The efficacy (or lack thereof) of Gun Control

[Speaker4thesilent]

Sir or Ma'am, you are entitled to your opinion, but what recourse would Australia's citizens have if their government decided to head down that path?

Y’know, when I made this post, I never expected Australia in 2021 to be on step number seven of the Stages of Genocide with concentration camps set up for those who disagree with the party line on the Wu Flu. Bet a lot of people there wish they still had their guns.

 

[Captain X]

I will point out that you can ban every gun in the US and seize every single gun in the country and criminals will still have guns by months end. Back in the early 90s when my unit was part of the Carribbean Anti Drug Task Force. We seized some boats that not only contained Cocaine but also a shit ton of Firearms. A lot of the guns that get into this country also come from outside the country with drugs. That is what the powers that be don't want to tell the people.

Not to mention crooked cops and people in the military looking to make some money for themselves.

 

[The Whispering Monk]

We litterally had a year where the police showed us in graphic detail that they will not protect people and property from rioters that they will gladly allow people to be murdered in the street. The need for civilians to have milatary weapons has been decisively shoved into our faces the social contract was broken now we need to be able to protect ourselves.

I wish I could argue against this, I really do.

The hard truth that everyone must accept is that the police aren't there to prevent crime. They don't have the capability to get there before the Bad Things happen. It's up to us to do everything we can to stop those Bad Things from happening.

As I said, you aren't thinking like a civilian. You're thinking military where anything just the slightest bit out of the ordinary might mean you're about to get shot.

That's...totally not it. The difference is the rules under which force will be employed, not the preparedness for using force. In war I get to shoot first, from any angle, and in such overwhelming force the other guy has no chance of returning fire.

In personal carry, the use of force requires that I already be in danger. That's how we train, it's how we practice.

 

[ShadowsOfParadox]

Personal opinion, given the stated goal of the 2nd Amendment and the writing surrounding it in the immediate follow up, I'm pretty sure that technically speaking the 2nd Amendment should probably cover SSBN's and every tool of war... I'm also of the opinion that I don't actually want that because I don't want to live in a world where Amazon has a military.

 

[Marduk]

The problem is that we are dealing people who will not accept that there's such a thing as "legitimate civilian use" for firearms, because "civilian" to them is supposed to mean "powerless serf that Government Almighty can do as it pleases with".

One way to clear the air is to make anyone who wants to talk about regulation answer one question first, and answer it with no waffle or word-games: Do you accept that human beings have the right to defend themselves?
If they will not give a clear answer, then you know you are dealing with a bad faith actor.

Its about more than just firearms, its about self defense in general, firearms just get the bulk of the heat in America because they are the most capable and universal tool for it. This general attitude in leftist circles is far older than the modern western gun control movements.

Note that this wasn't applied under empathetic, humane at any cost, every life matters, no death penalty ever modern western law, but under the harsh conditions of 1920's Soviet Union.
Guns, and particularly the kind of guns one would use for self defense most effectively (aka willing to let some hunting/sport weapons slide, for now), are just simply the highest priority target for this sentiment.

 

[stephen the barbarian]

the lapd is in deep shit.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/theft-44-firearms-l-gun-130009500.html

Duenas, manager of the gun store at the Los Angeles Police Academy, had been reprimanded over the years for tardiness and sloppy record keeping, but he never took time off, according to the memo. As the store's closing supervisor, he was there each night to lock up — and hand count the inventory.

If someone else had been assigned that count, they might have discovered that dozens of guns were missing and that Duenas was stealing them and selling them for cash, prosecutors wrote in the memo. But since he was always there, the Los Angeles Police Revolver and Athletic Club was apparently none the wiser.

turns out that the lapd has their own gun store. the manager has selling pistols off the books, mostly to lapd officers

 

[Captain X]

So exactly the kind of thing I was talking about.

Anywho, just to chime back in on the whole "legitimate civilian use" bullshit:

 

[Morphic Tide]

Rocket launchers yes, also anti-air and anti-ballistic-missile systems, but not the nukes themselves. The thing of it is that the government should not be smugly declaring the populace cannot stop an attempt at tyranny, readily answering F-15s and nuke deployment, but it should be able to deal with lone madmen, which personal weapons of mass destruction go over the line for.

