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[Brentai]

Going for all-porcelain actually.

[sei]

Also O Hax, you are frakking well kidding me. 

Defensive mother fucking grenade?

Flashbang?

[Shinra]

its defensive because it requires it to be thrown from cover.

Yeah, it's probably better to parse it as "grenade that is used from a defensive position."

Grenade makes a wonderful deterrent.  Who wants to press their luck against somebody so clearly dangerously insane?

Personally I have to wonder how many folks like our friend the truck salesman there want people to be able to own heavy military hardware, not for home defense in the "burglar" sense, but in the "government police state/Communist revolution/some other political bugbear we're all convinced is coming" sense.

Look, guys. It's just a tea tax. It's not a big deal, it's not a sign of things to come, and the only people talking about revolution are the tinfoil hats and extremists.

It's fun to joke because everything's going our way now, but weren't we talking about secession from the south three years ago? My fellow democrats who want to take away our gun rights really aren't considering 3/4s of the last century were under progressively more extremist republican rule and our last republican president actually thought he was mandated by god to be the president of the united states.

They will get back into power again, and an electorate that allows their progressive leaders to take away the tools to fight their government has noone to blame but themsleves when the shoe ends up on the other foot and they fall under the rule of tyrants. Furthermore, there is no reason - whatsoever - we should be restricting the use of any firearm, other than the simple acts of liscensing, registration, and qualification (eg. not a convicted felon) because there is no correlation whatsoever to a reduction in crime when gun laws get stricter, and people do not typically commit crimes with firearms that belong to them, let alone expensive assault weapons such as AK-47s. (While I will not argue an AK-47 has never been used in a crime, I will argue that 99% of crimes committed with assault rifles were done using illegally modified stolen AK-47s, or AK-47s that were shipped into the states after the iron curtain fell.) I think the best possible compromise is to treat everything like a handgun - waiting period, serial numbers, on the books as registered - and then lift the bans. On everything. Including fully automatic weapons. Top of it with a unified, national law on open and concealed carry that streamlines the process and makes sure the right, responsible people obtain those liscenses. The problem with laws as they stand is the more liberal the state the more difficult (or impossible) it becomes to obtain the right to carry a firearm. On the other side, the more conservative a state is, the more ridiculously easy it is to get access to those firearms. The end result is that the crazier your state is the more irresponsible the gun owners are. We need a middle ground. We shouldn't be telling an uneducated, mentally ill person he can wave a gun around in public. But we shouldn't be telling an educated, responsible, hard working adult that he can't carry a firearm to defend himself when he walks through the worst neighborhood in downtown detroit when he goes to church every sunday - a walk that has put him on the wrong end of a gun or a knife, as the victim of muggings, multiple times. Unfortunately, as things stand, this is the system we have.

"We don't need that for hunting" is an irrelevant argument that will never hold any weight, because the 2nd amendment was not about hunting and most of the people living in civilization - including the founding fathers - were craftsmen and tradesmen, not hunters and trappers and furriers. Keep in mind that at the time hunting was a profession, not a hobby. It's a pretty safe bet that every man had tried it, but I highly doubt benjamin franklin had shot a deer within 20 years of the revolutionary war. They wanted the right to gun ownership to protect themselves from "domestic threats" (then indians, today terrorists) thieves, foreign invaders, and of course, their own government. Just because there is a thick layer of beauracracy and a military too principled to attempt a coup these days does not mean that the threat of tyranny will ever be gone for good, it does not mean that our children or our grandchildren will have no need to pick up a weapon in defense of their freedoms.

And let's write that off as an impossibility - despite the fact that 8 of the last 9 years have been under the rule of a leader put in power by an activist supreme court, who belonged to a party that recently attempted to take the new york state congress in what they called in their own words a coup, a member of a party that has been in control of the government for the majority of the last century, and that unlike us can actually achieve party unity and get things done when they set their minds to it despite idealogical differences, and that will almost certainly get back in power again and retain it - again, we will pretend that a revolution will never, ever be necessary, and we need not worry about the future.

