets. Of course, when our criminals are bringing down capitalist American by robbing, raping, killing, oh, and breaking the gun laws too, the ban won’t really mean all that much to them – as professionals, they tend not to pay attention to such relatively minor infractions. It’s just common communist sense for the law to ban large magazines, since it will only affect the law-abiding, who are afraid to break the law, and if they’re not afraid we’ll give them ten years in the gulag! Ha! Ha! All your hi-caps are belong to us!”

  35. “A line must be drawn somewhere, that’s what all the talk about magazine size is about, drawing a line.”

    A line must not be drawn somewhere. Not on my freedom.

    (The schoolyard bully says you must hand over at least some of your lunch money, because you can’t keep it all, and he wants very much to continue discussing the matter of your lunch money.)

  36. “Where’s your line?”

    McAuliffe said, “Nuts!”. I say the same thing.

  37. Hey, MikeB302000.

    If another mag ban passes, I want you to personally come confiscate all of my mags that cross “the line” established by the ban, whatever that may be.

    All I ask is that when you come to confiscate my mags that cross “the line,” just call me and let me know when you’ll be coming down my driveway, okay?

  38. What makes this whole discussion so absurd is that there are only two scenarios where magazine limits would make any difference:

    1. Bad guy shooting at multiple armed victims who are returning fire, and aren’t hit immediately.

    2. Bad guy opens fire in a crowd close enough to grab him while he is reloading.

    Realistically, neither of these are typical situations. Most mass murders are done in situations where victims are busily pleading for mercy or praying to God–and they are not able to return fire, or even notice that the bad guy is changing magazines.

    How long does it take to a magazine change? A second or so. I suppose if you were watching carefully, and noticed that the bad guy had dropped the magazine, and was putting another one in, you could grab the guy (as happened in Tucson). But this is a pretty rare scenario, and it requires a pretty dense crowd.

  39. Mike from Philly asked if I think Loughner would have obeyed whatever restrictions there might have been.

    My answer is, of course not. Most gun control laws are aimed at the law-abiding. It’s kinda silly for you gun owners to keep asking that question as if we gun control folks are stupid. We actually understand as well as you do that criminals don’t obey the laws.

    The idea of most of these laws is to keep the guns away from the criminals by constraining the law abiding to hang onto them better. Don’t you see the connection, the fact that all the guns start out legally owned?

    Clayton, I saw that video story several times like everybody else. Do you think, even in that extreme and rare situation, that 14 rounds and one backup magazine would not have been enough?

    The question is where do we draw the line. Chris described that popular “manportable” idea. I don’t think it’s that simple.

  40. “The question is where do we draw the line.”

    Markie Marxist sez: “Absolutely! We have to keep hammering gun owners with that question until we’ve wrung a concession out of them! Because once we get gun owners to allow us to draw a line, with nasty penalties for crossing it, we can move the line further and further, one step at a time, until there’s no freedom left for those former, private gun owners. Ha! Ha! All your line is belong to us!”

  41. “The idea of most of these laws is to keep the guns away from the criminals by constraining the law abiding to hang onto them better.”

    The lie in that approach is that restrictions are aimed at the law-abiding because the restrictions are intended solely for the law-abiding. Criminals will get guns, one way or another, even if they have to be illegally manufactured, smuggled into the country or stolen (or bought) from the police and the military.
    The only way to prevent criminals from getting guns is to lock up the criminals, because if they are free, then they are free to get guns. However, anti-gunners do not want to talk about criminal control, only gun control. It is sleight of mind to keep the discussion falsely focused on the guns of lawful gun owners, and gun owners all too often fall for the ruse by merely reacting to the threat against their rights.
    Hand-wringing, nervous Nellies who are afraid to own a gun and whine for government restrictions to be forced on the rest of us, at gunpoint if necessary and backed with criminal penalties – these people are pathetic and would take this country down the road to ruin with their contemptible cowardice and calls for oppression.
    Armed gun owners deter crime, as Dr. Lott’s studies show. Gun owners are in fact the solution to crime, not the problem that the anti-gunners would have us imagine.
    It is hard to believe that someone would come away from reading, “More Guns, Less Crime” with the desire to impose even more restrictions on law-abiding gun owners than we already unfairly and unconstitutionally suffer. America needs to respect the freedom that made us the greatest nation on earth, because we move away from our freedom and towards government restriction at our peril in these perilous times.