Ideally, things should be set up so that the government itself being the madmen is reasonably dealt with, which when respecting having force concentrations able to deal with extremely wealthy lone madmen generally means decentralizing so that "the government" is not a monolith but rather has to have agreement among separate governing bodies.

The usual separation of powers isn't good for this because it has all executive power of enforcement be one branch, so it is extremely vulnerable to coups, to the point of a few cases where a bloodless coup could have happened from popular sentiment being out of synch with the official process. If it weren't for the Uniparty bullshit having the generals, it could happen today.

You really do need to have the military separated, in the end, so that if civil war occurs you are not reliant upon defectors from existing chains of command, but rather can trust to have fully separate chains of command to side in full. Mostly because of the fact that funding serious defensive forces has far exited any remotely plausible militia budget.

 

[Zachowon]

Rocket launchers yes, also anti-air and anti-ballistic-missile systems, but not the nukes themselves. The thing of it is that the government should not be smugly declaring the populace cannot stop an attempt at tyranny, readily answering F-15s and nuke deployment, but it should be able to deal with lone madmen, which personal weapons of mass destruction go over the line for.

Ideally, things should be set up so that the government itself being the madmen is reasonably dealt with, which when respecting having force concentrations able to deal with extremely wealthy lone madmen generally means decentralizing so that "the government" is not a monolith but rather has to have agreement among separate governing bodies.

The usual separation of powers isn't good for this because it has all executive power of enforcement be one branch, so it is extremely vulnerable to coups, to the point of a few cases where a bloodless coup could have happened from popular sentiment being out of synch with the official process. If it weren't for the Uniparty bullshit having the generals, it could happen today.

You really do need to have the military separated, in the end, so that if civil war occurs you are not reliant upon defectors from existing chains of command, but rather can trust to have fully separate chains of command to side in full. Mostly because of the fact that funding serious defensive forces has far exited any remotely plausible militia budget.

Why should ther government have something I don't?

 

[Bacle]

Why should ther government have something I don't?

Remember, explosives are regulated differently from guns and the 2nd Amendment for civies, where those regs don't apply as much for military use. DoD doesn't need to fear the ATFE being retarded, civies do.

Same reason things like tank rounds are treated as more akin to C4 for permitting, compared to buying .223 or 45 cal for a personal weapon.

 

[KilroywasNOTHere]

When the social contract fails, people will look to other means for protection. If seconds count and the police are minutes away, then you can't really be suppressed when neighborhoods start hiring out mercenaries or forming militas (AKA gangs) for protection. heck at this point I think I would trust a group of mercenaries to protect me before I'd trust any government entity if Oregon is anything to go by.

that ought to tell you how worthless the social contract is at this point.

 

[Morphic Tide]

Why should ther government have something I don't?

When you're talking about things where a slip-up can take a town off the map in a split second, you do not want that available to individuals with no constraints but the means to get ahold of raw material and the knowledge of how to arrange it. Simply put, the government has a vast number of people along the way to deciding to use them, while a single rich asshole with access would have the deployment on their personal whim giving them wholly independent ability to declare the lives of millions forfit.

There's only so far budgetary constraints go. If you allow private nukes, then bad actors will actually use them. Do you think for an instant that ISIS agents would flinch at taking themselves out in the blast if it meant wiping out half of San Francisco, hive of hyper-progressive scum and internet infrastructure it is, if they seriously had the option? There are things that need to have limited access because the world would not stand a lone madman ever being able to use them.

Some that even exceptionally deadlock-prone governments can't really be trusted with, but that's MAD for the sorry lot of us.

 

[Scottty]

When you're talking about things where a slip-up can take a town off the map in a split second, you do not want that available to individuals with no constraints but the means to get ahold of raw material and the knowledge of how to arrange it. Simply put, the government has a vast number of people along the way to deciding to use them, while a single rich asshole with access would have the deployment on their personal whim giving them wholly independent ability to declare the lives of millions forfit.

