[Ed Huntress]

On Fri, 31 Jul 2015 15:02:36 -0500, "David R. Birch"
wrote:

On 7/31/2015 7:44 AM, Ed Huntress wrote:
On Thu, 30 Jul 2015 22:18:25 -0500, "David R. Birch"

From reading NFA '34, it looks like most of it was pulled out of the
air.

But why did they "pull it out of the air"? That's the question. And
the answer is, because they had to make a judgment with little
guidance. And they did, for better or worse.

Mostly worse. NFA '34 didn't prevent criminal access to what they
wanted, it just made access for honest citizens hard.

Oh, I don't know about that. Gary Kleck reports that four police
officers were killed in the line of duty with machine guns from 1983
to 1992 -- three of them being illegal machine guns. During that same
period, a total of 651 officers were killed with all types of guns.

It looks like the NFA '34 has been pretty effective. Meanwhile, there
were 240,000 machine guns legally registered with the ATF in 1995, and
two murders committed with them since 1934, one in 1988 (that was the
cop killed by another cop) and the other in 1992. So the registration
of machine guns (roughly the same thing we go through to get a handgun
in NJ, including fingerprints and an FBI background check) seems to
correlate very well with a reduction in homicides with that type of
weapon. BTW, if you take a look at the gun-homicide rate in NJ, factor
in that only 18% of ALL gun crimes in NJ are committed with guns that
were sold legally here. The large majority of our gun crime involves
guns sold in VA, SC, and FL.

Numbers for sawed-off shotguns are much harder to come by, but the
principle is the same, and it is pretty much common sense -- that
strict background checks and registration/identification of owners
correlates with a vast reduction in homices -- and shouldn't surprise
anyone who thinks clearly and who has a mature sense of
responsibility. But those are meaningless qualifiers for gun nutz.


Many of the items had legitimate uses that didn't involve criminal
activities.

Of course. There's hardly a law written anywhere that doesn't step on
some toes while accomplishing its purpose. That's why we elect
legislators -- to make those judgments.

And they do that so well, depending on who contributed most to their
campaign.

Overall, they do it better than most democratic legislatures around
the world. Parliamentary systems produce something like what you get
after breaking a pinata.



Maxim invented the silencer so he could shoot in his
backyard without disturbing his neighbors.

And assassins and some other criminals have loved him for it ever
since!

And NFA '34 did nothing to prevent their illegal use.

Do you have data to support that? If you do, you're the only one,
because there is no legislative evidence, and no other evidence that
has been provided by defenders of silencers/suppressors:

https://www.guntrustlawyer.com/files...er-caselaw.pdf

It seems likely that the pattern is not much different from that for
machine guns, for the same reason. Using a silencer in a crime, like
using a machine gun in a crime, carries a 30-year mandatory sentence,
and the evidence for the effect of all of the provisions of NFA '34 on
crimes with machine guns is pretty strong.



Diane Swinestein looked through a gun catalog and pointed to guns that
looked naughty when selecting what to ban for the '94 Pro-Crime bill.

That seems to be the way that mass killers select them, too. They go
for those _Solcier of Fortune_ optics.

Not so much, pistols seem to be the guns of bad choice.

Consider that there probably are somewhere around 4.5 million ARs
(industry reports said 3.5 million in 2013; guesstimating from there)
and probably over 114 million handguns (the number reported by CRS,
2009). Proportionally, mass killers have been opting for ARs in
several recent killings, despite their inconvenience and the
difficulty of concealing them, apparently for theatrical effect. I'm
sure you don't need to be reminded with a list.



Do you expect to see reason when gun controllers write bills?

David, I've spent many hours in state senate hearings, listening to
arguments from both sides. I don't expect to hear reason from *either*
side.

When I hear ol' Wayne LaPierre make his arguments against background
checks for private sales, starting just five years after he said there
should be background checks for *all* gun sales, it sounds to me like
we're listening to the voice of an unstable sociopath.


Yeah, ol' Wayne can't seem to decide whom to bend over for next. He
can't be too successful or the NRA loses their favorite fund raising rants.

I still haven't figured out why the NRA needs a board w/ 75 members,
almost all of whom are dead wood.

Internal politics. Read _Ricochet: Confessions of a Gun Lobbyist_ by
Richard Feldman. He was the NRA official in charge of the NJ AR
affairs, of which I had a small part.

