brandon
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Now is not the time to talk about gun control (1 Viewer)
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Optimus Prime
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How long can we go between news cycles featuring assault rifles?
According to the Gun Violence Archive, in 2023 the answer is barely more than 12 hours. This year there have been 565 mass shootings in the US, including the latest horror in Maine – an average of nearly two a day. Those statistics make American Gun, a brilliant new biography of the AR-15, a particularly powerful and important book.
Written by two fine Wall Street Journal reporters, Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson, the book is packed with characters and plot turns, from Eugene Stoner, the publicity-shy inventor who designed the first AR-15 in the 1950s, to the embrace of the gun by Robert McNamara and John F Kennedy, which led to its disastrous adoption as the chief weapon for army infantrymen in Vietnam.
The design was shaped by a simple military adage: “Whoever shoots the most lead wins.” Every detail of how the weapon went from a “counter-insurgency” tool in south-east Asia in the 1960s to the most popular way to kill American schoolchildren in the 21st century is included in this harrowing narrative.
Stoner worked with aluminum in one of the booming aerospace factories in California and became obsessed with how he could use new materials like plastic to make a lighter, more effective rifle.
He also achieved the “holy grail that gun designers had pursued for generations: how to use the energy released from the exploding gunpowder … to reload the weapon”.
Soon he had a patent for a “gas operated bolt and carrier system” with fewer parts than a conventional rifle, that would make his “smoother to operate and last longer”.……..
www.theguardian.com
According to the Gun Violence Archive, in 2023 the answer is barely more than 12 hours. This year there have been 565 mass shootings in the US, including the latest horror in Maine – an average of nearly two a day. Those statistics make American Gun, a brilliant new biography of the AR-15, a particularly powerful and important book.
Written by two fine Wall Street Journal reporters, Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson, the book is packed with characters and plot turns, from Eugene Stoner, the publicity-shy inventor who designed the first AR-15 in the 1950s, to the embrace of the gun by Robert McNamara and John F Kennedy, which led to its disastrous adoption as the chief weapon for army infantrymen in Vietnam.
The design was shaped by a simple military adage: “Whoever shoots the most lead wins.” Every detail of how the weapon went from a “counter-insurgency” tool in south-east Asia in the 1960s to the most popular way to kill American schoolchildren in the 21st century is included in this harrowing narrative.
Stoner worked with aluminum in one of the booming aerospace factories in California and became obsessed with how he could use new materials like plastic to make a lighter, more effective rifle.
He also achieved the “holy grail that gun designers had pursued for generations: how to use the energy released from the exploding gunpowder … to reload the weapon”.
Soon he had a patent for a “gas operated bolt and carrier system” with fewer parts than a conventional rifle, that would make his “smoother to operate and last longer”.……..
American Gun review: riveting and horrifying history of the AR-15
Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson provide an indispensable read on the assault rifle used in so many mass shootings
Optimus Prime
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some interesting stats in this article
======================
The gunman who a week ago killed 18 people in Lewiston, Maine, finished his bloodbath by shooting himself. Like many mass shootings, his rampage appears to have been a suicide that took others with him.
Mass shootings draw deserved media attention, but they are a small percentage of all gun deaths in the US; suicide is the most common way people die by gun. That is, if you own or have access to a gun, the person you’re most likely to kill is yourself.
Fifty-four per cent of US gun deaths are suicides, which means access to a gun is a major risk factor for dying this way.
This fact, often cited but rarely examined, means the gun industry is pushing guns the same way the tobacco industry pushed cigarettes: their intentions toward their customers are blithely murderous. It also undermines the advertisements and arguments claiming that guns provide safety and protection. Of the 48,117 reported gun deaths in the US in 2022, 26,993 were suicides – a stunning number, a gun death every 11 minutes, the equivalent to a mid-sized town being wiped out annually.
Gun sales went up in Maine after the mass shooting and the two days the public feared a killer on the loose. The desire for protection is
understandable but guns rarely provide it. Cases in which guns really are used to protect against harm are far, far, far rarer than the gun lobby and the macho fantasies of skillful gun use fed by films and video games suggest.
Guns are rarely actually used in such situations, and when used, are seldom as effective as the fantasies suggest (and sometimes kill bystanders or are used against the gun owner).
Even police, who are trained in marksmanship, mostly miss their intended targets in conflicts.
