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.