  42. MikeB, we are in agreement then. Criminals don’t follow our laws including imaginary lines on the pavement that form gun free zones and our desire they not use guns with certain features.

    Take a look at this report. It shows the impact of gun control and how it increases violent crime.

    http://www.georgiacarry.com/research/GCO_-_Guns_Good_Bans_Bad.pdf

    My question to you is why support gun control? Shouldn’t we shit can it and find an approach we both (conservative and liberal) can support? For example, improved mental health processes.

  43. “The question is where do we draw the line.”

    There is in that question, the presumption that the line must be drawn. From where does the authority to make such a demand come? Where in the US Constitution does it require that a federal line be drawn? America’s gun owners should make no such concession to our enemies whose eventual goal is to disarm us completely.

    There is no line in, “…shall not be infringed.”
    When we argue against a magazine restriction being imposed on us that is so severe that it threatens to felonize us out of all of our constitutional rights, as being a grossly unconstitutional infringement, we are perfectly within our right to keep and bear arms.
    With their magazine ban, the anti-rights mob thinks they have found a clever, little trick to infringe our right to keep and bear arms while hoping to skirt the Second Amendment.
    Felonizing someone for merely keeping or bearing arms, under any pretext, including magazine size, is grievous, extreme and unconstitutional infringement of a fundamental American right.
    The discussion that we should be having is of how severe the penalties should be for what should become the felony of violating an individual’s Second Amendment rights. Government officials should violate our rights only under penalty of law and those penalties should be no less severe than our fundamental rights are important.
    Bloomberg might have to move from Gracie Mansion to Sing Sing, but the change would do us good.

  44. @MikeB: By your own reasoning, a limit on the number of carred guns or the amount of carried ammunition has no point. The lawless will break it (as you admit), and there is no way that a restriction on the amout of guns and ammo on a law abiding person restricts the amount a lawbreaker can obtain.

    Please explain to me how retricting me from carrying 3×10 round magazines would have prevented the AZ shooter or the VA Tech shooter from obtaining, possessing, and carrying the guns and ammo that they used in their rampages. (Not that I’m in support of the magazine restrictions – it just so happens that’s all the magazines I own).

  45. @ Clayton

    “Today those weapons are getting cheaper and more available around the world to every insurgent or militia or tin-pot dictator (cf the last Israel-Hezbollah spat). While these weapons are man-portable, and because they are guided they are discriminate,”

    Just out of curiosity: what are the cost of these weapons? There’s a reason that Barrett Light .50s are so seldom used for liquor store robberies or gang drive-bys, and it isn’t regulation. I think it might have something to do with the cost of the weapon and the ammo.

    Well, an SA-7 (an old Soviet MANPADS) can apparently be had for a few grand in some parts of the world (http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=97816&page=1). A remote control plane hobbyist can build a UAV “cruise missile” fairly easily with off the shelf components. FAS thinks you could build a COTS Tomahawk for $250K (and that was a few years ago; I’d expect prices to decrease rapidly). Hezbollah was able to acquire anti-ship cruise missiles and sink an Israeli destroyer, somethign only a state could have done until recently. As technology marches on, prices for these sorts of guided weapons will only go down. Even only a few years ago, something like GPS guidance was a capability limited to states only. Now anyone can go get a GPS receiver for a few hundred bucks. It isn’t a huge leap to strap that GPS reciever to some sort of vehicle. These sorts of weapons used to only be owned by states, now they’re owned by relatively capable non-state actors (Hezbollah, AQ, etc) and it won’t be surprising to see them filter down to less capable non-state actors (Mexican drug cartels?) and even individuals over the next decade or two, just like most other technologies. Once the genie is out of the bottle it is hard to put back in.