The publication the Trace, noting that 16 million Americans who own AR-15 assault rifles say they are for self-defense, was able to find only 51 verified cases of owners using them in self-defense over an almost 10-year period.
Eighty-one per cent of AR-15 owners are male; 74% are white. There’s a kind of nightmarish illogic to the fact that people buy guns for protection when the people they are most likely to turn the guns on are themselves.
According to the New England Journal of Medicine, “the evidence indicates that the risk of suicide is three times as high when there is firearm access as when there is not”.
White men, who make up less than a third of the US population, make up more than two-thirds of suicides by guns, and run higher risks of suicide overall. As the Washington Post recently put it, “White men are six times as likely to die by suicide as other Americans.”……
If the left were pushing guns, you could imagine the right arguing that it’s a conspiracy against white men.
But of course it’s the right that has built a cult around guns, the right that has pushed for lax gun laws, the right that has sought to make guns available to domestic abuse perpetrators, mentally ill people and people under 21 – such as the mass shooter who last year murdered 18 children and teachers in an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, with an AR-15-style rifle purchased the day after his 18th birthday.
While the frontier rhetoric of protecting women is often invoked, male gun owners can and do turn these weapons on female partners and former partners at horrific rates. Half of all female murder victims are killed by intimate partners or family members, and most of these are gun deaths……
www.theguardian.com
======================
The gunman who a week ago killed 18 people in Lewiston, Maine, finished his bloodbath by shooting himself. Like many mass shootings, his rampage appears to have been a suicide that took others with him.
Mass shootings draw deserved media attention, but they are a small percentage of all gun deaths in the US; suicide is the most common way people die by gun. That is, if you own or have access to a gun, the person you’re most likely to kill is yourself.
Fifty-four per cent of US gun deaths are suicides, which means access to a gun is a major risk factor for dying this way.
This fact, often cited but rarely examined, means the gun industry is pushing guns the same way the tobacco industry pushed cigarettes: their intentions toward their customers are blithely murderous. It also undermines the advertisements and arguments claiming that guns provide safety and protection. Of the 48,117 reported gun deaths in the US in 2022, 26,993 were suicides – a stunning number, a gun death every 11 minutes, the equivalent to a mid-sized town being wiped out annually.
Gun sales went up in Maine after the mass shooting and the two days the public feared a killer on the loose. The desire for protection is
understandable but guns rarely provide it. Cases in which guns really are used to protect against harm are far, far, far rarer than the gun lobby and the macho fantasies of skillful gun use fed by films and video games suggest.
Guns are rarely actually used in such situations, and when used, are seldom as effective as the fantasies suggest (and sometimes kill bystanders or are used against the gun owner).
Even police, who are trained in marksmanship, mostly miss their intended targets in conflicts.
The publication the Trace, noting that 16 million Americans who own AR-15 assault rifles say they are for self-defense, was able to find only 51 verified cases of owners using them in self-defense over an almost 10-year period.
Eighty-one per cent of AR-15 owners are male; 74% are white. There’s a kind of nightmarish illogic to the fact that people buy guns for protection when the people they are most likely to turn the guns on are themselves.
According to the New England Journal of Medicine, “the evidence indicates that the risk of suicide is three times as high when there is firearm access as when there is not”.
White men, who make up less than a third of the US population, make up more than two-thirds of suicides by guns, and run higher risks of suicide overall. As the Washington Post recently put it, “White men are six times as likely to die by suicide as other Americans.”……
If the left were pushing guns, you could imagine the right arguing that it’s a conspiracy against white men.
But of course it’s the right that has built a cult around guns, the right that has pushed for lax gun laws, the right that has sought to make guns available to domestic abuse perpetrators, mentally ill people and people under 21 – such as the mass shooter who last year murdered 18 children and teachers in an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, with an AR-15-style rifle purchased the day after his 18th birthday.
While the frontier rhetoric of protecting women is often invoked, male gun owners can and do turn these weapons on female partners and former partners at horrific rates. Half of all female murder victims are killed by intimate partners or family members, and most of these are gun deaths……
US companies push guns as blithely and murderously as they once did tobacco | Rebecca Solnit
Guns are used so often in suicide that if the left were associated with lax gun laws, the right might accuse liberals of conspiring to kill white men
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Optimus Prime
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Big_L
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So, if an ar15 ban is adopted, what do we do with the firearms we already own?
Optimus Prime
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Buybacks or annual tax on them?