Well, now you have the issue of having an ocean - with a series of islands that can function as ports - between us and a major world power, with an army that outnumbers ours ten to one, that is an economic superpower that devotes much of it's money to military research and development, that will surpass us technologically in the next twenty years, that has spies and subversives in every branch of the military, law enforcement, and have been rooted out in places like the pentagon and as operators aboard AEGIS cruisers, who have gone to great lengths to research and steal information our missle and sub defense systems, and in the absolute best case scenario considers us a rival in the world, militarily, technologically, idealogically, socially and otherwise - and in the worst case scenario, considers us a hated enemy. While an invasion from China is hardly imminent or likely, it IS a possibility - a very real possibility - that we will see a chinese invasion or at the very least a war with china in the next 40 years. If we are not armed, who is going to save us? Our vastly outnumbered, and comparitively undertrained army? What if we station most of them overseas, and using the information they stole from us, defeat our radar and defense systems and stealthily invade california? We employed militias during World War I and World War II in the united states who never saw combat. They sat on standby, in case the germans invaded. It didn't happen, but it could have, and if we had planned for the future like we are today, we would have been in pretty dire straits if it had.

You might think my tinfoil hat is firmly affixed now, but let me get this straight - I don't believe that honestly any of this will ever happen during my lifetime. But it COULD. And if having the guns isn't hurting anyone - and it really isnt', because again, the overwhelming majority of gun crime - 90%+++ - is committed with guns that were illegally brought into the united states in the first place - then why is it an issue to keep them around "just in case"? Noone expects the worst case scenario, but not planning for the event is really, really stupid.

Also: Before anyone brings it up, if we were invaded by a foreign power I find it exceedingly unlikely the military would arm anyone until it was too late. The downside to having checks and balances is that even when there is an overhwelming support and need for something, getting congress to pass it without bickering for six months is impossible. See: Healthcare.

Edit: I also want to note, I said any type of gun, not any type of ammunition. Cop killers are called cop killers for a reason. In the event of an actual ground war with China, insurgents can easily fashion armor piercing ammunition if it became necessary, which is unlikely given that kevlar isn't super effective against assault rifle ammunition to begin with. The only reasons to have armor piercing ammunition is to have a concealable weapon capable of piercing bulletproof armor (which isn't necessary for self defense) or to defend yourself while operating in a tank crew, neither of which seem particularly pertinent...

[Transportation]

..so are you fakeposting or something Shinra?

A few random points because it is possible someone, somewhere, posted this:

1.) Massive armies don't count if they are on the other side of the Pacific. They just get bombed.

2.) China does not and will not have a sealift capacity to transport that army anywhere for a very long time. Especially over the pacific. Easily seen by whatever future satellites we have at that point.

And the Germans never had it either, for that record.

3.) Assuming we have enough pewpew lasers to shoot down enough ICBMs, bomber fleets, or whatever to make Phase 2 of the war feasible, it won't be up against "just" China. A fully modernized China would have a GDP...greater than all of NATO I think? That sort of power makes rulers wary, at the very least. Especially if this China is bizarrely militant as you make it out to be.

Unless America is pulling a Nazi Germany or something we'll probably be able to convince another continental Asian power (Russia, India, every single smaller country on China's periphery) to throw its infantry into the meat grinder for us against their would-be dominator. And a decent ensemble of allies from around the world because oh hey it's a World War.

Of course your scenario is 40-years in the future so who the fuck knows what'll happen then. A prosperous China will make the people conscious of any CCP fuck-ups, so maybe the post-revolution rulers will be democratic and American BFFs or something.

tl;dr Your alarmism is silly.

[SCD]

Also O Hax, you are frakking well kidding me. 

Defensive mother fucking grenade?

Flashbang?

you mean the thing you throw in a room before you send a stack in?

[Mongrel]

I note that none of the US military vets we have on here are contradicting SCD.

 

[Mongrel]

..so are you fakeposting or something Shinra?

A few random points because it is possible someone, somewhere, posted this:

1.) Massive armies don't count if they are on the other side of the Pacific. They just get bombed.

2.) China does not and will not have a sealift capacity to transport that army anywhere for a very long time. Especially over the pacific. Easily seen by whatever future satellites we have at that point.

And the Germans never had it either, for that record.

3.) Assuming we have enough pewpew lasers to shoot down enough ICBMs, bomber fleets, or whatever to make Phase 2 of the war feasible, it won't be up against "just" China. A fully modernized China would have a GDP...greater than all of NATO I think? That sort of power makes rulers wary, at the very least. Especially if this China is bizarrely militant as you make it out to be.

Unless America is pulling a Nazi Germany or something we'll probably be able to convince another continental Asian power (Russia, India, every single smaller country on China's periphery) to throw its infantry into the meat grinder for us against their would-be dominator. And a decent ensemble of allies from around the world because oh hey it's a World War.

