Assume for a moment that less guns in public hands means higher levels of public safety. I know that studies have not shown this and there are few data points that even support this, but for the moment, pretend this is so.
Grandfathering is a tool of scoundrels when it comes to gun restrictions. The point of putting gun restrictions in place is usually touted as being for public safety. "It's for the children." "If it saves one child's life its worth it." However, the politicians that propose these laws and then include a grandfather clause show their true colors. The 1994 AWB had a grandfather clause, the SAFE Act and the Colorado laws have grandfather clauses.
As an aside, "grandfathering" got its start as a technique used by Democrats in conjuction with other laws to ensure that whites could vote (because their grandfather did) while blacks couldn't (because they couldn't pass a reading test or pay a poll tax). Since gun control has its roots in racism, I find it appropriate that the technique of grandfathering would be included.
Back to the topic at hand. What are the true colors of politicians who propose such laws? Well, just take a look at what is said to pass the law and what the law does. The law is said to increase public safety because these guns or magazines that are being banned are so much more dangerous than "safe" guns. Yet because of the grandfather clause, the public is allowed to keep the ones that they already own. Furthermore, since many laws don't get enacted for 30 days to 180 days after passage, people are allowed to stock up on the items that will be banned, but aren't yet.
So which is it? If the guns and magazines that are being restricted are so dangerous and public safety will be increased so much more by passage of these restrictions, then why would you allow people to continue to own the firearms in question. If the public is still allowed to own them and stock up on them in the days before the ban starts, then why bother with the ban in the first place?
Put simply, if the politician really cared about public safety and they really thought that restricting certain guns would increase that safety, then they would call for a confiscation. Except they have said they aren't going to confiscate anyone's guns. Which means there is no reason to restrict them in the first place.
Any gun law that has a grandfather clause in it should be voted down by gun control supporters, because it obviously isn't going to increase public safety. However, if control of the populace and not public safety is the chief concern, then vote for it. Vote for everything that restricts the people.
Showing posts with label Guns. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Guns. Show all posts
Thursday, March 28, 2013
Wednesday, March 27, 2013
Chewing Guns Can Be Dangerous
Every now and then, misspellings can lead to hilarious headlines. Found on Drudge yesterday:
Where does masticating guns fall under the rules of safety? And why so narrowly focused on helping your colon recover from cancer surgery? Does this mean it is not helpful for after having a colonostomy or a prostate exam? Does it matter what type of gun? What about the parts: is the barrel more effective than the butt stock? How does this differ from those who just chew on trees or scrap iron? There are a lot of questions that this headline brings up.
Most important though, we need to find out where this kind of research was funded.
"Does chewing gun help colon recover from cancer surgery?"
Where does masticating guns fall under the rules of safety? And why so narrowly focused on helping your colon recover from cancer surgery? Does this mean it is not helpful for after having a colonostomy or a prostate exam? Does it matter what type of gun? What about the parts: is the barrel more effective than the butt stock? How does this differ from those who just chew on trees or scrap iron? There are a lot of questions that this headline brings up.
Most important though, we need to find out where this kind of research was funded.
Thursday, March 21, 2013
GUN "Almost" FACTS 101: Can Terrorists buy guns in the US?
There is a series of videos from the organization "Protest Easy Guns" titled Gun Facts 101 that can be found on YouTube. Comments are not allowed so originally I had the idea of fisking them with my own video. Alas, that takes way too much time. So I just will do a line by line analysis of the "Almost Facts" (in italics) that are presented. This one is on Terrorists and Guns.
Absolutely, in fact Al Qaida training manuals were found that recommended that potential terrorists acquire weapons inside the United States.
I can’t really deny this. Not because I have seen the training manuals, but because it makes logical sense. Do you know what else makes logical sense? If you are going to operate in Britain, wait until you are in Britain to acquire your weapons (even with their draconian gun laws which don’t seem to keep guns out of the hands of their criminals – as seen by their rising gun crime rates). If you are a terrorist from say Saudi Arabia, and are assigned to carry out a mission in the US which won’t take place for another year, does it make any sense to risk your capture by trying to smuggle weapons into the US (unless you happen to be a professional weapons smuggler)? Or would it make more sense to enter the US with a clean record, and get the weapons needed later (because the only weapon you may need is a boxcutter and they sell those at hardware stores in every one of the 50 states)?
Do you know what else the terrorist training manuals recommend? Blend in. Don’t be overtly “muslim”. Don’t attend mosque. Wear western clothes. Hang out with westerners. Heck, even indulge in some of the western vices like alcohol. So, with this logic, we should be targeting everybody in the US who DOESN’T look like a terrorist.
They specifically mentioned how any type of weapon is available at gun shows.
