Rational Nation USA
Liberty -vs- Tyranny
In the wake of the Sandy Hook tragedy in which 20 innocent children lost their live to a sick and mentally unstable individual the subject of gun control has remained center stage.
This is understandable, and as it should be. The pursuit of finding improved methods to better identify unstable individuals and thereby keep firearms out of the hands of such individuals is a worthy pursuit.
As we consider how to deal with increasing societal violence we must find a happy medium that will both improve public safety and preserve our second amendment rights. It can be done, if both sides of the gun control debate will start listening to each other rather talking AT each other.
We have heard from the NRA's Wayne LaPierre, who has offered essentially the same solution as the organization did in 2007. Put armed police guards in every school in America. Not anything most suburban and rural Mom's and Dad's will be comfortable with.
Senator Dianne Feinstein will be introducing a bill in 2013 to strengthen gun control legislation. It is by no means perfect, and it leaves questions unanswered, yet it is something from which to build a bipartisan consensus. Assuming of course the goal is to effectively reduce the incidents of death by gun violence n America.
Here then is a summary of the bill Senator Feinstein will be introducing to the Senate in 2013. Rational Nation USA, in publishing the Senator's proposal is not making a statement either in support of or against the bill as outlined.
Bans the sale, transfer, importation, or manufacturing of:
- 120 specifically-named firearms
- Certain other semiautomatic rifles, handguns, shotguns that can accept adetachable magazine and have one military characteristic
Strengthens the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban and various state bans by:
- Semiautomatic rifles and handguns with a fixed magazine that can accept more than 10 rounds
- Moving from a 2-characteristic test to a 1-characteristic test
- Eliminating the easy-to-remove bayonet mounts and flash suppressors fromthe characteristics test
Bans large-capacity ammunition feeding devices capable of accepting more than
- Banning firearms with “thumbhole stocks” and “bullet buttons” to addressattempts to “work around” prior bans
10 rounds.
Protects legitimate hunters and the rights of existing gun owners by:
- Grandfathering weapons legally possessed on the date of enactment
- Exempting over 900 specifically-named weapons used for hunting orsporting purposes and
Requires that grandfathered weapons be registered under the National Firearms
- Exempting antique, manually-operated, and permanently disabled weapons
Act, to include:
- Background check of owner and any transferee;
- Type and serial number of the firearm;
- Positive identification, including photograph and fingerprint;
- Certification from local law enforcement of identity and thatpossession would not violate State or local law; and
- Dedicated funding for ATF to implement registration
Not perfect, most certainly their are legitimate questions to be asked and needed answer to the same. What is important, at least IMNHO, is that we ask the questions and in the spirit of making things better (without violating our 2'nd amendment rights) we find a reasonable solution.
Captain Fogg over at The Swash Zone says it best. At least IMNHO.
O' course Bill Cody didn't use a Glock, but he could have bought anything from a Gattling gun to one of the newly popular Mauser and Colt and Browning autoloading pistols every bit as deadly and some more than the plastic gun in the picture. Maybe he did, but I doubt it. Guns are much harder to come buy these days. I don't know how to make it harder unless we require licensing.
Shooting exhibitions were the most popular spectator sport before we learned to watch steroidal men beat each other half to death while we get drunk and cheer. I have it on good authority (my own)that the old showman wasn't death's blue eyed boy unless death is a Buffalo.
But all kidding aside, I have no cowboy origins or fantasies and I think the love of the power firearms convey is just plain old "will to power" humanity we inherited from the other apes. I think it's more that weapons have been restricted to the gentry in Europe for so many thousands of years, it seems natural to them as it seemed natural to change that for the colonials who damned well needed them to survive.
Looking at magazines from 50 or 60 or more years ago, gun ads were everywhere with images of boy scouts holding Ithaca 49 saddle guns, red shirted men in canvas canoes shooting ducks with shotguns and deer with rifles.
After bear? You're not going to want a single shot weapon really.
You know, that's still the real world for some people. In Australia crocodile hunters use spears and ropes. In Louisiana, Swamp Men use repeating rifles or pistols and they have a much higher life expectancy. I have a feeling outdoorsmen all over this huge and empty country fear legitimately that their lives are going to be controlled by people who have no clue and no care for them or their "obsolete" lives.
I hope that's not true, but in a country where boys don't grow up reading Stuart Edward White and Baden Powell and Hemingway and Faulkner and think Central Park is 'nature:' where people's first and only exposure to firearms is in lurid TV coverage of murders, I think it may become so -- with one size fits all laws and stereotypes about people of the "gun culture."
There's a difference between being part of a culture obsessed with anger and acting it out, where people love military looking vehicles and half believe in apocalypse movies with zombies in the streets and who build underground bunkers with booby traps -- a difference between Rambo and Daniel Boone and if I can use that prejudiced term "gun Culture" I think there are several.
And how often have we heard that we need gun control without any clue as to what that might constitute, about what has been done and what effects have been had? What gun owner, what sportsmen or women can fail to ponder what might be suggested next when nearly all the rhetoric not only paints them with the same bloody brush and the same, sometimes outrageously prejudicial and always wrong language? Sniper rifles, automatic weapons, cop killer bullets and of course everything from a slingshot ball up is "high velocity"
Sorry, I agree that the NRA is fond of playing word games and fallacies and fear mongering, but perhaps this is one of those times when we're nearly as bad and by looking at only one aspect of why people buy and use guns we're engineering the conclusion.
I'd like to know why there was a big surge of buying in 2011 and why it came from Democrats and women, while Republican males ownership has remained more steady in the last decade?
But I feel intimidated and drowned out by people who keep illustrating Nietzsche's observation that every word is a prejudice and don't know a Glock from a Glockenspiel.
Hardly anyone who spent his best years paddling remote lakes and rivers and spending weeks in the woods or ordinary afternoons hiking his own land likes to be described as an anachronism or a drug store cowboy because he liked having a rifle with him when a long, long way from anyone else and the same thing goes for Country Club sportsmen and professional target shooters or hunters or Biathlon contestants and if that kind of life dies, replaced by a Western clone of iron fisted Singapore in all its suffocating safety, something American will die and I want no part of that future.
No, I'm not against gun legislation because it's gun legislation or because I'm from the NRA and I think that's true of a great many people. I resent the constant equation. I just don't want more faith put in any more fake bans and trigger locks and waiting periods and arguments about "saturday night specials" and automatic weapons that aren't and all that stuff that did nothing whatsoever but provide false security.
I just don't have faith in the naive proposals, the lack of concrete plans based on concrete data and I'm against the state of mind that assumes everything is getting worse and worse and life is more dangerous than ever - where not only is one in a million too much but the price of civilization is life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
I've yet to hear anyone ask why Americans' private dreams seem to be military and apocalyptic and we see it in their Hummers and AK's and their shootouts. Buffalo Bill made a living with guns and guns were everywhere, but I've not heard of school shootings by him or Annie Oakley or anyone else back over a hundred years ago.
I wanna know what's changed, why everyone is afraid and I don't want to ban first and ask questions later pardner.
Certainly there are reasonable solutions that will address the concerns we all have over firearm safety and keeping firearms, to the greatest extent possible, out of the hands of the mentally unstable and criminals. Most Americans value the right to "keep and bear arms." At the same time it is admittedly hard to understand why any law abiding citizen needs an arsenal of semi automatic assault weapons with extended magazines for either 1) home protection or 2) hunting.
Via: Memeorandum
