Anyone claiming otherwise is lying. The relevant law is Public Law 99-408; here's the cite:

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d0...

With civilian ammunition, the 5.7x28mm won't penetrate any vest rated to stop a .357, and the 5.7 is considerably less lethal. (And with restricted AP ammunition, a .357 will penetrate anything a 5.7 will.)

in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a heavy tax on printer's ink violated the First Amendment freedom of the press.

http://law.jrank.org/pages/12734/Minneapol...
http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/faclib...
http://supreme.justia.com/us/460/575/case....

To say otherwise would be like saying a state could outlaw abortion by outlawing the clinics that perform them or the tools to perform them with, or that a state could outlaw a particular religion by outlawing its places of worship.

"She had it coming because of her lifestyle."

"Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas."

Those sentiments are despicable when applied to a woman who is raped. But it's apparently OK to feel that way if instead of being raped, the woman is is shot in the back by a rogue law enforcement officer in her own kitchen, while unarmed and talking on her webcam.

That mother of three kids who was murdered by a misogynist loser with a badge this week didn't "have it coming" because she owned a gun herself (a gun that wasn't even in the room with her). She was murdered by an abusive loser with an authority complex, and the murder weapon may have been department issued; it certainly wasn't hers.

I realize that one can have strong feelings against gun ownership by non-LEO's; I get that. What I DON'T get is people dancing gleefully in her blood and saying she brought it on herself, when her gun ownership had nothing to do with her death. Had she been a gun control activist who believed that only people in law enforcement, like her husband, should have access to guns, this would have played out exactly the same way. He would have still had access to a gun, and she would still have been as unarmed as she was.


RIP, Melanie Hain. I disagreed with you on your politics and your style on the gun issue, but you deserved better than this. Praying for your kids.

http://www.dcjs.virginia.gov/standardsTrai...

They use a HUGE target (the old "B21" target) and you only even have to hit anywhere on the target with 70% of your shots to qualify, even given the extremely generous time allotments.

Yes, police do have to meet minimal accuracy and time standards, but those of most states are very basic, and any competent shooter could pass them. I was objecting to the characterization of police as "highly trained" in firearms use, when in fact the bar is generally set at basic competence. The vast majority of non-SWAT officers shoot considerably less than competitive shooters or most gun enthusiasts, unless the officer is a gun enthusiast herself/himself.

By contrast, here is what a "highly trained" course of fire would look like:

http://www.pgpft.com/MEUSOC_qual_M4-Pistol...

My personal goal is to be able to pass this one.

even as the number of guns owned has increased roughly 50% over the past two decades.

Here are the stats through most of the 20th century, through 1990:



Another chart showing 1970-2002, using a different scale (sorry about the non-disinterested source, but the data are National Safety Council and are easily verifiable):



And the accident rate has continued that decline since 2002, and is now IIRC at historic lows.

The thing is, gun accidents are not a linear function of guns owned; they are strongly correlated with inexperience with guns, impulse control and/or substance abuse issues, and (yes) criminal records. The lawful gun culture is, generally speaking, a very safety conscious one, and increases in the ownership rate within that group do not necessarily correlate with gun-exposure rates in the more at-risk populations.

Rifles (all types combined) accounted for 3.0% of murders in 2007, and 2.6% in 2008. Out of 14,180 total murders, all styles of rifles combined were used in 375, down from 450 in 2007.

http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2008/data/table...

So much for the "Modern Looking Rifles Is Gonna Killz Us All" meme. I think the "assault weapon" fraud is dead beyond resurrection...

I found these floating around the blogosphere, but I have no idea who originally posted them. If they are real, I think they are a pretty good example of why the gun-control lobby lost its credibility through the '90s and early '00s.














I assume that these were put out by a state-level Illinois gun-control organization, if they are even real. The only suggestion I have that they aren't real is the rather remarkable dishonesty, which might suggest they are a spoof, or (worse) a false-flag effort by repubs to make the Dem reps in question look foolish. Can anyone verify these as real or fake?


