Posted on 02/23/2018 11:21:22 AM PST by DCBryan1
Guns and I go back a long way.
My father was a champion skeet shooter. A picture of him aiming his favorite pump skyward has pride of place in our living room. He owned fine rifles and shotguns, and he valued them.
My first experience with pulling a trigger came late, by family standards. I was already 7 or 8 when my dad and “Uncle” George took me out back of Old Lily’s house and handed me a sawed-off shotgun (illegal then and now) kept handy for woodchucks and rattlesnakes. The recoil didn’t knock me off my feet, but my shoulder ached for weeks.
I’m blessed to have few material regrets, but I still feel a sting when I recall how, after my father’s bankruptcy, we had to sell his guns to put food on the table. Those arms were important to him and, thus, to me.
I served in the US Army, including unforgettable years in an infantry battalion. I fired my share of automatic weapons, from M16A1s to machine guns and even Kalashnikovs. (Let’s not talk about dud-grenade disposal . . .)
And I’m a gun owner. As I write these lines, there’s an 1858 Tower musket behind me and a Colt on my desk.
But I believe, on moral, practical and constitutional grounds, that no private citizen should own an automatic weapon or a semi-automatic weapon that can easily be modified for automatic effects.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
What a faggot. Stack up at my door if you want mine.
He does not understand the Constitution that he took an Oath to defend. On the other hand, maybe he breached his Oath.
They mainly came for the gunpowder and shot. Without that they were useless.
How the British Gun Control Program Precipitated the American Revolution
Not much mention of shot, but it was part of it. Will look for more.
I’m a military man and I think you should kiss my ass.
Even though Col.Peters was former military he knows damn well that the weapon used was Not an assault rifle.
Why he would make a statement like that is beyond me. It sure isn’t correct and he knows it.
Maybe he’s going to be running for political office as a Rat.
Not splitting hairs here, but this mutt is a Lt. Colonel...an 0-5, not an 0-6.
And in my humble opinion, anyone that spends over 22 years in the US Military, with 20 of it being an officer and cannot achieve better than 0-5...is a turd.
This guy is a turd.
A sheep turd in conservative clothing.
Ralphie voted for HILLIARY!!! Girlie man.
The troops of today use other terms. I still use REMF when I want to denigrate somebody and new troops turn to me with a questioning look. I explain what it means and they laugh. Many have told me they were going to start using REMF so as to use something "new."
What goes around, comes around.
Define assault weapon!
Military man means nothing, or, if anything, someone who lived on a socialist plantation. I am a military man and I know military careerists and culture of using the time as a laboratory as to how the world should be.
In the military one has privileges and not rights, end of story,
In the military it is emphasises civilians are our bosses as a means to obey orders. This doofus is obviously a corrupt military person as I have seen my share in the military.
“...I thought fully automatic rifles were banned ... he capacity to switch between semiautomatic and fully automatic ... If such a definition is to be found in the ATF site I could not find it in any direct fashion-’
“Assault rifle” has been a piece of military nomenclature, not a legal definition.
BATFE (supposedly) bases its rules on legislation like the National Firearms Act and later laws. “Assault rifle” does not appear in any of their documentation (”Assault weapon” has no definition of any sort - PR nonsense dreamt up by the anti-gun folks to confuse the ignorant. Maddeningly, it’s caught on).
Hiram Stevens Maxim himself began the uncertainty by calling his invention the “Automatic Gun” or similar names ... it operated itself - fired, extracted, ejected, fed rounds under its own power unlike hand-operated guns of those times like Gatling, Gardner, Nordenfeldt and others.
A semi-automatic firearm discharges one shot for each pull of the trigger and thus does not fall under this aspect of BATFE jurisdiction.
The gun industry itself added to the confusion by using the word “automatic” to punch up marketing of semi-auto pistols 125 years ago - referring to newfangled handguns that reloaded their chamber without any help from the user, “automatically,” after each trigger pull. “Colt’s Automatic Pistol” wasn’t just a trade name, it became a byword and a proverb, through which Colt dominated the market for 50 years and more. Easier to say “automatic” than “self-loading” or “semiautomatic”; cheaper to roll-mark it on each pistol. (It did help, that they acquired great designs and turned out products of superior quality)
Fully automatic firearms discharge two or more shots for each pull of the trigger. That is the legal definition BATFE uses. Any such firearm is legally a “machine gun”: possession and transfer are thus regulated by the agency.
Actually, the Heller decision did not reverse the 1939 Miller decision. It didn't need to because some of the lower courts have been lying about the Miller decision for seventy years.
The appellant in the Miller case was the government. The District Court had simply ruled without much trouble that the Second Amendment protected Miller's possession of a short-barreled shotgun.