--
Ed Huntress


David

[David R. Birch]

On 8/1/2015 9:46 PM, Ed Huntress wrote:
On Fri, 31 Jul 2015 15:02:36 -0500, "David R. Birch"
wrote:

On 7/31/2015 7:44 AM, Ed Huntress wrote:
On Thu, 30 Jul 2015 22:18:25 -0500, "David R. Birch"

From reading NFA '34, it looks like most of it was pulled out of the
air.

But why did they "pull it out of the air"? That's the question. And
the answer is, because they had to make a judgment with little
guidance. And they did, for better or worse.

Mostly worse. NFA '34 didn't prevent criminal access to what they
wanted, it just made access for honest citizens hard.

Oh, I don't know about that. Gary Kleck reports that four police
officers were killed in the line of duty with machine guns from 1983
to 1992 -- three of them being illegal machine guns. During that same
period, a total of 651 officers were killed with all types of guns.

So those that really wanted illegal machine guns could still get them,
but most didn't bother. So?

It looks like the NFA '34 has been pretty effective. Meanwhile, there
were 240,000 machine guns legally registered with the ATF in 1995, and
two murders committed with them since 1934, one in 1988 (that was the
cop killed by another cop) and the other in 1992. So the registration
of machine guns (roughly the same thing we go through to get a handgun
in NJ, including fingerprints and an FBI background check) seems to
correlate very well with a reduction in homicides with that type of
weapon. BTW, if you take a look at the gun-homicide rate in NJ, factor
in that only 18% of ALL gun crimes in NJ are committed with guns that
were sold legally here. The large majority of our gun crime involves
guns sold in VA, SC, and FL.

The fact that its only slightly harder to get an MG in NJ than it is to
get a handgun does not say good things about NJ.

I doubt that the NFA had much effect on crime overall, it just affected
crime committed w/ NFA guns. W/ NFA, 100 people get shot, none with NFA
guns. W/O NFA, 100 people get shot, some w/ NFA guns.

Numbers for sawed-off shotguns are much harder to come by, but the
principle is the same, and it is pretty much common sense -- that
strict background checks and registration/identification of owners
correlates with a vast reduction in homices -- and shouldn't surprise
anyone who thinks clearly and who has a mature sense of
responsibility. But those are meaningless qualifiers for gun nutz.

Again, it doesn't much affect overall crime, just that people get shot
with different guns.


Many of the items had legitimate uses that didn't involve criminal
activities.

Of course. There's hardly a law written anywhere that doesn't step on
some toes while accomplishing its purpose. That's why we elect
legislators -- to make those judgments.

And they do that so well, depending on who contributed most to their
campaign.

Overall, they do it better than most democratic legislatures around
the world. Parliamentary systems produce something like what you get
after breaking a pinata.

Although sometimes the coalitions to achieve a majority can lead to
really amusing bedfellows, as in the Bundesrepublik. Or paralysis, as in
Belgium.




Maxim invented the silencer so he could shoot in his
backyard without disturbing his neighbors.

And assassins and some other criminals have loved him for it ever
since!

And NFA '34 did nothing to prevent their illegal use.

Do you have data to support that? If you do, you're the only one,
because there is no legislative evidence, and no other evidence that
has been provided by defenders of silencers/suppressors:

https://www.guntrustlawyer.com/files...er-caselaw.pdf

It seems likely that the pattern is not much different from that for
machine guns, for the same reason. Using a silencer in a crime, like
using a machine gun in a crime, carries a 30-year mandatory sentence,
and the evidence for the effect of all of the provisions of NFA '34 on
crimes with machine guns is pretty strong.

Silencers are easy to make and don't show up in statistics much unless a
gun is found with one installed. Easy to remove, so the gun may be
linked, but use of the silencer would be unknown.

Again, it doesn't much affect overall crime, just that people get shot
with guns w/o silencers.



Diane Swinestein looked through a gun catalog and pointed to guns that
looked naughty when selecting what to ban for the '94 Pro-Crime bill.

That seems to be the way that mass killers select them, too. They go
for those _Solcier of Fortune_ optics.

Not so much, pistols seem to be the guns of bad choice.

Consider that there probably are somewhere around 4.5 million ARs
(industry reports said 3.5 million in 2013; guesstimating from there)
and probably over 114 million handguns (the number reported by CRS,
2009). Proportionally, mass killers have been opting for ARs in
several recent killings, despite their inconvenience and the
difficulty of concealing them, apparently for theatrical effect. I'm
sure you don't need to be reminded with a list.

The problem is that even with mass killers sometimes using them, pistols
still predominate. In some cases, they had the rifle but didn't use it.



Do you expect to see reason when gun controllers write bills?

