Gun Control & RKBA

Cynical fearmongering about guns that kill fewer people than bicycles, despite being the most popular rifles on the U.S. civilian market for about two decades now.

Murder, by State and Type of Weapon, 2014 (FBI)

[font face="courier new"]Total murders...................... 11,961
Handguns............................ 5,562 (46.5%)
Firearms (type unknown)............. 2,052 (17.2%)
Clubs, rope, fire, etc.............. 1,610 (13.5%)
Knives and other cutting weapons.... 1,567 (13.1%)
Hands, fists, feet.................... 660 (5.5%)
Shotguns.............................. 262 (2.2%)
Rifles................................ 248 (2.1%) [/font]

Law enforcement deaths in the United States are about as low as they've ever been, per capita, and are still falling, down by 20% over 2014. And for perspective, 2012 was the lowest year in absolute numbers since *1887*.

http://www.nleomf.org/facts/officer-fatalities-data/

"The Lapsed Federal Assault Weapons Ban: In 1994, Congress adopted the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which made it “unlawful for a person to manufacture, transfer, or possess” a semiautomatic assault weapon.13 The law was adopted with a sunset clause, however, and expired in 2004, despite overwhelming public support for its renewal. Thus, semi-automatic, military style weapons that were formerly banned under the federal law are now legal unless banned by state or local law."

That is exceedingly brazen bullshit, considering that "assault weapons" as now defined by the gun control lobby were never banned, and more AR-15's, civilian AK's, and other "assault weapons" using the gun control lobby's current definition were sold 1994-2004 than in the prior fifty years combined. The 1994 Feinstein non-ban outlawed no guns, just names, and required some subtle cosmetic and ergonomic changes that you non-gunnies wouldn't even notice. Yet the homicide rate dropped.

Ban-era civilian SAR-1, very collectible, freely imported and sold between 1994 and 2004 (this is probably a 2002-2003), with a ban-era-import 30-round magazine; see if you can spot the differences between this carbine and a pre-1994 or post-2004:


After the non-ban expired in 2004, allowing the name "Colt AR-15" to be used again (as if that mattered, since Colt is a minor player in the AR market) and encouraged adjustable stocks to be unpinned, the rifle homicide rate dropped by another 50% since 2004:

Rifle homicides 2005-2014 (from FBI Uniform Crime Reports 2005-2014, Tables 20, collated)
[font face="courier new"]2005: 442
2006: 436
2007: 450
2008: 375
2009: 348
2010: 358
2011: 323
2012: 302
2013: 285
2014: 248[/font]

"Anecdotal evidence from law enforcement leaders suggests that military-style assault weapons are increasingly being used against law enforcement by drug dealers and gang members."

False. Rifle murders are decreasing. Murders of police officers are decreasing. Being a police officer in the United States is safer than it has ever been.

"67% of Field & Stream readers polled did not consider assault weapons to be legitimate sporting guns. "

The most popular sporting guns in the United States aren't legitimate sporting guns? That is too funny. You do realize that sport shooters are mostly target shooters, not hunters, right? Guess what the #1 centerfire target rifle in the United States is. And guess what the #1 target caliber in the United States is.

And I'd like to see a source for that poll, given the backlash by hunters and shooters against Outdoor Life's Jim Zumbo when he suggested something along those lines. Field and Stream regularly runs articles on hunting with modern-looking rifles (do you even read it, bro?), and if I am not mistaken, even that magazine's old-school-curmudgeon-in-chief (David Petzal) owns an AR. You are really stuck in 1992 here.

" During the 1980s, the firearms industry sought to reverse a decline in consumer demand for guns by developing and marketing new types of weapons based on military designs"

That's pretty funny, considering that most civilian rifles manufactured since the 1770s have been "based on military designs", from muzzleloading muskets, to military-style lever actions, to military-style bolt-actions, to straight-wooden-stocked semiautos, to more modern looking semiautos.

And Federal law regulates how rifles work, not what they look like. Semiautomatic is the default mode of operation of civilian guns in this country, and 75% or so of U.S. guns sold annually are semiautomatic (meaning they fire once and only once when you pull the trigger, and won't fire again until you release it and pull it a second time, unlike a select-fire military rifle or a machinegun).

Finally, that graphic is hilarious; you can tell the person who did it didn't actually know much about the gun market. An adjustable stock adjusts the stock to fit the shooter, but doesn't make the gun any shorter than a fixed stock would; Federal law defines the minimum length, not whether the stock can be extended to longer than that. And "concealable"? LOL. An AR with the stock full short is nearly THREE FEET LONG and eight or more inches high with sights, even without the magazine. A 9mm and a dozen magazines will fit in your waistband and pockets; try that with a three-foot-long rifle. If anybody can point me toward a photo hosting site with good privacy settings, I'll post a comparison pic of an AR vs. a large handgun and a smallish handgun.

And, ummm, that's not a barrel shroud. That's a forestock (handguard), like a target rifle has. A barrel shroud is a heat shield like you might see on an old Intratec pistol or an old Sten reproduction, whereas the forend of an AR is made first and foremost for holding the gun rather than preventing accidental contact with a hot barrel. You can get a barrel shroud for an AR if you want, to cover the exposed barrel in front of the forend, but they're rather silly, IMO.

And you're not trying to outlaw 100 round range toys; you're trying to outlaw standard 11 to 30 round magazines, of which 50+ million citizens own maybe half a billion, going back to the early 1860s. Be honest.

Frankly, the gun control lobby's obsession with banning the least misused, most popular rifles makes no sense from either a violence prevention standpoint or a strategic standpoint. Even door to door sweeps that confiscated every rifle in America would do nothing to reduce the (falling) murder rate, because rifles are hardly used at all in murders or violent crime in general (~2.5% of murders, 0.6% of violent crime), and shotguns and handguns---both responsible for more murders than rifles are---can be easily substituted. All the "assault weapon" fraud does is to motivate gun owners to fight the prohibitionists tooth and nail; those shooters who might go along to get along with UBC's and whatnot will rise up and get active when you start talking about banning their guns. The prohibitionists' obsession with legislating rifle stock shape is arguably directly responsible for the utter collapse of the gun control lobby after 1994, for the wave of concealed carry licensing reform that swept the nation after 1994, and for the doubling or tripling of annual gun sales (especially rifle sales) since 1994. Yet rifle murders continue to fall. Hmmmm.

I'll close with a quotation from the head of the gun control lobby a few decades ago, when rifle murders were two or three times what they are now, that is even more apropos now than it was then:

&quot O)ur organization, Handgun Control, Inc. does not propose further controls on rifles and shotguns. Rifles and shotguns are not the problem; they are not concealable."

--Nelson T. "Pete" Shields, head of what is now the Brady Campaign 1978-1989, Guns Don't Die--People Do, Priam Press, 1981, pp. 47-48 (emphasis added).

I guess at some point, idealogical purity in gun control fundamentalism won out over pragmatism, but it certainly shot the gun controllers in the foot. Anyway, we own rifles with handgrips that stick out. Protruding rifle handgrips and adjustable stocks aren't a crime problem in this country. And we will keep them.