Added on edit: Supposely these images were scanned from postcards and uploaded by someone from Illinois Carry, but I cannot verify that.

There was no threat to the President; the threat was to the President's message, which the MSM gleefully buried under ZOMG SCAWWY GUN! stories.

What the Secret Service actually said about the matter, for those who haven't bothered to look past the MSM hysteria:

The Official Media Freakout is precisely what the protesters were after. Taking advantage of MSM gullibility, gun ignorance, and paranoia to COMPLETELY derail Obama's message about health care.

How many news articles and threads have you seen about what Obama said that that forum, compared to how many articles and threads you've seen about some guy carrying an unloaded centerfire .22 in an unsecured area nowhere near the President?

You think buring Obama's message was unintentional? You think it's not exactly what the protesters were after? And as a bonus, they even suck a few people into trying to resurrect the gun-ban albatross, too; you think that was unintentional as well?


You think statements like this help the party? Again, you're giving these people exactly what they want---getting the focus off health care, and instead talking about pie-in-the-sky gun bans and similar nonsense. You're being played.

And I see that continuing the shell game, you slipped in the sum of all non-handgun weapons to try to inflate rifle crime, which is less than half of that number, and I'm sure there will be more scary anecdotes to follow to make that number seem bigger.

ZERO POINT SIX PERCENT of violent crime.

Less than SIX POINT FIVE PERCENT of all gun crimes.

THREE PERCENT of murders.

Like the head of the U.S. gun-control lobby said, back when rifle crime was HIGHER THAN IT IS NOW:

"Firearms other than handguns" are about equally split between rifles and shotguns, per the FBI UCR data, ignoring the very small contribution from Title 2 stuff. 1.2% (rifle + shotgun) works out to 0.6% rifle and 0.6% shotgun. And 1 in 8 gun crimes (rifle + shotgun) works out to rifle involvement 1 in 16 nonlethal violent crimes in which a firearm is used, plus another 1 in 16 involving shotguns.

1 divided by 16 is 6.25%. That is not significantly different from the 2007 FBI UCR, which shows rifles involved in 3% of homicides and 5% of firearm homicides, that you keep pretending is way, way low.

You just validated the point that rifles are not a significant contributor to violent crime, whether lethal or nonlethal. 0.6% of nonlethal violent crimes and 3% of murders does not support the "ZOMG RIFLES ARE THE BOGEYMAN!!!111" meme being peddled here.

Yes, playing your little shell game with numbers is fun, but the fact remains that rifles of ANY type are involved in fewer than 1% of nonlethal violent crimes (by your own post above) and 3% of murders (per the FBI UCR).

My 2002 SAR-1 has been slowly evolving away from the traditional AKM look. I added a Kobra optic a few years back, and a year or so ago became interested in upgrading to more modern furniture so I could mount a light.

I took my time picking out the light as I wanted something very bright, but with good battery life. And although the little 7.62x39mm isn't a hard recoiling caliber at all, I still felt it needed to be something designed for the g-loads it would experience as a firearm mounted light.

I eventually settled on a Surefire G3 LED, which is very lightweight, remarkably bright for an LED (80 lumens, brighter than the original 6P incandescent) and offers >60 lumens for 6 hours and fainter light for another 3. The tailcap switch allows both momentary-on and twist-on, like most Surefires.

I installed a Tapco Galil style forestock with a single Picatinny rail on the left side. A little fitting of the stock to the action was required, as they make it a little oversize to ensure it's not loose. The light is mounted to the rail with a quick-detach ring from GG&G. I also installed a vintage Romanian sidefolding stock that I had lying around, to make it a little easier to carry slung without banging the stock into things; it also simplifies storage somewhat, and it matches the new forend.

The new stock and forend did require re-zeroing the optic---the different recoil dynamic seems to have pulled the POI a little to the left---but it shoots well. I've shot one IPSC style match with the new stock and it worked well. I wouldn't want to use it with a gun that recoils much, though, as the butt is narrow and would put a hurting on one's shoulder.