I think you underestimate just how complex a business building a nuclear device actually is. "Knowledge of how to arrange it" does nothing without a large amount of manpower and machinery to do the arranging.
If it were as simple as you seem to think, bad actors would already be doing it.

 

[Morphic Tide]

If it were as simply as you seem to think, bad actors would already be doing it.

Most of this is the considerable efforts involved in keeping the materials and knowledge under wraps, North Korea's the main supplier of fissile material for the attempts. That goes away when you have any kind of basis to be talking about McNukes. If a private person can do it, then you've already stripped the problem down to the point that it's trivial for a state-level actor to pull it off.

Seriously, there are numerous international treaties and every last time a country has started trying without US go-ahead they've been promptly buried in sanctions.

 

[Captain X]

 

[Scottty]

Most of this is the considerable efforts involved in keeping the materials and knowledge under wraps, North Korea's the main supplier of fissile material for the attempts. That goes away when you have any kind of basis to be talking about McNukes. If a private person can do it, then you've already stripped the problem down to the point that it's trivial for a state-level actor to pull it off.

Seriously, there are numerous international treaties and every last time a country has started trying without US go-ahead they've been promptly buried in sanctions.

Which brings us to the question of how the rest of the world might react to one nation deciding that nuclear weapons in private hands are now a totally okay thing.

Billy-Joe with his AR doesn't bother the Russians or the Chinese, when though a few million people like him would be a serious problem if they were planning an invasion.
Even Billy-Joe with his tripod-mounted, belt-fed, rotary-barrelled whatyoucallit that would have liberals clutching their pearls would not trouble them.

But Billy-Joe driving home with half-a-dozen McNukes on the back of his pickup truck (the hardware store was having a special that morning) and getting to work in his yard on something that looks suspiciously like it's going to be a long-range, solid-fuel rocket of some sort?
That might just get their attention in an "America, if you won't send people to stop him, we will!" kind of way.

So maybe the whole concept of McNukes should be dismissed as the reductio ad absurdum argument it obviously is? Billy-Joe can have any bullet-firing weapon he can afford, even a tank or his own home-built A-10 clone, but ABC weapons?
That should be where the line gets drawn.

 

[Free-Stater 101]

View attachment 1010

To be honest, I think the only exception to the Second Amendment is nukes and other NBC WMD's weapons for a few reasons.

1. The damage they cause is irreversible and have long term consequences for everybody.
2. Those three weapon types are indiscriminate and can't really be controlled upon release making them a pandora's box for anyone's use.
3. The expenses required to make them would only ensure only the rich could acquire them and I am annoyed enough by the government possessing them.
4. If WMD's were allowed to be made privately by U.S. citizens what's stopping the third world dictatorships from outsourcing their nuclear program here to be developed legally by U.S. citizens?

So, there are limits to what I will allow even if they are pretty high set.

 

[Captain X]

I have limits, too, it's just that when someone gets hyperbolic with me, I like to just lean into it.

 

[Marduk]

A lot of the practical "threat rating" of weapons when it comes to common crime and terrorism is kinda counterintuitive, not proportional to the weapon's power. Similar to the situation with small arms, where for all the idiots pearl clutching about AR style rifles being too deadly for civilians to own and designed to kill, most criminals just simply don't want to lug around a long arm they can't hide and is too expensive to throw away after one use, and instead do plenty of killing mostly with small, concealable and disposable shitty compact handguns, which fit their needs almost perfectly.
In the more powerful stuff, large, expensive, crew served weapons are in a similar position to ARs. Sure, very destructive in right circumstances, but for most obvious criminal uses they have other characteristics that annoyingly get in the way. The real worry when it comes to criminals using the stuff are MANPADS, RPGs, explosive charges and grenades, and even then its more terrorists than common criminals.
And obviously CBRN weapons combined with more suicidally oriented troublemakers.

 

[Zachowon]

Look, if a country wants you dead, they will nuke you.
So just arm your populace with nukes.
Simple