David, I've spent many hours in state senate hearings, listening to
arguments from both sides. I don't expect to hear reason from *either*
side.

When I hear ol' Wayne LaPierre make his arguments against background
checks for private sales, starting just five years after he said there
should be background checks for *all* gun sales, it sounds to me like
we're listening to the voice of an unstable sociopath.


Yeah, ol' Wayne can't seem to decide whom to bend over for next. He
can't be too successful or the NRA loses their favorite fund raising rants.

I still haven't figured out why the NRA needs a board w/ 75 members,
almost all of whom are dead wood.

Internal politics. Read _Ricochet: Confessions of a Gun Lobbyist_ by
Richard Feldman. He was the NRA official in charge of the NJ AR
affairs, of which I had a small part.

I read it at your suggestion several years ago. Unfortunately, the NRA
is still the big boy in defending gun rights. They have the support of
the commercial gun industry, which is a tiny part of the economy, and
about 5M members. If they ever succeed, they become redundant and they
lose a lot of clout.

David

[Ed Huntress]

On Sun, 2 Aug 2015 09:54:40 -0500, "David R. Birch"
wrote:

On 8/1/2015 9:46 PM, Ed Huntress wrote:
On Fri, 31 Jul 2015 15:02:36 -0500, "David R. Birch"
wrote:

On 7/31/2015 7:44 AM, Ed Huntress wrote:
On Thu, 30 Jul 2015 22:18:25 -0500, "David R. Birch"

From reading NFA '34, it looks like most of it was pulled out of the
air.

But why did they "pull it out of the air"? That's the question. And
the answer is, because they had to make a judgment with little
guidance. And they did, for better or worse.

Mostly worse. NFA '34 didn't prevent criminal access to what they
wanted, it just made access for honest citizens hard.

Oh, I don't know about that. Gary Kleck reports that four police
officers were killed in the line of duty with machine guns from 1983
to 1992 -- three of them being illegal machine guns. During that same
period, a total of 651 officers were killed with all types of guns.

So those that really wanted illegal machine guns could still get them,
but most didn't bother. So?

What makes you think they could get them? The statistics show that
crimes committed with (and confiscations of illegal) machine guns all
but dried up. And those who have legal ones, who have been vetted six
ways to Sunday, aren't the people who commit crimes with them. So the
regulations obviously worked.


It looks like the NFA '34 has been pretty effective. Meanwhile, there
were 240,000 machine guns legally registered with the ATF in 1995, and
two murders committed with them since 1934, one in 1988 (that was the
cop killed by another cop) and the other in 1992. So the registration
of machine guns (roughly the same thing we go through to get a handgun
in NJ, including fingerprints and an FBI background check) seems to
correlate very well with a reduction in homicides with that type of
weapon. BTW, if you take a look at the gun-homicide rate in NJ, factor
in that only 18% of ALL gun crimes in NJ are committed with guns that
were sold legally here. The large majority of our gun crime involves
guns sold in VA, SC, and FL.

The fact that its only slightly harder to get an MG in NJ than it is to
get a handgun does not say good things about NJ.

What makes you think it's only "slightly harder" to get a machine gun
in NJ than to get a handgun? We haven't had a single crime committed
with a machine gun. And handguns, which are easy to get in the states
with irresponsible laws and enforcement, and then haul up in your
trunk on I-95, are quite easy to get.


I doubt that the NFA had much effect on crime overall, it just affected
crime committed w/ NFA guns. W/ NFA, 100 people get shot, none with NFA
guns. W/O NFA, 100 people get shot, some w/ NFA guns.

Evidence, please? There have only been three homicides with ILLEGAL
machine guns since 1934. You have a LONG way to go, David, to support
that statement.

Guns that aren't covered by NFA are the ones used in crimes -- like
handguns bought in private sales, where nobody checks to see if you're
telling the truth about your criminal record.

Of course, if you think that criminals never lie, you probably think
highly of our present system.


Numbers for sawed-off shotguns are much harder to come by, but the
principle is the same, and it is pretty much common sense -- that
strict background checks and registration/identification of owners
correlates with a vast reduction in homices -- and shouldn't surprise
anyone who thinks clearly and who has a mature sense of
responsibility. But those are meaningless qualifiers for gun nutz.

Again, it doesn't much affect overall crime, just that people get shot
with different guns.

In other words, the NFA worked, and the evidence is that the rest of
our gun laws -- or lack thereof -- are stupid and evidentially insane.

I agree.



Many of the items had legitimate uses that didn't involve criminal
activities.