Here's the end result:




Closeup of the light and mount on the left side; note that the lens of the light is positioned forward of the gas vents to avoid excessive carbon fouling of the lens.




With the stock folded for storage:




And the old stock, for comparison:




I do sometimes miss the 1950's wood aesthetic (I don't generally like wooden stocked rifles, but I thought the wood did look good on this carbine), but I wanted to be able to use a light, and I did NOT want to mess up the nice wood by drilling holes in it for a Picatinny rail. The polymer is a lot less slippery on humid summer days at the range, too.

Whoops, missed those. Here are some thoughts (with your prior questions quoted):


In 1791, practically the only bullets available were expanding bullets, because the bullet material of choice was soft lead. A bullet only needs a hollow nose to help it expand if it's made of something harder than pure lead, so hollowpoints weren't necessary until bullets started being made out of harder alloys or with copper jackets.

Expanded .69 caliber musket ball dug up from a Civil War battlefield:


Hard alloys and jackets became common after the invention of smokeless powder in the mid to late 1800's, which allowed higher safe working pressures than black powder (because smokeless powder burns cleaner and with a more predictable pressure curve), which in turn allowed higher velocities. Problem was, pure lead bullets coat the bore very badly when driven at high velocities, and the preferred solution (eventually) was to encapsulate the lead in a copper jacket, which fouls much less. That led to another problem, the fact that totally copper bullets don't expand like the older lead bullets did. Hence, softpoints and hollowpoints. Now, it is indisputable that hollowpoints have gotten more reliable at expanding than they used to be, but IMO no more so than the old soft lead bullets were.

In terms of per-bullet lethality, do consider that in the Founders' day, a Brown Bess musket fired a .75 caliber soft lead ball (bigger than a modern 12-gauge shotgun slug) and they lived in a world without body armor, antibiotics, surgical anesthetics, and blood transfusions. I dare say per-shot lethality was far higher in their world than it is in ours.

Regarding armor piercing, they had no body armor, so to them, any bullet could penetrate a peace officer's clothing. Practical body armor capable of stopping bullets wasn't invented until the mid-20th century, AFAIK; it was possible to make sooner (out of steel or silk), but was too heavy/bulky to be practical before the invention of high-strength aramid polymers.

FWIW, I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but armor-piercing bullets in handgun calibers were banned in 1986 by Federal law (H.R.3132, introduced 1985, became Public Law 99-408) and the law was extended to cover all rifle calibers that matter in 1994, a law that still stands.


Fingerprint-resistant coatings protect against corrosion, not identification. The fingerprints on a phosphate coated (parkerized) or nitrided steel surface are just as readable to modern forensics as fingerprints on any other matte surface are.

Also, remember that the Founders lived in a world in which fingerprints were anonymous. Fingerprint classification and identification wasn't invented until the 1880's.


Parents teaching their kids to be safe, responsible, and competent with guns is a tradition that does indeed go back to the Founders' era and before, and it is something that more than one of the Founders wrote about (I believe Jefferson touched on the topic in at least one of his letters). But this always presents a problem, in that adult sized rifles are way too heavy and long in the stock for children to handle safely. In the past, you could simply use an old rifle and cut down the barrel and stock, but beginning in the mid to late 1800's, small-caliber, usually single-shot guns downsized to fit children and adolescents began to be marketed.

Here's a Remington Boy's Rifle from around 1900:



Sorry I couldn't find a photo of the whole rifle. I have seen period ads around the 'net, but can't find any at the moment.

I do have a little treasure of a book that my mom and dad gave me as a child to help teach me to be responsible with firearms (they started me on a BB gun and moved me on to a .22 when I was ready, under supervision of course). It was "First Rifle : How to Shoot it Straight and Use it Safely" by C. B. Colby (New York : Coward-McCann, c1954). I still have it. This is not a new trend by any means.

When I can afford one, I want to pick up one of these for my 8 y.o. daughter:


http://www.crickett.com/CrickettRifle/m221...

