NRA gives FCC boss Ajit Pai a gun as reward for killing net neutrality. Yeah, an actual gun Ajit Pai – chairman of America's broadband watchdog, the FCC – is the proud new owner of a handmade Kentucky long gun from the US National Rifle Association (NRA) – thanks to his brave stance in favor of lining the pockets of billion-dollar telcos. The watchdog boss said he was surprised to receive the Charlton Heston Courage …
NRA / 2nd amendment types (read tin foil nutters ) care to comment about the ban of the ownership and sale of automatic weapons to the general US public?
The government has ALREADY banned you from holding one class of weapons........... so there should be no problem with banning the ownership and sale of semi-auto rifles
"But I need it for hunting" comes the wail.... well if you missed with your first shot its highly liable that bambi and her ilk have fucked off at this point, so sending another 29 rnds after them wont help a bit... and if you hit on your first shot.. why do you need a semi-auto rifle in the first place?
And as for the laughable "I need it to defend myself from the ebil guvernment"... good luck with taking on a squad of marines armed with M-16s, grenade launchers and able to call for A10 back up if things get tough....... Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrpppppppppppp and the problem is gone.
Handguns yes... single shot rifles yes.. semi auto and fully auto guns..... no (and thats a quote from a republican friend whos into guns and stuff)
"And as for the laughable "I need it to defend myself from the ebil guvernment"... good luck with taking on a squad of marines armed with M-16s, grenade launchers and able to call for A10 back up if things get tough....... Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrpppppppppppp and the problem is gone."
Seemed the Vietnamese, Iraqis, and Somalia did all right given their disadvantages (and the A10 was in Vietnam, too). Why can't we?
Because you don't need to? Because most of you have never killed a man, and despite your bravado and claiming the 2A, many of you would either simply not be able to do it, or would miss... or would do it and suffer long term mental effects.
And if you're invaded by Un ... well, you should join up and get trained properly.
@Charles 9:
Seemed the Vietnamese, Iraqis, and Somalia did all right given their disadvantages (and the A10 was in Vietnam, too). Why can't we?
You make a good point, but the bottom line is: all those countries were repelling a foreign invader. Nothing unifies opposition quite like that. As humankind has repeatedly shown, it's amazing what people can do when they all work together.
What do you think would unify the American public to the same extent? Nothing short of foreign invasion, I suspect. Certainly I doubt that you could persuade everyone to take part in comparable operations if the US Army (and, most likely, also its law enforcement agencies) was on the other side. And a people divided are, as the poet says, well and truly screwed. (C.f. Brexit.)
I would think a DOMESTIC invasion would be the ULTIMATE motivator, as it would prove the Founders and all the "nuts" right. Plus, consider that all those military people come from those same hometowns. How many of them do you think would stay in the ranks if ordered to move seriously against their own people?
And if it comes to turning American troops against civilians in the homeland, you know how it will be framed: as a clear and present threat of terrorism. If commanders can convince their subordinates that the enemy poses an imminent threat to peace and the safety of innocent people, they can convince them to act.
And you know what makes it really hard to make that case? The knowledge that the targets are mostly unarmed or, at most, lightly armed. If everyone knows they've got top-flight weapons of their own, then escalation becomes really easy. That's why swatting is a thing now.
"How many of them do you think would stay in the ranks if ordered to move seriously against their own people?"
That's why the Romans took recruits from the conquered territories but sent them elsewhere to serve and fight. I doubt the US military could manage the same WRT to service people being sent only to areas out of their home range.
Some knowledge of history would help.
Not at all. Vietnamese weren't just the Vietcong with a rifle you saw in movies. They were heavily armed (by Russia and China) - fighter jets, SAMs, artillery and mortars, mines, heavy machine guns, etc. They also had armored vehicles and tanks. Plus a terrain which made advanced weaponry like big tanks useless. The US armed forces were designed to fight a war in Europe against division of battle tanks in open terrain, not in the South-East jungle. You have to accept much more casualties in such war - and of course you have to destroy supply lines and enemy cities like done in WWII. Nothing of that of course, was acceptable in Vietnam.
A-10 entered service in 1977, thus was never used in Vietnam. Even attack helicopters were in their infancy in the Vietnam era, and would have been of little use anyway in the jungle.
In Somalia, US troops were sent as a "peace and humanitarian relief corp" - with only light weapons, no armored vehicles, no attack helicopters and planes, albeit they were tasked also to fight the local warlords. Just, the Somali pick-up mounted heavy machine guns and RPGs outgunned them easily, and while usually fighting each other, they allied against the US attempt.