Big_L
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I don't like either option. A buyback is not going to give me fair market value and a tax . . . I feel that would essentially be an ex post facto type of law.
Optimus Prime
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I thought that buybacks were above market value to give people an incentive to sell
coldseat
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Let's worry about the future sales of those weapons first. It seems to me that a lot of the mass shooters buy their AR-15's legally within a few months of their massacres.
Then we can do other things like not allow resale of AR-15's and have an optional gun buyback program. Basically just make them a lot harder to get. We don't need to seize any weapons or anything like that.
I think it would be good to have an national (optional) gun buyback program for all guns with a set budget for an extended period of time (like 10 years). We need to try and remove as many guns from the street as we can.
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brandon
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You have no reason to believe this. The buyback can, and should, be above market value.
SystemShock
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I am going to have to nitpick a few things in that piece.How long can we go between news cycles featuring assault rifles?
According to the Gun Violence Archive, in 2023 the answer is barely more than 12 hours. This year there have been 565 mass shootings in the US, including the latest horror in Maine – an average of nearly two a day. Those statistics make American Gun, a brilliant new biography of the AR-15, a particularly powerful and important book.
Written by two fine Wall Street Journal reporters, Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson, the book is packed with characters and plot turns, from Eugene Stoner, the publicity-shy inventor who designed the first AR-15 in the 1950s, to the embrace of the gun by Robert McNamara and John F Kennedy, which led to its disastrous adoption as the chief weapon for army infantrymen in Vietnam.
The design was shaped by a simple military adage: “Whoever shoots the most lead wins.” Every detail of how the weapon went from a “counter-insurgency” tool in south-east Asia in the 1960s to the most popular way to kill American schoolchildren in the 21st century is included in this harrowing narrative.
Stoner worked with aluminum in one of the booming aerospace factories in California and became obsessed with how he could use new materials like plastic to make a lighter, more effective rifle.
He also achieved the “holy grail that gun designers had pursued for generations: how to use the energy released from the exploding gunpowder … to reload the weapon”.
Soon he had a patent for a “gas operated bolt and carrier system” with fewer parts than a conventional rifle, that would make his “smoother to operate and last longer”.……..
American Gun review: riveting and horrifying history of the AR-15
Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson provide an indispensable read on the assault rifle used in so many mass shootings
I'd like to ask the writer, what makes the armed forces' adoption of the Armalite "disastrous".
The AR-15 design wasn't shaped by the old adage "whoever shoots the most lead wins". If that was the case, its max rate of fire would be higher than the M14 or M1921 but it isn't. What drove the design was the U.S. armed forces need for a gun that could compete with the AK-47 in durability, accuracy, weight, etc.
Gas operated guns weren't the holy grail that designers had pursued for generations prior to the AR-15. The aforementioned AK-47 uses gas operated reloads, and the AK is an older design. Even the M1 Garand, which was replaced by the M14, which was replaced by the AR-15 (M16) is gas operated.
Is the AR-15 a tool for killing? Yes. Any gun that fires lead bullets is a tool for killing. A firearm designed for the armed forces is definitely a tool for killing. Armed forces' rifles around the globe have specifications around muzzle velocity, calibers, penetration (flesh, vests, helmets), etc. which ultimate purpose is to kill. That is not for debate. Is the AR-15 better at killing than any other gun? No.
But if anyone is going to write the history of anything, at least they should get their facts straight.
BullSheetBuddha
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The M16 fires a 223 as opposed to the 308 the M14 fires. It doesn't matter whether or not the M14 fires at the same rate as an M16 when both are on full auto. The M14 is A) too unwieldy on full auto and B) the 308 weighs too much for a rifleman to carry 250 rounds or so around. Ask anyone who was on the M60 what it's like carrying 7.62 x .51 ammo?
Anyway, the AR15 needs to be banned.
Optimus Prime
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NSFW
replace deer with “you” and pants with “assault rifle“ and wearing with “shot you with”
replace deer with “you” and pants with “assault rifle“ and wearing with “shot you with”
BullSheetBuddha
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I love that movie. However, it does matter what these mass killers are carrying and they're carrying AR15s.
SystemShock
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I don't have to ask, I've carried one.
As for the rest, still, the AR-15 design wasn't shaped by the desire to fire more lead, but fire it more effectively, among other things.
BullSheetBuddha
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If they hadn't cared about how much lead the M16 could pour out then they wouldn't have had a full auto switch.
SystemShock
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Whatever you say.
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