The government appealed directly to the Supreme Court (bypassing the Circuit Court) and made two claims in their plea to overturn the District Court.
First they claimed that Miller could be tried because he was not a member of the Militia, so his possession of a short-barreled weapon was not protected by the Second Amendment.
Second, they claimed that Miller could be tried because the short-barreled shotgun was not useful to a Militia and therefor the possession of such a weapon was not protected by the Second Amendment.
Significantly, the Miller Decision did not address membership in a Militia. They only questioned whether the weapon was useful to a Militia, a fact which would be irrelevant if Miller himself wasn't protected by the Second Amendment. The case was remanded back to the District Court to make a factual determination, not about Miller, but about the shotgun.
For the next seventy years lower courts have simply lied about what the Miller case decided and the liberal media supported the lie. I'm not aware of ANY Supreme Court decision which has treated the Second Amendment as anything other than an individual right.
What the Supreme Court DID do was fail to correct the lying lower courts for almost a century.
Millions have served in the US military, over centuries. They have a million-plus-one (at least) reasons for doing so. Each is an individual, a law unto themselves; motivations vary across the spectrum. Forum members who claim to know them, and to be so sure of their motivations, are merely kidding themselves.
I spent four years as a cadet, then just over 24-1/2 years on active duty, as combat aircrew, then on staffs as a technical officer performing operational test and evaluation for a number of electronic systems on many platforms. It was my privilege to work with every US armed service, a great many civilian agencies, contractors, and a number of allied nations on numerous single-service, Joint, and Combined programs. My office interacted daily with personnel from every armed service, in every specialty, in operations and logistics and support of each and every kind. It fell to me to advise senior leaders and decisionmakers up to and including the four-star level, and I got to know a great many generals and admirals.
If I recall correctly what I have learned about Ralph Peters’ background, he spent a lot of time working in the intelligence career field. I coordinated activities closely with intelligence collection, analysis, and production agencies at numerous levels, and while I completed the basic qualifications for an entry-level specialty code in that area, I was never formally assigned to that career field.
Intel officers vary as widely as uniformed personnel in any other service or specialty - perhaps moreso. It’s a relatively young field as service traditions go, with an uncertain role, and a corporate culture that doesn’t always know how to define itself. Before American involvement in World War Two it scarcely existed; except in actual wartime, it lacked clearly defined missions and procedures, earning a (perverse) reputation as a dumping ground for dysfunctional types and eccentrics. Since then, it moved more fully than other fields (those with more historically recognized and approved missions, or rigorously defined technical responsibilities) into bureaucratization. Specialized commands and agencies compete with each other in ways the rest of the armed services rarely notice.
All of them have one thing in common: the orientation for all assigned is more intellectual, more imaginative and “creative” than most other activities in which the military (and security agencies in general) gets involved. Most personnel are solid citizens, dedicated to the mission, and do not wander off the reservation - not always easy when conditions grow boring or onerous. Some pass the time by one-upping each other; those susceptible to egotism and afflicted with a surfeit of ambition sometimes wander farther afield, feeling intellectually superior to the rest of us working stiffs, and of cosmopolitan bent, make sport of “American values” and what they denigrate as the dreary existence of average citizens.
Ralph seems to have painted himself into a corner just like this. I think he’s lost track of reality.
I cannot speak for everybody else who has signed on the dotted line and put on the uniform. But speaking for myself, I never had enough time to do everything I had to, not even when blessed with the savviest and most determined colleagues and subordinates. Dealing with systems few citizens know of, and ensuring the function of weapons with destructive potential beyond the worst nightmares of almost everyone on the planet, I found it something of a relief to realize the general public was armed - one less worry, one item I could cross off the list of urgent stuff that demanded attention. Americans providing some of their own security made life less difficult for me - and for the small handful of colleagues who did what we did, making our particular contribution to the common defense.
The nation stands only because it is an armed nation. At many levels, in every fashion possible, and against numerous adversaries. Being so armed is not the purview of a privileged few inside the armed services; it is the responsibility of all. Without overmastering armed force - of every type imaginable - our love of liberty and our stature as moral exemplars are as nothing.
Congratulations, Ralph, you’re wrong! (That is all)
What do you mean by assault weapons?
Rocks?
Phillips screwdrivers?
FA18 Superhornets?
"...A pencil. A f*****g pencil..."
As far as I know, every weapon is built to assault. No?
A-M-E-N-!
I have long supposed that the origin lies in NAZI Germany’s special weapon in World War II:
The Sturmgewehr (”Assault Rifle”) 44 [StG 44], a.k.a. Maschinenpistole 43 [MP 43] or Maschinenpistole 44 [MP 44].
It was a selective-fire weapon and, I opine, may have been the inspiration for the AK-47.
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