Of course. There's hardly a law written anywhere that doesn't step on
some toes while accomplishing its purpose. That's why we elect
legislators -- to make those judgments.

And they do that so well, depending on who contributed most to their
campaign.

Overall, they do it better than most democratic legislatures around
the world. Parliamentary systems produce something like what you get
after breaking a pinata.

Although sometimes the coalitions to achieve a majority can lead to
really amusing bedfellows, as in the Bundesrepublik. Or paralysis, as in
Belgium.

Parliamentary systems produce coalitions in government: You scratch my
back, and I'll scratch yours.

Our system, throughout most of our history until recently, tends to
produce more compromise than back-scratching coalitions. Our
coalitions occur at the part level, not in govenment itself.





Maxim invented the silencer so he could shoot in his
backyard without disturbing his neighbors.

And assassins and some other criminals have loved him for it ever
since!

And NFA '34 did nothing to prevent their illegal use.

Do you have data to support that? If you do, you're the only one,
because there is no legislative evidence, and no other evidence that
has been provided by defenders of silencers/suppressors:

https://www.guntrustlawyer.com/files...er-caselaw.pdf

It seems likely that the pattern is not much different from that for
machine guns, for the same reason. Using a silencer in a crime, like
using a machine gun in a crime, carries a 30-year mandatory sentence,
and the evidence for the effect of all of the provisions of NFA '34 on
crimes with machine guns is pretty strong.

Silencers are easy to make and don't show up in statistics much unless a
gun is found with one installed. Easy to remove, so the gun may be
linked, but use of the silencer would be unknown.

As of a few years ago, there were an estimated 60,000 legally owned
suppressors in civilian hands. Now, tell us about how many *illegal*
ones, OR *legal* ones, have been confiscated in the commission of a
crime.

Again, the NFA '34 has been very effective.


Again, it doesn't much affect overall crime, just that people get shot
with guns w/o silencers.

For a generally logical guy, you're really playing fast and loose
here, David. The NFA has been effective. What is NOT effective is the
rest of our truly stupid gun laws.




Diane Swinestein looked through a gun catalog and pointed to guns that
looked naughty when selecting what to ban for the '94 Pro-Crime bill.

That seems to be the way that mass killers select them, too. They go
for those _Solcier of Fortune_ optics.

Not so much, pistols seem to be the guns of bad choice.

Consider that there probably are somewhere around 4.5 million ARs
(industry reports said 3.5 million in 2013; guesstimating from there)
and probably over 114 million handguns (the number reported by CRS,
2009). Proportionally, mass killers have been opting for ARs in
several recent killings, despite their inconvenience and the
difficulty of concealing them, apparently for theatrical effect. I'm
sure you don't need to be reminded with a list.

The problem is that even with mass killers sometimes using them, pistols
still predominate. In some cases, they had the rifle but didn't use it.

Of course they predominate. But ARs have become disproportionally
popular for mass killings. They add to the drama, and to the news
coverage.




Do you expect to see reason when gun controllers write bills?

David, I've spent many hours in state senate hearings, listening to
arguments from both sides. I don't expect to hear reason from *either*
side.

When I hear ol' Wayne LaPierre make his arguments against background
checks for private sales, starting just five years after he said there
should be background checks for *all* gun sales, it sounds to me like
we're listening to the voice of an unstable sociopath.


Yeah, ol' Wayne can't seem to decide whom to bend over for next. He
can't be too successful or the NRA loses their favorite fund raising rants.

I still haven't figured out why the NRA needs a board w/ 75 members,
almost all of whom are dead wood.

Internal politics. Read _Ricochet: Confessions of a Gun Lobbyist_ by
Richard Feldman. He was the NRA official in charge of the NJ AR
affairs, of which I had a small part.

I read it at your suggestion several years ago. Unfortunately, the NRA
is still the big boy in defending gun rights. They have the support of
the commercial gun industry, which is a tiny part of the economy, and
about 5M members. If they ever succeed, they become redundant and they
lose a lot of clout.

David

Since you read the book, you know about one of the precipitating
events that turned the NRA to the dark side, when the Mayors Against
Illegal Guns sandbagged Feldman and went back on an agreement NOT to
push for confiscating guns. The NRA circled the wagons, pushed Feldman
out, and handed the reins to LaPierre and the rest of the
mouth-breathers.