It was a big, bit mistake made by US military planners, which needed to resort to ask help from other nations tanks and armored vehicles to save their troops under siege.
Iraqi regular troops and the Republican Guard couldn't sustain a fight against US and allies troops - did you forget the prisoners herder by helicopters?
Insurgents, especially suicidal ones, are always an issue, if they have enough support from the local population, and have supply lines which feeds them the required weapons, which usually go far beyond assault rifles, usually including RPGs, heavy machine guns, small missiles, explosives.
Even in Afghanistan Talibans had to accept US help to fight Russians. You may need to adopt an approach like the one Russia adopted in Chechenya, but it's a bit bloody, and with large collateral damages. Cutting supply lines may mean to enter into a conflict with a larger power, i.e. Russia and/or China in Korea and Vietnam, Iran in Iraq.
Being on someone's own territory and being invaded may matter, but it's not really decisive. France couldn't stop the Nazi invasion, nor Italy the Allied one. Egyptian forces were routed by Israeli ones on their own soil. Finns were able to resist the Russia invasion in Winter, when they could take advantage of terrain and better equipment against the ill-equipped and badly organized Russian army, but as soon Spring came, the numbers were against them.
It works better with highly indoctrinated populations, of course, which can be got convinced to die "for the cause" in big numbers, especially if you can leverage their deepest fears about the "invader".
What's the chance the US armed forces turn against the citizens? Wouldn't it turn far earlier in another civil war fought using any available military weapon, with army forces split among factions? Anyway, if it ever happens, it will be too late to fight them with some assault rifle.
Any invading force able to defeat them, anyway, would come from nations that would have no problems to utterly wipe out fat bearded white men and their AR-15s. And there would be no country able to help them.
"And as for the laughable "I need it to defend myself from the ebil guvernment"... good luck with taking on a squad of marines armed with M-16s, grenade launchers and able to call for A10 back up if things get tough....... Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrpppppppppppp and the problem is gone."
Although I completely agree with the stance on the outdated second amendment and the "WELL REGULATED militia" arguments, if it ever did come to some level of civil war in the US, I'd expect that significant sections of the government military would be on each side of the conflict.
Yeah, the supremes decided all gun owners are part of some hypothetical militia, but is it really "well regulated"?
Yes, because by the use of the term in 1790, "well-regualted" meant "well-equipped". Isn't that why the British Army were known as "regulars"?
"The government has ALREADY banned you from holding one class of weapons........... so there should be no problem with banning the ownership and sale of semi-auto rifles"
Not quite. An AK-47 (for example) made before 1985 CANNOT be banned due to the retroactive law restriction in the Constitution. And there's still room for any existing ban to be challenged on Second Amendment grounds, especially after the "individual right" aka militia of one ruling.
You're never going to be able to eliminate guns in the US. There are just too many in circulation. That said, when I was a kid, every boy child carried a pocket knife, and a lot of us had pellet guns and .22 rifles, and had families with shotguns and other arms. It never would have occurred to me to take one to school unless it was for show and tell, which probably would have actually been allowed if you cleared it with the teacher first. Or to use my pocketknife to stab someone. There were fistfights and bullying (which is not okay), but no one really considered actually killing their classmates. There weren't any mass shootings that I can recall before Columbine.
What changed in these decades? Were mass shootings just a meme, an idea whose time had come? Did the first one somehow make it "okay" for others to do the same? I don't know. One thing I do know is that our sanitized, politically-correct society allows resentment and anger to fester and build without a safety valve, and parenting skills are at an all-time low. And I believe that information being freely available is a wonderful thing, but I would have to admit that letting your kids view uncensored violence and destruction with no supervision does desensitize them. We also seem to think that kids are equal to adults and responsible for their own actions in the same way, while they are often still way too immature to realize the consequences of their actions or deal with heady emotions that they're feeling for the first time.
So what is the answer? I don't know. Banning everything in life that can be misused is not it though. This is the equivalent of putting your hands over your ears and singing "LaLaLaLa" to tune out something you don't want to hear. And arming teachers is ridiculous. If there is any solution IMHO, it is giving kids more education than what they get in Algebra class. Kids need to be raised to value their own lives and that of others, and when warning signs present themselves, the answer isn't to lock them up forever, but to work with them to salvage their troubled psyches before they become truly lost.
I think what it is is that societal pressure is getting too great now (unlike before) and as a result people are snapping. My thing, though, is that violence will happen regardless of the means. Like with suicide, take oneears away and they'll just find another. Remember, the worst nonmilitary massacres in American history didn't use guns.
