Cycling UK Forum

An interesting article, from a Canadian perspective:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commenta ... le6496972/

thirdcrank wrote:PS If you divide the number of firearms reportedly in private hands in the US by the population, you seem to have a lot of people owning a lot pf guns. That's unless there are fewer people owning so many guns they'd need warehouses to store them.

Well... the other day the news reported the arrest of a bloke who had squirreled away over 300 unlicensed firearms - in France. He did have a firearms certificate, as I recall, but only for one of them. FWIW, it takes about two years to obtain a weapon here, including a year's formal training on club weapons and a psychological evaluation.

Really, and in spite of what I wrote earlier, I think the structure of society is the main culprit. In most primitive societies, adolescents learn how to be adults by accompanying adults in the course of their daily round and gradually assuming grown-up responsibilities. We keep our adolescents separate while they go on learning, during which time their bodies develop but their status does not evolve to match. It's a pressure-cooker of sorts, in which all kinds of psychoses and neuroses develop.

I can't see how this can be changed.

Vorpal wrote:
I have never seen either machine guns nor assault rifles for sale in a shop, and I am fairly widely travelled. I’ve see hunting rifles, pellet guns, harpoon guns, and handguns for sale in shops in the US, but not assault rifles.

The very gun this guy used can be bought from Walmart, Bushmaster AR-15.

No sane law abiding citizen needs this sort of fire power in their home, and the fact this guy's Mum had one of these (same rifle as used in the Aurora cinema shootings as well) and several others all freely available to a mentally unstable person, is just nuts on anybodies scale.

Those in favour of this gun culture will never be happy, they always claim it's "not the gun, but the person using it" and demonise mentally ill people, and yet they're neither in favour of a better health care system to try and help these people nor in favour of stricter gun legislation.

Unfortunately they're too far down the rabbit hole of insanity, in my opinion. They have the highest firearm per 100 citizen rate in the world (88 firearms for every 100 citizens) and when you see the figures for yearly gun deaths compared with the rest of the civilised world it beggars belief they can still argue against it:

Germany - 381

France - 255

Canada - 165

United Kingdom - 68

Australia - 65

Japan - 39

United States - 11,127

Trigger wrote:

Vorpal wrote:
I have never seen either machine guns nor assault rifles for sale in a shop, and I am fairly widely travelled. I’ve see hunting rifles, pellet guns, harpoon guns, and handguns for sale in shops in the US, but not assault rifles.

The very gun this guy used can be bought from Walmart, Bushmaster AR-15.

That's exactly the sort of thing that was banned under the federal ban on assault weapons. When I left the USA it wasn't legal to sell them there.

Vorpal wrote:

Trigger wrote:

Vorpal wrote:
I have never seen either machine guns nor assault rifles for sale in a shop, and I am fairly widely travelled. I’ve see hunting rifles, pellet guns, harpoon guns, and handguns for sale in shops in the US, but not assault rifles.

The very gun this guy used can be bought from Walmart, Bushmaster AR-15.

That's exactly the sort of thing that was banned under the federal ban on assault weapons. When I left the USA it wasn't legal to sell them there.

That gun is no longer in stock at Walmart, but a few similar ones are. I had a look at them, and they all appear to be .22 calibre. I thought that true assault weapons were 8mm and up, and weapons such as this were merely lookalikes.

.22" can still kill and it is roughly that which is the NATO standard since the 1980's.

Back in the old days the "can go through a brick wall" bullets were 7.62mm or a pretty close .303".

When the Dunblane tragedy happened here, my younger daughter was 6, the same age as the majority of the children killed there. A few days after it happened I called in on my Mum who had a few friends round. I had Louise with me, and one of the ladies asked me how old she was. When I told them, one commented that she was the same age as the Dunblane children, and you could see the group shock that went round - suddenly it became "real" to them when they saw a living child.

I've always remembered that, and I felt the same way when I heard the awful news this week - another group of 6 year olds. Poor little mites.

Jan

SA80 these days in the British services 5.56mm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SA80
When I joined up, we used SLRs - 7.72mm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L1A1_SLR

Both are nasty pieces of work and need skilled people to use them. I've been trained in both of them and fired them on occasions of course - but only in training at targets thank goodness.

From today's Daily T Business section (sorry I'm too thick to link it, but theres not much mre in the article.)

The State of California has annouced that it will withdraw its teachers' pension fund investments from firearms firms.

The fund has investments totalling $155 bn including $750m in the private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management.

Cerberus has in turn announce it is selling "Freedom Group" the manufacturer of the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle used to murder the people remembered in this thread.

Perhaps the free market will achieve what democracy did not.

California's State Tresurer has threatened to withdraw all the state's investments in firearms companies. The Cerberus connection has me thinking of barking and biting.

Vorpal wrote:I have never seen either machine guns nor assault rifles for sale in a shop, and I am fairly widely travelled. I’ve see hunting rifles, pellet guns, harpoon guns, and handguns for sale in shops in the US, but not assault rifles. It is illegal to sell machine guns in the USA.

You should visit Las Vegas then (OTOH don't bother)
Whilst my teenage sons were blasting AK47s into the Gun Range targets, I wandered around the shop, where, if you were a Nevada resident you could purchase for (IIRC) less than $k4, a field machine gun - the one on the tripod with big bullets on a bandolier!
I quipped to the sales assistant something like 'no wonder you're all so polite here' to which he replied 'an armed society is a polite society, Sir'
Only one of us was joking

What all the Americans should have is one of these each, perhaps?Range is about 12miles.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4.5_inch_Mark_8_naval_gun

There are lots of different definitions of assault weapons, and that is one of the confusions when it comes to what is legal in the USA.

There are lots of things that look like assault weapons (or machine guns) and can, under some circumstances be assault weapons, but technically aren't by one definition or another.

It may also be that some things are permitted on firing ranges that aren't for sale to the general public. I don't know about that, and I am not familiar with Nevada law, either.

The law enforcement services in the USA have all sorts of lists and identification / selection trees to determine whether any particular weapon is legal or not. Quite a few rifles that are referred to as semi-automatic, are sold with limitations in some states. But they are too easy to modify, or purchase automatic rounds for. They cannot legally be sold as 'machine guns', but they can be sold as semi-automatic. It is this sort of thing that is banned in some states, and was banned under the (somewhat misleadingly named) assault weapons ban. IMO, they ought to limit them by the number of rounds per cartridge, or something rather than relying on technical definitions.

Mick F is escalating the arms race

Unfortunately I think a minority of people almost see it that way. I was dismayed to see some posts in the comments sections of news sites that if the US government had not banned firearms in schools the teachers could have protected the children.

meic wrote:.22" can still kill and it is roughly that which is the NATO standard since the 1980's.

Kinda suspected that might be the case.

Vorpal wrote:Unfortunately I think a minority of people almost see it that way. I was dismayed to see some posts in the comments sections of news sites that if the US government had not banned firearms in schools the teachers could have protected the children.

Gail Collins, NYT 14th December: Recently the Michigan House of Representatives passed and sent to the governor a bill that, among other things, makes it easy for people to carry concealed weapons in schools. After the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School Friday, a spokesman for House Speaker Jase Bolger said that it might have meant “the difference between life and death for many innocent bystanders.” This is a popular theory of civic self-defense that discounts endless evidence that in a sudden crisis, civilians with guns either fail to respond or respond by firing at the wrong target.

Incidentally, on another forum I frequent (on fountain pens, yet) the percentage of gun freaks is alarming. Maybe it's just a gathering-place for people with obsessive tendencies who like to gloat over small, heavy pieces of hardware, and their thing just happens to be guns.

No comment.