Of course your scenario is 40-years in the future so who the fuck knows what'll happen then. A prosperous China will make the people conscious of any CCP fuck-ups, so maybe the post-revolution rulers will be democratic and American BFFs or something.

tl;dr Your alarmism is silly.

I don't really agree with Shinra's points per se, but I got that he was trying to make a point based purely on principle, rather than any real-world facts.

Of course that in and of itself can be a very silly thing to do.

[Catloaf]

I just don't see why anyone in America would ever need a pistol for anything but committing a crime.

For home-defense, a shotgun or hunting rifle is far more intimidating and better in general than even the largest handguns, as things are more accurately fired when they have stocks on them and are designed to be held with two hands to begin with so are generally more powerful.  As long as the thing is semi-automatic, it's fine.  Also, it's harder for a small-child to kill themselves or another with a full two-handed gun.

The same thing for assault rifles.  Why would anyone ever need to fire that many bullets in that short a time frame if not trying to kill a group of equally/similarly armed people?

I agree that people should have the right to a weapon, but within reason. 

Rifles and shotguns, they're the best in videogames, and in real life.

[Doom]

As long as the thing is semi-automatic, it's fine.  Also, it's harder for a small-child to kill themselves or another with a full two-handed gun.

dot dot dot

Rifles and shotguns, they're the best in videogames, and in real life.

facepalm.jpg

I just don't see why anyone in America would ever need a pistol for anything but committing a crime.

concealment issues, lethal vs non-lethal force, etc etc etc

Catloaf I want to send you to a school or possibly an institute where they could use beatings/electro-shocks to fix what is wrong with your brain.

[Rico]

The problem is that the second amendment was written at a time when the average citizen wasn't likely to have anything more powerful than a hunting rifle anyway.  About the only more powerful thing there was to buy was a cannon, and nobody was making those for public consumption.

And on a related note, it was written at a time when government oppressors wouldn't have anything more powerful than a rifle, also.

[Shinra]

Mongrel- A simple google search can prove the 'no correlation between gun control and gun crime' thing - there's a reason that the Brady bill was allowed to sunset without any fanfare. Gun crime in urban areas actually went up during the years that the bill was active - kind of defeating the point. Furthermore, the vast majority of the guns banned by the Brady assault weapons ban had never been used in a crime in the criminal history of the united states, and to date still have not.

Catloaf - Handguns are meant for personal defense outside of the home. In a fairly large portion of the united states you can obtain a concealed carry permit. While a short-barrel shotgun would be a much better option in terms of intimidation and stopping power, the downside is that you have to dangerously and illegally modify a firearm to get it. While many anti-gun activists and some police departments state that adding another gun to an already volatile situation - such as a bank robbery, mugging, attempted rape, attempted kidnapping or murder - is asking for trouble, eg the gun can be taken away etc - with proper training in the use of the weapon it can save lives and in states where concealed and open carry aren't uncommon it often does. The last thing I want to note, too, is that in a tight hallway a handgun is a much more effective and useful weapon than the full sized shotguns and rifles that were the only types of non-handgun weapons legal during the Brady assault weapons ban era - and those rifles and shotguns, by the way, were required to have clips that carried no greater than six cartridges or four shells, and if they combined semi-automatic action with one of the other home defense necessary accessories - such as a shortened or collapsable stock, shortened barrel, arm strap, stabilizing device (Such as a bipod or tripod), flashlight or bullpup design, there were immediately banned under the bill as well, so, lol, hurray gun control. During the Brady era, handguns were a very, very real choice for home defense, and I would argue the only choice for home defense.

Transportation: Again, I'm talking about a potential, possible scenario that could occur in the next 40+ years. The point is, if we are willing to sacrifice our right to carry and own firearms now, when we're at peace out of our perceptions of safety, what happens down the road when we're not so safe anymore? We're out of the reach of our enemies, but how long can that conceivably last? And how long will our immediate neighbors remain our allies for that matter? Mexico and Canada are irrelevant militarily, but that hasn't always been the case. "But canada has been irrelevant military for 300 years!" you say? Well, the english didn't expect us to revolt after 200 years of passive settlement, either.

These scenarios are ridiculous because, uh, history is ridiculous. The governer of the most populated state in the country once starred in a movie where he played a pregnant man, the president is the son of a black african man and a white american woman, and we circulate currency that is not only backed on the perceived value of it as a currency rather than any tangible item, but we mint coins that have pictures of bunnies, race cars, and guitars on them. (state quarters!) If we told the founding fathers this was our future, they would all find it hilariously implausible. (except jefferson, who would probably get very uncomfortable and quiet when we mentioned the president thing.)