    Some good further reading on the subject is Wired for War (a book), Millenium Challenge 2002 (a military exercise prominently featuring precision guided cruise missiles), etc. The bottom line is that most experts in the field seem to expect these weapons to proliferate and become increasingly affordable.

    Today, these weapons seem to remain out of financial reach of most individuals. However, that will change in the near future, requiring me to adjust my “Man Portable + Discriminate” criteria. Although argueably, if you look at the militia aspect of the 2A, a MANPADS could possibly have more protection than a side-by-side shotgun intended only for sport. Argueably any decent militia in the 21st century should have MANPADS after all. Even so, I’m not certain how comfortable I feel with people being able to plunk down $3000 for a surface to air missile that could kill 300 people on an Airbus. Perhaps there needs to be a “incapable of causing mass casualties” rider added to my existing two criteria.

  46. It’s a mugs game, banning artillery and heavy weapons, though. The components of a COTS “cruise missile” are all innocuous in and of themselves, with justifiable uses, except the warhead. Likewise the components of a beam-riding guided missile. Crude examples could be made for less than the cost of a decent used car, and in the case of the beam rider, you get to keep the expensive bits (the electronics necessary to keep the beam on target – the “seeker” is relatively cheap by comparison).

    Mortars can be made up simply – scale up a potato cannon.

    Banning the implements of mass destruction by law is pointless – the actions are already banned, and the parts of the tools are all dual-use or otherwise innocuous or readily available.

  47. Mike in Philly, I hate to tell you but there are equal and opposite reports out there. It’s not like a foregone conclusion that gun control does not work. I support the idea of gun control because if done properly it would work, or it would help, I should say.

    Ian, are you really asking how a particular restriction on YOU would have stopped HIM? That’s pretty silly isn’t it?

    Even when you guys ask a general question, how could gun control laws have stopped a particular shooter, it’s bogus. When you rstrict it to you and him, it’s even worse.

    Proper gun control laws would prevent guns from flowing from you guys to the criminals. It’s that simple. If that were the case the most determined of the violent criminals would still get guns, yeah, but many would be resigned to using other less-lethal implements. The less determined would end up causing no damage at all. That’s the idea.

  48. @MikeB: “Proper gun control laws would prevent guns from flowing from you guys to the criminals” – a restriction on the number of guns or amount of ammunition carried doesn’t address this – it’s strictly an annoyance measure for legitimate gun owners as the illegitimate ones will just ignore the laws against carrying extra guns or ammo just as they ignore the laws against the rest of the crimes they commit.

    As for the idea that the violent criminals will switch to other weapons; so what? Disproportionatly, criminals are young and fit – they don’t need guns as badly as do their victims. Or do you not care about the battered but alive victims of crime at knife point of under threat of a baseball bat?

    Violent criminals are a small fraction of the population – you would seriously impede the inherent right of self-defense for the vast majority in the name of minorly inconveniencing the tiny minority; who have less of a need for firearms. Got it.

  49. ” the most determined of the violent criminals would still get guns”

    apparently that’s not good enough for some folks on your side who want it cut down to zero.

  50. “Ian, are you really asking how a particular restriction on YOU would have stopped HIM? That’s pretty silly isn’t it?”

    Yes, it’s silly, but that silliness is exactly what you’re proposing! You’re using the behavior of a madman as an excuse to force unconstitutional restrictions on millions of Americans. That is madness itself.
    You’re effectively saying that any lunatic who wants to, can veto our freedom and that we have to be punished for what he does. We will not allow such nonsense; we won’t put up with such abuse. It’s wrong to wrong us and we won’t stand for it!

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