--
Ed Huntress

[Gunner Asch[_6_]]

On Sun, 2 Aug 2015 09:54:40 -0500, "David R. Birch"
wrote:

On 8/1/2015 9:46 PM, Ed Huntress wrote:
On Fri, 31 Jul 2015 15:02:36 -0500, "David R. Birch"
wrote:

On 7/31/2015 7:44 AM, Ed Huntress wrote:
On Thu, 30 Jul 2015 22:18:25 -0500, "David R. Birch"

From reading NFA '34, it looks like most of it was pulled out of the
air.

But why did they "pull it out of the air"? That's the question. And
the answer is, because they had to make a judgment with little
guidance. And they did, for better or worse.

Mostly worse. NFA '34 didn't prevent criminal access to what they
wanted, it just made access for honest citizens hard.

Oh, I don't know about that. Gary Kleck reports that four police
officers were killed in the line of duty with machine guns from 1983
to 1992 -- three of them being illegal machine guns. During that same
period, a total of 651 officers were killed with all types of guns.

So those that really wanted illegal machine guns could still get them,
but most didn't bother. So?

It looks like the NFA '34 has been pretty effective. Meanwhile, there
were 240,000 machine guns legally registered with the ATF in 1995, and
two murders committed with them since 1934, one in 1988 (that was the
cop killed by another cop) and the other in 1992. So the registration
of machine guns (roughly the same thing we go through to get a handgun
in NJ, including fingerprints and an FBI background check) seems to
correlate very well with a reduction in homicides with that type of
weapon. BTW, if you take a look at the gun-homicide rate in NJ, factor
in that only 18% of ALL gun crimes in NJ are committed with guns that
were sold legally here. The large majority of our gun crime involves
guns sold in VA, SC, and FL.

Ed is leaving out that the second murder was a cop who killed his wife
with his department issue machine gun. Funny how he slid that one
in....

The fact that its only slightly harder to get an MG in NJ than it is to
get a handgun does not say good things about NJ.

I doubt that the NFA had much effect on crime overall, it just affected
crime committed w/ NFA guns. W/ NFA, 100 people get shot, none with NFA
guns. W/O NFA, 100 people get shot, some w/ NFA guns.

Numbers for sawed-off shotguns are much harder to come by, but the
principle is the same, and it is pretty much common sense -- that
strict background checks and registration/identification of owners
correlates with a vast reduction in homices -- and shouldn't surprise
anyone who thinks clearly and who has a mature sense of
responsibility. But those are meaningless qualifiers for gun nutz.

Again, it doesn't much affect overall crime, just that people get shot
with different guns.


Many of the items had legitimate uses that didn't involve criminal
activities.

Of course. There's hardly a law written anywhere that doesn't step on
some toes while accomplishing its purpose. That's why we elect
legislators -- to make those judgments.

And they do that so well, depending on who contributed most to their
campaign.

Overall, they do it better than most democratic legislatures around
the world. Parliamentary systems produce something like what you get
after breaking a pinata.

Although sometimes the coalitions to achieve a majority can lead to
really amusing bedfellows, as in the Bundesrepublik. Or paralysis, as in
Belgium.




Maxim invented the silencer so he could shoot in his
backyard without disturbing his neighbors.

And assassins and some other criminals have loved him for it ever
since!

And NFA '34 did nothing to prevent their illegal use.

Do you have data to support that? If you do, you're the only one,
because there is no legislative evidence, and no other evidence that
has been provided by defenders of silencers/suppressors:

https://www.guntrustlawyer.com/files...er-caselaw.pdf

It seems likely that the pattern is not much different from that for
machine guns, for the same reason. Using a silencer in a crime, like
using a machine gun in a crime, carries a 30-year mandatory sentence,
and the evidence for the effect of all of the provisions of NFA '34 on
crimes with machine guns is pretty strong.

Silencers are easy to make and don't show up in statistics much unless a
gun is found with one installed. Easy to remove, so the gun may be
linked, but use of the silencer would be unknown.

Again, it doesn't much affect overall crime, just that people get shot
with guns w/o silencers.



Diane Swinestein looked through a gun catalog and pointed to guns that
looked naughty when selecting what to ban for the '94 Pro-Crime bill.

That seems to be the way that mass killers select them, too. They go
for those _Solcier of Fortune_ optics.

Not so much, pistols seem to be the guns of bad choice.

Consider that there probably are somewhere around 4.5 million ARs
(industry reports said 3.5 million in 2013; guesstimating from there)
and probably over 114 million handguns (the number reported by CRS,
2009). Proportionally, mass killers have been opting for ARs in
several recent killings, despite their inconvenience and the
difficulty of concealing them, apparently for theatrical effect. I'm
sure you don't need to be reminded with a list.

