Yeah, because humans are horribly evil creatures who murder each other at every opportunity.

That's why gun homicides are down 49% and violent crimes are down 72% since 1993, while gun ownership has remained steady (and concealed carry has skyrocketed).

High end custom .308 with 6-24x scope & AAC suppressor: $5000

Magpul Dynamics Precision Rifle Class: $750

Travel, hotel, food, etc. for class: $500

500 rounds of match ammo: $350 (I handload)

Kestrel wind/temperature/pressure meter: $200

Total: $6800

And I can stack shots at 100y (my three-shot groups are under 0.5"), and hit a 10" steel plate at 1km all day long. And unlike the $17k rifle, I can observe the wind at a distance, and account for it. Oh, and the class is a load of fun!

We're so frustrated that we keep buying more and more iPads thinking it will fix the problem.

And of course, we would never do anything a stupid as use an iPad for what it's good for and a notebook or desktop for what they're good for. Nope. We assume every electronic device should do everything that our other electronic devices do. What I'm really frustrated about with the iPad is its inability to make toast or wash my clothes.

The article quotes a politician from Queens (making me very glad I live on the good coast, with the smart people, who aren't completely clueless about guns) who is worried that if the untraceable firearms act expires, terrorists will start smuggling guns on planes. Am I the only one who realizes that a criminal with a 3D printer building a gun for criminal purposes probably won't worry about the untraceable firearms act?

It would be far easier just to smuggle a standard gun through the TSA checkpoint, given that the TSA has failed every single security audit they have ever had, and has failed to detect knives and guns, until the owners were stupid enough to go back and inform the TSA agents.

Also, I noticed that they tried to imply in the article that Cody was building semi-auto AR-15 rifles out of plastic, by intermixing text about the plastic gun and his work with AR-15 parts. The printed gun is a single shot .380ACP, lethal to about 10 feet, if you aim well. Way to go media neutrality.

How the hell did this pile of garbage get modded as "informative"? Let's examine the bullshit, shall we?

The guys who wrote the Second Amendment were very clear in their other writings that it was about letting communities (not states, and certainly not the feds) organize their own militias. In 1789, there were no national guard units. Regardless of the introductory phrase, the second part is pretty clear that no government, at any level, can restrict the rights of the people to own or carry firearms. No taxes, no bans, no magazine restrictions, nothing. Additionally, since the main body of the Constitution explicitly defines the finite powers that the states and people grant to the federal government, and none of those powers mention the ability to restrict firearms ownership, there is no such power to begin with.

The NRA is not a sportsmen's association. A handful of Union Civil War veterans founded the NRA, because they realized that the Union soldiers were horrible shots compared to their Confederate counterparts. They founded the NRA to improve the general firearms skills of the population, in preparation for defensive readiness.

I've purchased three firearms so far this year. They were all about the same price as a year ago. Ammo is definitely up though. Part of this is civilians buying up civilian production, but a bigger piece is the government buying up hundreds of millions of rounds. Additionally, commodity prices are up. Ammunition is mostly processed metals, so when the metal gets expensive, so does the ammo. Also, given the depression that is now finally kicking in (notice the world-wide drop in commodities last month, and the increasing number of bank panics) will probably not be over in 2016, because government idiots will try to legislate it away, which will only worsen it, I doubt a democrat will get elected in 2016. That would be almost as bad as electing a Republican.

Now I'm sure you have a source for your claim that over 50% of these firearms will end up stolen (perhaps your ass?), but the number of stolen firearms in the US is actually pretty low. As is our crime rate, including our gun crime rate. Yes other countries have an even lower rate, but if you take out the drug smuggling related crimes, our murder rate is pretty low.

I'm not disagreeing with your post, quite the opposite. I just want to point out that the Kellerman study (which you allude to) that claimed a gun was 2.7 times more likely to be used against a resident of the house than against a non resident was horribly flawed.

The claim of the paper was that people who have a firearm in the home are more likely to die from their own guns. Don Kates proved that most of the victims in the study were shot by guns from outside the home, which makes the presence of the homeowner's gun independent of the death.
Kellerman also "proved" X -> Y, using data that actually proves Y -> X, by introducing a selection bias. Most of the victims in the study regularly engaged in criminal behavior. Criminals have a much higher probability of meeting a violent death, so murder victims are predominantly criminals, or their friends, family, or other associates. Criminals are also more likely to have guns in the home (which is strange given that it's illegal...).
What the study actually showed was a high correlation between being a murder victim and having a gun in the home. It did not sample gun owning households at random and determine how many suffered a shooting with a gun from that household.
Some Data

1) Put a defective ambidextrous safety on a 1911.
2) Flip it back and forth until the connection between the two halves breaks.


I had that happen once. Fortunately I discovered it in a competition, not a gunfight.

So would banning and confiscating all guns, or ending all human life. Stopping one bad thing (that doesn't happen much to begin with) with a worse thing isn't a good solution.

It's better to have to do as little as possible under stress. People forget to do things like deactivate safety levers, cock hammers, rack slides, etc. when the crazy meth addict with the machete is running at them.

That annoying thing in the middle of your trigger.

^^^ Glock haters respond ;-)

Are you saying that a gun on his hip (or my hip) is not secure? Or one on my computer desk (no kids in the house) within arm's reach? And no intelligent gun owner uses gun locks. All they do is force a thief to take the gun home to break the lock. And trigger locks are dangerous, because the possibility of a negligent discharge goes up dramatically when you stick things in the trigger guard.

Can I sweep up all the 9mm and 5.56mm?

The possibility of a mechanical failure is far more remote than the possibility of a fingerprint scanner failure. Have you ever tried scanning your fingerprints while bleeding, sweating, covered in mud, wearing gloves, or otherwise obscured?
Clearly you know very little of firearms, or you wouldn't have used the terms "bullets" (ammunition) or "mechanism" (action). Also you'd know that the vast majority of those of us who have self-defense firearms keep them loaded and would never put a lock on a gun, because trigger locks violate one of the primary safety rules ("don't put anything in the trigger guard, until you're on target and ready to shoot").
I stopped carrying a 1911, because there were a few times in IDPA, where I drew the gun and went to shoot, but forgot to hit the thumb safety. Now I either carry an XD (grip safety--hard to screw up) or CZ (decocker--even harder to screw up). So I'm in total agreement with the OP, reduce the number of things that can go wrong under stress.

Huh? That's like saying: I consider myself a moderate scientist... I believe in Intelligent Design.
Libertarianism is about choice, competition, and the freedom to decide. Keynesianism is about centralized economic control.

Instead of using vague, feel-good terms like "social justice" and "economic equality", say what you really mean: you want to use the force of government to push your view of what's "right" on the rest of us. You believe in freedom, as long as people don't say or do things you don't like. You believe that government effectively owns people's lives and property, and has the authority to tell them what they may, or must, do with it.

Or...
Come up with a good platform, based on the American ideals of individual responsibility and community involvement. This is all you need to do that:
Eliminate the executive and judicial branches as part of the legislative process. They execute the laws or judge the execution. (Hence the clever names).
For a bill to pass the legislature, it must have 90% approval.
If the bill consists entirely of repealing an existing law, it needs only 10% approval.
A ballot proposition can eliminate any law with 10% approval.
Done.

Things that would pass the 90% mark:
Bans on murder, rape, theft, fraud, etc.
Things that would fail to pass the 90% mark:
Bans on sexuality, drugs, guns, etc.
Wars, slavery, genocide, etc.