They would be gravely mistaken then. Probably got that misinformation from the US media though, so it is understandable. Unlike the writers of these terrorist manuals, I have been to gun shows. You can’t buy any type of weapon there. What you can buy are knifes, revolvers, pump shotguns, lever rifles, semi-auto shotguns and rifles, and ammunition. You know the kind of weapons you can buy in sporting goods stores across America. No grenades, no rocket launchers, no C4, not even a fully automatic machine gun.
But what about all of those books that tell you how to convert your semi-auto into a fully automatic bullet hose? Well, have you ever read any of them? Some of them aren’t illegal to do – because they don’t work! Some of them will turn your $500 rifle into a $500 paperweight. And some of them will actually make a fully automatic rifle (its still illegal in the US). Unfortunately, the books don’t tell you which kind they are. And even if they did, there is this wonderful thing called the internet, it is available in nearly every library across the nation – no criminal background check required. And even if the internet wasn’t invented, a basic knowledge of how semi-autos or full autos work will be enough to allow a passably mechanically inclined person to make their own. They make fully automatic weapons with hand tools in the caves of Afghanistan and Pakistan. This isn't rocket science people. It is a technology that is older than the moveable type printing press.
In fact around our country we offer a virtual flea market for terrorists because we can buy assault weapons, 50 calibers, concealable assault weapons, handguns, and we offer them whatever they want.
Like boxcutters. In spite of the fact that boxcutters were the weapon of choice in the largest terrorist action in the world, I can still buy them at a dozen places in my city and never have to show an ID. This country also provides a virtual flea market for terrorist who wish to construct explosives or poisonous gas. I know how to make both from components I can buy at any grocery store, and I didn’t even read a terrorist manual.
In fact we offer them conversion kits, so if they want to make their semi-automatic weapons into automatic weapons they can buy that here too.
Really? Where are these conversion kits? Does Wal-Mart stock them? I am not saying that people can’t turn their semi-automatics into automatics (which is still illegal), what I am saying is there is not a market that someone can buy a conversion kit off of Ebay and be set to go. Semi-to-full auto conversion kits are sold in this country, both above ground to FFLs that are allowed to make full auto (for law enforcement) and on the black market. Terrorists wouldn’t be going the FFL route since they are not law enforcement. Which leaves the black market. Besides Vatican City, which country doesn’t have a black market?
It just seems absolutely outrageous that at a time when we are taking off our shoes in the security at the airport lines,
Perhaps it is the taking shoes off that is outrageous. There are 700 million airline passengers a year in America. Taking our shoes off and then putting them back on probably only takes 30 seconds on average. That is 5.8 million hours of time. At a wage rate of $20/hour, we are spending minimum of $100 million/ year of lost productivity to do what? There was one instance of a terrorist trying to ignite his shoes on fire (before the taking off of shoes at screening). He was subdued by passengers. In fact every terrorist attack against airlines since 9/11 has been stopped by the passengers on the aircraft. Funny how knowing that you will die changes your perspective and what actions you are willing to take in an emergency.
The TSA likes to brag about all of the weapons that they confiscate in airports each year including loaded guns. However, having read several of the tests that have been done of airport security and the abysmal pass rate, there are probably hundreds or thousands of passengers a day that have something illicit on the airplane. Yet there haven't been an uptick of airplane bombings - because the people have no ill intentions. Likewise before the TSA found all of this stuff, it was likely getting past security and on to planes. Yet there wasn't a rash of airplane bombings before either. Terrorist attacks on airplanes happen to be a rare event both before the TSA and after the TSA.
and just yesterday morning I was pulled aside because I had a tiny bottle of water that I had forgotten about in a bag that I was taking on a plane,
And that tiny bottle of water posed no threat. In fact, it was so dangerous that they simply tossed it in the garbage can near the screening line. Do you know why a terrorist hasn’t just waited for a packed security line and detonated a bomb there. 1) its not flashy enough, terrorists want to get noticed, and right now the gold standard was 9/11 – unless they can top that, they aren’t going to get the publicity they want 2) while it would provide a temporary disruption at that airport, what are we going to do, move the security barrier back farther? 3) we have already disrupted our economy enough with air travel through the TSA, I doubt that attacks at airports would have any other effect.
so we go through all these measures for security and yet terrorists can come here and acquire weapons in great numbers.
"Measures for security" do not mean that security is present, only that there is the outward appearance of doing something. Do you want to see real security? Go to a Las Vegas casino. Except that you won't "see" it. Doesn't mean that it isn't there though.
Part of living in a country of immigrants that is open to visitors is the fact that some of those immigrants or visitors might not have the best of intentions. The only 100% effective way to stop this is to stop all immigration and tourism. I don’t think that is going to work and I happen to like the immigrants and the tourists. Besides, terrorists can come here and acquire gasoline in large volumes. Is there a push to limit the sales of gasoline or even tanker trucks?
And if you put the availability together with the fact that Congress and the current president have long advocated destroying gun background check data after 24 hours
There is the law, which says we will not have a national gun registry, and to meet this law, we destroy the records that could be used to assemble that registry.
that has gotten in the way of law enforcement who have been trying to get leads on potential terrorists and go after them.