4.5 million ARs? There are over 30 MILLION ARs in public hands. The
big drive in 2013/14 put that many out there. In fact..there is a
glut on them in the markets.

There were at last 10 million of them in 2012..and its been added to,
This of course doesnt include AK variants and all the other boys toys
like the SKS etc etc


The problem is that even with mass killers sometimes using them, pistols
still predominate. In some cases, they had the rifle but didn't use it.



Do you expect to see reason when gun controllers write bills?

David, I've spent many hours in state senate hearings, listening to
arguments from both sides. I don't expect to hear reason from *either*
side.

When I hear ol' Wayne LaPierre make his arguments against background
checks for private sales, starting just five years after he said there
should be background checks for *all* gun sales, it sounds to me like
we're listening to the voice of an unstable sociopath.


Yeah, ol' Wayne can't seem to decide whom to bend over for next. He
can't be too successful or the NRA loses their favorite fund raising rants.

I still haven't figured out why the NRA needs a board w/ 75 members,
almost all of whom are dead wood.

Internal politics. Read _Ricochet: Confessions of a Gun Lobbyist_ by
Richard Feldman. He was the NRA official in charge of the NJ AR
affairs, of which I had a small part.

I read it at your suggestion several years ago. Unfortunately, the NRA
is still the big boy in defending gun rights. They have the support of
the commercial gun industry, which is a tiny part of the economy, and
about 5M members. If they ever succeed, they become redundant and they
lose a lot of clout.

David

[Ed Huntress]

On Sun, 02 Aug 2015 11:25:40 -0700, Gunner Asch
wrote:

On Sun, 2 Aug 2015 09:54:40 -0500, "David R. Birch"
wrote:

On 8/1/2015 9:46 PM, Ed Huntress wrote:
On Fri, 31 Jul 2015 15:02:36 -0500, "David R. Birch"
wrote:

On 7/31/2015 7:44 AM, Ed Huntress wrote:
On Thu, 30 Jul 2015 22:18:25 -0500, "David R. Birch"

From reading NFA '34, it looks like most of it was pulled out of the
air.

But why did they "pull it out of the air"? That's the question. And
the answer is, because they had to make a judgment with little
guidance. And they did, for better or worse.

Mostly worse. NFA '34 didn't prevent criminal access to what they
wanted, it just made access for honest citizens hard.

Oh, I don't know about that. Gary Kleck reports that four police
officers were killed in the line of duty with machine guns from 1983
to 1992 -- three of them being illegal machine guns. During that same
period, a total of 651 officers were killed with all types of guns.

So those that really wanted illegal machine guns could still get them,
but most didn't bother. So?

It looks like the NFA '34 has been pretty effective. Meanwhile, there
were 240,000 machine guns legally registered with the ATF in 1995, and
two murders committed with them since 1934, one in 1988 (that was the
cop killed by another cop) and the other in 1992. So the registration
of machine guns (roughly the same thing we go through to get a handgun
in NJ, including fingerprints and an FBI background check) seems to
correlate very well with a reduction in homicides with that type of
weapon. BTW, if you take a look at the gun-homicide rate in NJ, factor
in that only 18% of ALL gun crimes in NJ are committed with guns that
were sold legally here. The large majority of our gun crime involves
guns sold in VA, SC, and FL.

Ed is leaving out that the second murder was a cop who killed his wife
with his department issue machine gun. Funny how he slid that one

What kind of nut would care? The point is, there were only two.

in....

The fact that its only slightly harder to get an MG in NJ than it is to
get a handgun does not say good things about NJ.

I doubt that the NFA had much effect on crime overall, it just affected
crime committed w/ NFA guns. W/ NFA, 100 people get shot, none with NFA
guns. W/O NFA, 100 people get shot, some w/ NFA guns.

Numbers for sawed-off shotguns are much harder to come by, but the
principle is the same, and it is pretty much common sense -- that
strict background checks and registration/identification of owners
correlates with a vast reduction in homices -- and shouldn't surprise
anyone who thinks clearly and who has a mature sense of
responsibility. But those are meaningless qualifiers for gun nutz.

Again, it doesn't much affect overall crime, just that people get shot
with different guns.


Many of the items had legitimate uses that didn't involve criminal
activities.

Of course. There's hardly a law written anywhere that doesn't step on
some toes while accomplishing its purpose. That's why we elect
legislators -- to make those judgments.

And they do that so well, depending on who contributed most to their
campaign.

Overall, they do it better than most democratic legislatures around
the world. Parliamentary systems produce something like what you get
after breaking a pinata.

