Life is guaranteed to result in death.
Posted on 08/20/2012 7:14:38 PM PDT by JohnPierce
Shortly following the Aurora tragedy, a non-gun-owner friend of mine, obviously upset, began to question me about why I supported ownership of ‘deadly assault weapons.’ Even as he continued his extended, impassioned diatribe, I could tell that he was yet another victim of the media’s ‘assault weapon’ disinformation campaign.
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When he paused, I asked him what he thought an ‘assault weapon’ actually was. Looking at me as if I were mentally challenged, he said that everyone knows “assault weapons are military-style, fully-automatic guns capable of emptying a 100 round magazine in 3 seconds.” When I told him that fully-automatic firearms had been heavily regulated since the National Firearms Act of 1934 he simply stared at me blankly as if unsure what to say. When I went on to point out that, despite public misconceptions, President Clinton’s now-expired ‘Assault Weapons Ban‘ had nothing to do with fully-automatic firearms at all, he sarcastically replied “What kind of idiot would fall for such a thing?”
I felt really bad about my response but the only thing I could think of to say was “Apparently … you.” It took several minutes with Google to convince him that I was telling the truth but he still wasn’t ready to give up the debate. Grudgingly admitting that I might be right, he thought about it a few seconds and said “Then I think we should call everything except single-shot guns assault weapons.”
Amazing enough, he had stumbled upon the truth without even realizing it, or at least ‘a’ truth. As Wikipedia so aptly states, the term ‘assault weapon’ is not a technical term describing an actual type of firearm but rather a political term denoting whatever firearm the anti-gun crowd wishes to demonize, regulate, and ban at a given point in time.
During the Clinton Assault Weapon Ban, the definition included any semi-auto firearm with cosmetic features emulating that of fully automatic firearms. Let that settle into the logic center of your brain for a few minutes … it was literally a ban on ‘looks’ and accessories. The same firearm, with the same caliber, ammunition capacity, and rate of fire, would be legal or not depending upon whether it had a bayonet lug or a folding stock. When pressed on the ludicrousness of the definition, many anti-gun activists resorted to simply defining ‘assault weapons’ as “those scary black guns.”
And the ridiculousness of the law was also not lost on its sponsors or supporters. In 1996, syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote a piece titled “Disarm the Citizenry, But Not Yet” in which he stated that:
In fact, the assault weapons ban will have no significant effect either on the crime rate or on personal security. Nonetheless, it is a good idea … Given the frontier history and individualist ideology of the United States, however, this will not come easily. It certainly cannot be done radically. It will probably take one, maybe two generations. It might be 50 years before the United States gets to where Britain is today. Passing a law like the assault weapons ban is a symbolic — purely symbolic — move in that direction. Its only real justification is not to reduce crime but to desensitize the public to the regulation of weapons in preparation for their ultimate confiscation.
Even the Department of Justice acknowledged the fact that the so-called ‘Assault Weapons’ ban was ineffective as a tool to fight crime. In a study titled “Updated Assessment of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban: Impacts on Gun Markets and Gun Violence, 1994-2003,” the DOJ found that:
Should it be renewed, the ban’s effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement. AWs were rarely used in gun crimes even before the ban.
But facts have little to do with politics at the best of times and those who oppose gun rights for citizens have used the Aurora attack as a springboard to launch new attacks on ‘assault weapons’, whatever they might be at the moment.
So as these new ‘debates’ rage on … the next time you hear someone talking about ‘assault weapons’, tell them they simply don’t exist and challenge them to prove otherwise. They might just learn something even if they won’t admit it.
Life is guaranteed to result in death.
As they say on National Palisimain Radio, “Lets’s do the numbers.”
100 rounds in 3 seconds = 33.3 per second.
33.3 X 60 = 1998 rounds per minute.
1998 rounds per minute = rotary cannon, NOT a mere ‘assault weapon.”
Both great!
Could you make a video of you lighting off that 50 cal BMG and post it? Then tell us how the hand reattachment surgery?
Use to shoot a Ruger Super Blackhawk 44 mag and two hands was mandatory. That BMG would need to welded to an anvil!!
Probably not. They know banning shotguns will never fly in a hunting nation. First they have to re-define (as always) “assault weapons” and get them banned.
So it’s likely they will keep the shotgun thing about Aurora - if it’s true - secret. Their objective for now is “assault weapons.”
The libs/communists are very patient for achieving one step at a time and not over-reaching. Gradual conquest...the old frog in the slowly warming pot theory....works every time.
Look how far they’ve taken us already? They are more than 50% toward their goal of taking us over.....
But putting Obama in office just may have been an overreach......let’s hope and pray so......
I want to read this more carefully later
the term ‘assault weapon’ is not a technical term describing an actual type of firearm but rather a political term denoting whatever firearm the anti-gun crowd wishes to demonize, regulate, and ban at a given point in time.
It’s worse than that – given the definitions:
Assault
1 to attack someone in a violent way
Weapon
1 something that you use to fight with or attack someone with, such as a knife, bomb, or gun
An assault weapon could be any object that could be used as a weapon to assault or attack someone. It could apply to almost anything deemed to be a Weapon.
I wouldn't say that.
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Nah. Just your old run-of-the-mill MG42,M53 SARAK, or MG3 with the light bolt.
Any single barrel weapon will overheat rapidly under sustained fire near 2,000 rounds per minute. I was not, of course, referring to burst fire.
Well, the Villar-Perosa of 1914 managed about 1500 RPM, and in a twin-gun configuration was a reasonably effective defensive weapon for the aircraft of the early days of WWI. Barrel overheating was minimalized in three ways: the weapon fired from an open bolt using a pistol-caliber cartridge, from a limited capacity magazine, and rode in the 100 mph+ airflow of the observer's position in the aircraft.
The MG42 derived beltfed guns get around barrel overheating with frequent barrel changes, around every 500 rounds or so per my experience with German tank crews, who run off longer bursts than their Infantry countertparts who have to haul ammo on their backs. The WWI German Gast MG, chambered for the standard German 7,92mm rifle/MG cartridge, managed 1600 RPM [single mechanism/double barrelled, and again, magazine fed [2x 180-round drums.]
By the end of WWII, the Germans had machine cannon for aircraft developed to the point that two or three projectiles were in the barrel at the same time. See Chinn for details.
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