If we give up the right to bare arms now, it is inevitable that we will regret it later. It might not be at any time during our lives, or the lives of our children, or the lives of our children's children, but someday we as a country will regret it. The catalyst may be invasion by foreign power, oppression by federal or state governments, or even something as unlikely as complete socio-economic collapse, but eventually the time will come when America needs it's guns again. And again, given that gun control is not significantly reducing gun crime, why get rid of the right to gun ownership? Why severely impede it?

There is of course the argument of accidental gun death - and it's true, that most shootings in the united states are accidental, and it's very true that many children die or are injured every year as a result of playing with guns - the solution here is to provide more government funding for gun education programs, and to raise awareness of gun safety devices such as gun locks and how they work. And for christ's sake, take the politics out of gun control altogether. There's propaganda from both sides of the fence trying to keep people ignorant on what gun control really means. I know that most democrats aren't trying to ban all guns, just like I know most republicans aren't trying to wipe the books of every gun law, ever. The problem is that both sides create such an air of ignorance on the topic that most of the people who are on their side in the debate are deprived of information that would help them prove their case to the world. Gun locks are a great example of this - there are laws in some states requiring that guns remain under lock and key when present in a home - a lot of gun nuts think this means they have to keep their gun in a safe where they can never reach it in time, when this is simply not the case. Lock and key can include a simple single pin trigger lock. The lock comes off in seconds, and has been proven to be an effective deterrant at children accessing the gun and endangering themselves. But because these laws have been painted the way they have, many consumers don't know this and don't utilize the safety device because they're not even aware such a simple tool exists. A teacher I had in high school owned guns and when she heard about gun locks, she actually got offended - when I explained to her what a trigger lock actually was, she went out and bought one for every gun she owned.

Guns are a uniquely dangerous tool - a tool that was originally designed only for killing other human beings and in it's history has been developed primarily for that purpose. This being the case, I can understand an anti-gun sentiment. Having noted this, however, the old adage of 'Guns don't kill people...' is really quite true, and just as the vast majority of people don't run around stabbing each other simply because they have access to knives, the vast majority of people won't run around killing each other just because they have access to guns. A responsible, arms-baring society, with the proper education and access to the proper safety tools and devices can use guns safely & effectively for self defense, national defense and hunting without arbitrary restrictions on the types of guns they may buy and the intended use of the firearms in question. And I want to emphasize arbitrary here - we can buy an SKS in any gun store in america, but because of the assault weapons ban, we couldn't buy an M16. Nevermind that the SKS fires a larger caliber of ammunition and is made to less exacting standards and thus provides a greater 'potential safety risk'. Shotguns are, if anything, far more dangerous than assault weapons to an unarmored individual, and only a small handful of shotguns were banned under the brady bill, and with minor revisions to their designs the majority of those were re-released in 'street legal' - and far less effective for home defense - versions.

[Royal☭]

I have no faith in my ability, or the ability of any of my neighbors, to repel an invading army, no matter how many guns we have.

[Doom]

You don't think yourself or a group of arrogant hill-billies can figure out urban warfare and guerilla resistance in the land you grew up in?

[Shinra]

I have no faith in my ability, or the ability of any of my neighbors, to repel an invading army, no matter how many guns we have.

You'd be surprised at how heroic someone can be when he gets told he's not allowed to say the words 'amen' and 'jesus' anymore.

[Koah]

Another possible reason that I thought of that he's suggesting Kalashnikovs: It is apparently very easy to convert semi-automatic AKs to fully automatic ones.  I'm not sure where leads begin and baseless assumptions end, though...

You don't think yourself or a group of arrogant hill-billies can figure out urban warfare and guerilla resistance in the land you grew up in?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoM6IFiyRjE

But seriously though, with all the military, ex-military, law enforcement, ex-law enforcement and plain old crazy survivalists we have in this country, plus all the readily available information online and/or in bookstores, organizing (at the very least) a token resistance in the event of invasion will practically be a reflex action.  If you don't think that's possible, that says more about you than it does anything else.

[Shinra]

say what you will about Red Dawn, I found it to be a very entertaining movie if nothing else.