Although sometimes the coalitions to achieve a majority can lead to
really amusing bedfellows, as in the Bundesrepublik. Or paralysis, as in
Belgium.




Maxim invented the silencer so he could shoot in his
backyard without disturbing his neighbors.

And assassins and some other criminals have loved him for it ever
since!

And NFA '34 did nothing to prevent their illegal use.

Do you have data to support that? If you do, you're the only one,
because there is no legislative evidence, and no other evidence that
has been provided by defenders of silencers/suppressors:

https://www.guntrustlawyer.com/files...er-caselaw.pdf

It seems likely that the pattern is not much different from that for
machine guns, for the same reason. Using a silencer in a crime, like
using a machine gun in a crime, carries a 30-year mandatory sentence,
and the evidence for the effect of all of the provisions of NFA '34 on
crimes with machine guns is pretty strong.

Silencers are easy to make and don't show up in statistics much unless a
gun is found with one installed. Easy to remove, so the gun may be
linked, but use of the silencer would be unknown.

Again, it doesn't much affect overall crime, just that people get shot
with guns w/o silencers.



Diane Swinestein looked through a gun catalog and pointed to guns that
looked naughty when selecting what to ban for the '94 Pro-Crime bill.

That seems to be the way that mass killers select them, too. They go
for those _Solcier of Fortune_ optics.

Not so much, pistols seem to be the guns of bad choice.

Consider that there probably are somewhere around 4.5 million ARs
(industry reports said 3.5 million in 2013; guesstimating from there)
and probably over 114 million handguns (the number reported by CRS,
2009). Proportionally, mass killers have been opting for ARs in
several recent killings, despite their inconvenience and the
difficulty of concealing them, apparently for theatrical effect. I'm
sure you don't need to be reminded with a list.

4.5 million ARs? There are over 30 MILLION ARs in public hands. The
big drive in 2013/14 put that many out there. In fact..there is a
glut on them in the markets.

Your figures are completely, stark-raving nuts. Total long gun NICS
checks, for all types of long guns, were only 12.6 million for 2013
and 2014 *combined*. Total rifle sales are 2/3 of long-gun sales. AR
sales are some proportion of rifle sales.

The NSSF said a few months ago that they estimate the number of
military-style rifles in the US to be between 5 million and 8.2
million. That range is so wide that one has to wonder how they arrived
at it.


There were at last 10 million of them in 2012..and its been added to,
This of course doesnt include AK variants and all the other boys toys
like the SKS etc etc

You're pulling numbers out of your ass. Based on ATF data by
manufacturer, the estimate was 3.3 million in 2012. Here's the data
from which the number was derived. Scroll down on this PDF and look
for yourself:

[Google "atf ANNUAL FIREARMS MANUFACTURING AND EXPORT REPORT 2012"]


The total number of rifles of ALL types manufactured in 2012 was
3,168,206:

https://data.atf.gov/AFMER/Afmer-201...2014/dydm-cswg

The total number of (net) rifles of ALL types imported was
approximately 1.1 million.

Your numbers are still nuts.

--
Ed Huntress



The problem is that even with mass killers sometimes using them, pistols
still predominate. In some cases, they had the rifle but didn't use it.



Do you expect to see reason when gun controllers write bills?

David, I've spent many hours in state senate hearings, listening to
arguments from both sides. I don't expect to hear reason from *either*
side.

When I hear ol' Wayne LaPierre make his arguments against background
checks for private sales, starting just five years after he said there
should be background checks for *all* gun sales, it sounds to me like
we're listening to the voice of an unstable sociopath.


Yeah, ol' Wayne can't seem to decide whom to bend over for next. He
can't be too successful or the NRA loses their favorite fund raising rants.

I still haven't figured out why the NRA needs a board w/ 75 members,
almost all of whom are dead wood.

Internal politics. Read _Ricochet: Confessions of a Gun Lobbyist_ by
Richard Feldman. He was the NRA official in charge of the NJ AR
affairs, of which I had a small part.

I read it at your suggestion several years ago. Unfortunately, the NRA
is still the big boy in defending gun rights. They have the support of
the commercial gun industry, which is a tiny part of the economy, and
about 5M members. If they ever succeed, they become redundant and they
lose a lot of clout.

David

[nickname unavailable]

On 8/2/2015 11:25 AM, Gunner Asch wrote:
On Sun, 2 Aug 2015 09:54:40 -0500, "David R. Birch"
wrote:

On 8/1/2015 9:46 PM, Ed Huntress wrote:
On Fri, 31 Jul 2015 15:02:36 -0500, "David R. Birch"
wrote:

On 7/31/2015 7:44 AM, Ed Huntress wrote:
On Thu, 30 Jul 2015 22:18:25 -0500, "David R. Birch"

From reading NFA '34, it looks like most of it was pulled out of the
air.