Pellet guns and small calibers are not AR-15 rifles with high-power ammunition and large magazines. The damages you can inflict in a few minutes with military grade weapons are much larger than with far less powerful ones. A .22 bullet to be fatal needs a very precise hit, and many wounds will be less dangerous. High speed military bullets makes far more damages, they crush bones and the the resulting impact wave damages nearby tissues and organs. The caliber itself doesn't mean everything, bullet speed. weight and characteristics may be very different. Someone armed with such rifles also outguns most law enforcement agents but SWAT teams.
Mass murderers know it. If they couldn't do such big damage easily before being stopped, they may not even attempt it.
"There weren't any mass shootings that I can recall before Columbine."
Google, and you'll find they started well before. I.e. the "University of Texas tower shooting" - 1966. Anyway, only in relatively recent years military grade weapons are easily available at low prices.
In the 1930s, machine guns and other weapons used by gangsters for mass killings were outlawed, and it worked.
"Pellet guns and small calibers are not AR-15 rifles with high-power ammunition and large magazines. The damages you can inflict in a few minutes with military grade weapons are much larger than with far less powerful ones. "
My point was that kids just didn't kill people a few decades ago, with isolated exceptions of course. While I would not have a problem with banning most assault weapons, or at least making them a lot harder to get, you can do nearly the same damage with a pair of 1911 Colts, even if you'd need a few more clips and to reload more often. And I don't know the answer. Restricting access to the most deadly weapons may help, but I'm not sure how you fix a broken conscience or missing empathy, or instill a voice of reason asking "Do I really want to do this?" I'd be a hypocrite if I said I've never wished harm on someone, or been in a mood where I've wished someone would start something, but there's a difference between that and deciding to go on a killing spree.
You're never going to be able to eliminate guns in the US. There are just too many in circulation.
You can never eliminate them entirely anywhere. Even in places with strict gun controls there will be those who have them hidden in drawers and a criminal element which will get their hands on them.
But you can go a long way to eliminating most of them. It only requires the will and, for America, the willingness to use force to ensure compliance. It won't be pretty but could be done if the Will Of The People (TM) were behind it.
Make unauthorised gun ownership illegal. Have a gun surrender programme for a while then shoot dead anyone who is found with an unauthorised gun. Treat it like brutally disarming an enemy in conflict. The message will soon get out, and those resisting will soon not be part of the problem.
The Second Amendment isn't sacrosanct, and self-evidently the Constitution can be amended. It does indeed rest upon the Will Of The People supporting change but, if they do, then those resisting will be a minority and the majority mostly won't care how they get their way, or how the Enemies Of The People resisting change are dealt with. If putting people up against the wall is what it takes, then that is what it takes.
In fact it can even be argued that the Second Amendment itself exists to facilitate the removal of the tyranny of unrestricted gun ownership :-)
Think of it as democratically mandated revolution. As I said; it won't be pretty, but can be done.
Cowardly? I really would like to know what their rules of engagement were. I would not be at all surprised to find they followed those rules.
Of course, the RoE might have been too cautious - but if they'd broken the rules they'd probably be toast... Which they are now anyway.
Yes. Which is why people should know the RoE before calling them cowards. If they failed to follow the RoE by not going in then that's a different matter. However, I expect their RoE required them to 'consult superiors' or some such before going in. Too many constraints can stop people potentially doing what turns out with 20/20 hindsight to be the right thing.
I doubt if they said anything about consulting superiors, because that would shuffle responsibility upwards, which is not what anyone has in mind when drafting things like that. (The golden rule is to make sure the agency employing the cop can never be held responsible for anything, period.)
What they probably did say was something about obtaining the best possible information, and not making a move while the situation was still unclear. That would be quite enough to keep the cop outside for at least five minutes after he heard the first gunshots.
Makes no difference now, the poor guy is the official scapegoat for this episode. And the RoE won't change.
FCC under Pai and NRA. These 2 groups have nothing in common except having both attracted a lot of dislike, where to large segments of the population, they are spawns of Satan.
The core supporters of each may very well have good reasons to dislike the other outright - farmers unhappy w cable fees or, smaller group, telecom free for all advocates unhappy with assault rifles. For outsiders both are pariahs.
Sure, they may hope for strength in unity. But the synergy is unclear and sometimes it is best to steer clear of endorsement/ing controversial parties.
Ars Technica readers repeatedly quipped that this was like reading The Onion.
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