Side note: It's easy to modify an AK-47 to be fully automatic, but also extremely dangerous. This is the case with virtually every semi-automatic firearm, but the most notorious examples are the AK and the TEC-9. The problem with banning automatic weapons is, simply put, people are GOING to find ways around the law, and their diversion from the law creates a far more dangerous weapon - that isn't held to the exacting standards of weapons manufacturers. Replacement parts are almost always after-market and made with poor, less-than-durable materials which are ironically not designed to hold up to the rigors of automatic fire - why make perfectly legal to own parts durable when using them for the purpose they're intended for is illegal? And for those who can't get the parts, either due to state laws, ignorance of the availability, or unwillingness to spend the extra money, the alternative methods - such as filing down pins and posts inside the weapon, cutting out sections of metal, or the infamous 'shoestring method' - are all even more exceedingly dangerous than installing the replacement parts.

It's a fair argument that someone who modifies a weapon to fire automatic and dies as a result deserved to die, but it's also a fair argument that the restriction is arbitrary anyway since the amount of crimes that have been committed with legally owned assault rifles in the last twenty years is a pretty slim number - as a whole, gun owners are overwhelmingly law abiding citizens.

[Mongrel]

[Kashan]

You don't think yourself or a group of arrogant hill-billies can figure out urban warfare and guerilla resistance in the land you grew up in?

An effective one? No. I mean I'm sure we could turn ourselves into a slightly less effective version of the Iraq insurgency against a much more powerful counter insurgency, but that's about it. Any effective guerrilla warfare against an invading enemy would probably use explosives as the primary tool and not guns anyhow. Also, in respect to Shinra's statement, I don't think heroism has anything to do with it, if our defenses fell against a military invasion then I don't see guerrilla heroism, with or without guns, making a real difference.

Honestly I don't feel strongly about this one way or the other. I don't think the second amendment actually guarantees the right to bear arms as we new interpret it, but it doesn't really matter what I think. I think guns need to be much better regulated as we're supplying something like 70% of the weapons being used by the Mexican drug cartels. I have no desire to own a gun, and I think it's probably not a very good idea to own gun for most people, but I don't think that actually necessitates banning gun ownership.

[Mongrel]

Actually, I was to invoke my inner redneck, I think the allowance of firearms as a last-ditch form of defense against your own government is a much more relevant and legitimate concern than the nebulous possibility of foreign invasion. Foreign invasions in the case of the US, which is protected by two oceans from any hostiles is more of a cheap bogeyman than anything else.

OH HEY SHINRA? HOW ABOUT THAT JAPANESE GUN CONTROL. LOTSA VIOLENT CRIMES THERE, EH? BLAH BLAH CULTURAL DIFFERENCES BLAH BLAH BLAH.

Obligatory disclosure: I'm actually anti-gun control (mostly because I think it doesn't work), though I am pro-registration for legal owners.

[Shinra]

The french spent the better part of a century in total or near total peace, but they put up an effective resistance against the nazis in the streets of paris using machineguns the british taught them how to build out of lead pipes and brass fittings welded together.

And it was just 8 years ago when The Good King George II invaded Iraq and Afghanistan with no clear exit strategy because he assumed a bunch of poor, uneducated, malnourished muslims couldn't put up an effective resistance. Thousands of troop deaths later, we still haven't beat the insurgency, and insurgents still hold substantial swaths of land in both afghanistan and Iraq.

Never, ever underestimate the insurgent.

OH HEY SHINRA? HOW ABOUT THAT JAPANESE GUN CONTROL. LOTSA VIOLENT CRIMES THERE, EH? BLAH BLAH CULTURAL DIFFERENCES BLAH BLAH BLAH.

Good to know that there aren't any violent criminals in Japan, right?

Good thing that guns are the only weapons that have ever been used in a crime. Elimination of firearms has surely made crime a thing of the past in Japan. And there hasn't been any high profile murders in schools as a result. I'm glad we have narrowed down the only cause of violent death in crime is guns.


Edit: If you haven't figured out my point yet, my point is that a violent criminal isn't going to not commit crimes because he can't go to the gun store to buy guns, he's just going to find a new way to do it. We're not protecting anyone by keeping the guns out of reach, if anything we're funding smuggling operations indirectly and depriving law abiding citizens of owning a tool that can protect them and their family for that violent criminal that wasn't going to stop being a violent criminal simply because they couldn't legally buy a firearm.

Having said this, I am all, 100% for registration of firearm ownership, as it IS an effective deterrent.