But why did they "pull it out of the air"? That's the question. And
the answer is, because they had to make a judgment with little
guidance. And they did, for better or worse.

Mostly worse. NFA '34 didn't prevent criminal access to what they
wanted, it just made access for honest citizens hard.

Oh, I don't know about that. Gary Kleck reports that four police
officers were killed in the line of duty with machine guns from 1983
to 1992 -- three of them being illegal machine guns. During that same
period, a total of 651 officers were killed with all types of guns.

So those that really wanted illegal machine guns could still get them,
but most didn't bother. So?

It looks like the NFA '34 has been pretty effective. Meanwhile, there
were 240,000 machine guns legally registered with the ATF in 1995, and
two murders committed with them since 1934, one in 1988 (that was the
cop killed by another cop) and the other in 1992. So the registration
of machine guns (roughly the same thing we go through to get a handgun
in NJ, including fingerprints and an FBI background check) seems to
correlate very well with a reduction in homicides with that type of
weapon. BTW, if you take a look at the gun-homicide rate in NJ, factor
in that only 18% of ALL gun crimes in NJ are committed with guns that
were sold legally here. The large majority of our gun crime involves
guns sold in VA, SC, and FL.

Ed is leaving out that the second murder was a cop who killed his wife
with his department issue machine gun.

Cite.

The fact that its only slightly harder to get an MG in NJ than it is to
get a handgun does not say good things about NJ.

I doubt that the NFA had much effect on crime overall, it just affected
crime committed w/ NFA guns. W/ NFA, 100 people get shot, none with NFA
guns. W/O NFA, 100 people get shot, some w/ NFA guns.

Numbers for sawed-off shotguns are much harder to come by, but the
principle is the same, and it is pretty much common sense -- that
strict background checks and registration/identification of owners
correlates with a vast reduction in homices -- and shouldn't surprise
anyone who thinks clearly and who has a mature sense of
responsibility. But those are meaningless qualifiers for gun nutz.

Again, it doesn't much affect overall crime, just that people get shot
with different guns.


Many of the items had legitimate uses that didn't involve criminal
activities.

Of course. There's hardly a law written anywhere that doesn't step on
some toes while accomplishing its purpose. That's why we elect
legislators -- to make those judgments.

And they do that so well, depending on who contributed most to their
campaign.

Overall, they do it better than most democratic legislatures around
the world. Parliamentary systems produce something like what you get
after breaking a pinata.

Although sometimes the coalitions to achieve a majority can lead to
really amusing bedfellows, as in the Bundesrepublik. Or paralysis, as in
Belgium.




Maxim invented the silencer so he could shoot in his
backyard without disturbing his neighbors.

And assassins and some other criminals have loved him for it ever
since!

And NFA '34 did nothing to prevent their illegal use.

Do you have data to support that? If you do, you're the only one,
because there is no legislative evidence, and no other evidence that
has been provided by defenders of silencers/suppressors:

https://www.guntrustlawyer.com/files...er-caselaw.pdf

It seems likely that the pattern is not much different from that for
machine guns, for the same reason. Using a silencer in a crime, like
using a machine gun in a crime, carries a 30-year mandatory sentence,
and the evidence for the effect of all of the provisions of NFA '34 on
crimes with machine guns is pretty strong.

Silencers are easy to make and don't show up in statistics much unless a
gun is found with one installed. Easy to remove, so the gun may be
linked, but use of the silencer would be unknown.

Again, it doesn't much affect overall crime, just that people get shot
with guns w/o silencers.



Diane Swinestein looked through a gun catalog and pointed to guns that
looked naughty when selecting what to ban for the '94 Pro-Crime bill.

That seems to be the way that mass killers select them, too. They go
for those _Solcier of Fortune_ optics.

Not so much, pistols seem to be the guns of bad choice.

Consider that there probably are somewhere around 4.5 million ARs
(industry reports said 3.5 million in 2013; guesstimating from there)
and probably over 114 million handguns (the number reported by CRS,
2009). Proportionally, mass killers have been opting for ARs in
several recent killings, despite their inconvenience and the
difficulty of concealing them, apparently for theatrical effect. I'm
sure you don't need to be reminded with a list.

4.5 million ARs? There are over 30 MILLION ARs in public hands.

Cite.