Not for her to use on her own, but for me to teach her to shoot properly at the range. It is a single-shot (no magazine) .22LR that you load with a single round, that then has to be manually cocked before firing, and sized to fit a child my daughter's size, making it about the safest way to teach a child marksmanship. She is already quite competent with a Daisy Red Ryder BB gun, and I think she is more than ready to move up to a .22.

(And before I get any grief from others about sexist color choices, let me point out that this would not be my first choice, but my daughter is nuts about Pepto Bismol Pink, and my son will learn to shoot on the same rifle.)

Personally, I think the Founders would have approved, though I'm not sure if they'd have been thrilled with the color.


Anyway, I don't expect you to agree with all the above sentiments, but those are my feelings on the topics, anyway. Hope this is at least food for thought.

which occurred in the late 1800's. So functionally, every firearm operating mode that is civilian-legal (single shot, lever action, pump action, bolt action, semiautomatic) was already available on the civilian market before 1900. The post-1930 developments in automatic weapons, burst mode weapons, sound suppression, etc. are tightly controlled by Federal law, and for practical purposes are restricted to police/military only with rare exceptions.

Like I said, materials have improved greatly (better durability, better corrosion resistance, lighter weight), ergonomics have improved (protruding handgrips), optics have vastly improved (scopes were available in the 1860's, but were crude, and now we have holographic sights), ammunition has improved (more reliable, more consistent, more waterproof), but capabilities haven't changed nearly as much.


You could buy a single-action revolver in 1836:



Double-action Smith & Wessons were available by mid-Victorian times.



You could buy a 15-round lever-action rifle in 1861:




and a 34-round lever-action in 1873:




either one of which would give you roughly the same rate of aimed fire as a civilian non-automatic AK. By the late 1800's, semiautomatics like my AK were available. FWIW, my AK is functionally identical to a 1906 Remington Model 8 semiauto:



Image

Image

(Yes, Annie Oakley owned one.) And look closely at the safety lever, which keeps dirt out of the ejection port when engaged; the AK copied it.


Semiautomatic pistols haven't changed functionally a whole lot since the Colt Model of 1911:

namely this: the right of mentally competent adults with clean records to lawfully own and use non-automatic, non-sound-suppressed small arms under .51 caliber, plus some over-.50 shotguns and hunting weapons, that meet the barrel length and overall length requirements of the National Firearms Act. Things beyond that (automatic weapons, over-.50 tactical rifles, explosives, sawed-off shotguns, crew-served weapons) are already restricted by current law.

That not only IS the status quo, it has BEEN the status quo for decades. Much of that has been settled law for 75 years.

The NFA Title 1 guns that are available on the U.S. civilian market today are not that far outside the Founders' direct experience. For example, I own a civilian, non-automatic AK lookalike, the ne plus ultra of scary oooga-booga guns as portrayed by the MSM and the repubs at the Brady Campaign:



If I could take that rifle back in time and show it to Thomas Jefferson or George Washington, they would not only have easily figured out how it functions without even being told, merely by handling it (because it is so close to the technology available in their day), but they would probably have smacked themselves in the head and exclaimed "Why didn't I think of that?" It is mechanically that simple. And given two or three minutes' instruction on the controls and ergonomics, they could have used the rifle with supreme competence for the rest of their life. Try that with a Blackberry.

My AK's range, accuracy, and power are similar to a Kentucky rifle of the Revolutionary War period, and while followup shots are much quicker than a period musket, its overall lethality was far below that of a small 18th-century cannon.

By the 1860's, the rate of aimed fire of civilian rifles had reached that of a modern civilian AK, and available magazine capacities caught up by the early 1870's. Since that time, civilian firearms have mostly improved in reliability, accuracy, durability, ergonomics, and sighting systems, not lethality or rate of fire. The one thing Jefferson or Washington would have had a hard time figuring out is the optic on my rifle. A good 18th-century machinist could have built an AK, but not an LED-based collimator sight.

BTW, the Nuclear Bogeyman Argument is a red herring because the line between small arms and nukes is already drawn at non-automatic small arms under .51 caliber, so bringing in crew-served weapons at all (never mind nukes) is merely a distraction from the real issues.