Huh? There is no question on the form that you check if you are a terrorist. Terrorists are not buying guns in large numbers. At least not in the US. If they were, we would have had terrorist shootings all the time, instead we have one – which the US government won’t recognize as a terrorist action, and which very well may have been a lone wolf with terrorist sympathies. The federal government has far better databases to check for terrorists – they are called visitor visas.
When the background checks that are conducted when that data is destroyed right away we are losing an opportunity to go after terrorists.
No, we are preventing a registry of gun owners from being formed. But using this logic, by not having a background check for boxcutters, we are losing an opportunity to go after terrorists. By not asking everyone if they are a terrorist, we are losing an opportunity to go after terrorists. There are only a finite number of resources that can be used. It is to our benefit to use those resources in a way that will provide the best results.
So certainly in a time when library records are being looked at with greater scrutiny and other personal information on Americans yet somehow gun information is held sacred and destroyed because nobody can see that.
Perhaps we need to hold more information sacred. Why does the federal government or any government care what library books I check out (besides, this is so easily bypassed by just reading the books in the library and never checking them out)? The outrage shouldn’t be that gun information is held sacred, the outrage should be that all of our personal information is not held sacred. We live in a society where we are innocent until proven guilty. Furthermore, without a suspicion of guilt and some corroborating evidence, there is no reason for any government agent to go snooping around looking for more evidence of illegal activity.
So again you put that together with the availability and you have a definite destination for terrorists.
No, America is a destination for terrorists because we represent everything they hate. We don’t subscribe to the philosophy that if you don’t follow X group’s interpretation of Y then you are an infidel and deserve to be killed. There is no more better definition of barbarism than that. America has been dragging the rest of the world away from barbarism for a long time – it doesn’t mean we haven’t had our faults or backsliding but the world looks to America as the antithesis of barbarism, otherwise they wouldn’t come running to us when trouble happened. (I mean really, even Great Britain asked us if we would side with them over a second war for the Falklands – thankfully we have said we would stay out of it).
Absolutely, in fact Al Qaida training manuals were found that recommended that potential terrorists acquire weapons inside the United States.
I can’t really deny this. Not because I have seen the training manuals, but because it makes logical sense. Do you know what else makes logical sense? If you are going to operate in Britain, wait until you are in Britain to acquire your weapons (even with their draconian gun laws which don’t seem to keep guns out of the hands of their criminals – as seen by their rising gun crime rates). If you are a terrorist from say Saudi Arabia, and are assigned to carry out a mission in the US which won’t take place for another year, does it make any sense to risk your capture by trying to smuggle weapons into the US (unless you happen to be a professional weapons smuggler)? Or would it make more sense to enter the US with a clean record, and get the weapons needed later (because the only weapon you may need is a boxcutter and they sell those at hardware stores in every one of the 50 states)?
Do you know what else the terrorist training manuals recommend? Blend in. Don’t be overtly “muslim”. Don’t attend mosque. Wear western clothes. Hang out with westerners. Heck, even indulge in some of the western vices like alcohol. So, with this logic, we should be targeting everybody in the US who DOESN’T look like a terrorist.
They specifically mentioned how any type of weapon is available at gun shows.
They would be gravely mistaken then. Probably got that misinformation from the US media though, so it is understandable. Unlike the writers of these terrorist manuals, I have been to gun shows. You can’t buy any type of weapon there. What you can buy are knifes, revolvers, pump shotguns, lever rifles, semi-auto shotguns and rifles, and ammunition. You know the kind of weapons you can buy in sporting goods stores across America. No grenades, no rocket launchers, no C4, not even a fully automatic machine gun.
But what about all of those books that tell you how to convert your semi-auto into a fully automatic bullet hose? Well, have you ever read any of them? Some of them aren’t illegal to do – because they don’t work! Some of them will turn your $500 rifle into a $500 paperweight. And some of them will actually make a fully automatic rifle (its still illegal in the US). Unfortunately, the books don’t tell you which kind they are. And even if they did, there is this wonderful thing called the internet, it is available in nearly every library across the nation – no criminal background check required. And even if the internet wasn’t invented, a basic knowledge of how semi-autos or full autos work will be enough to allow a passably mechanically inclined person to make their own. They make fully automatic weapons with hand tools in the caves of Afghanistan and Pakistan. This isn't rocket science people. It is a technology that is older than the moveable type printing press.
In fact around our country we offer a virtual flea market for terrorists because we can buy assault weapons, 50 calibers, concealable assault weapons, handguns, and we offer them whatever they want.
Like boxcutters. In spite of the fact that boxcutters were the weapon of choice in the largest terrorist action in the world, I can still buy them at a dozen places in my city and never have to show an ID. This country also provides a virtual flea market for terrorist who wish to construct explosives or poisonous gas. I know how to make both from components I can buy at any grocery store, and I didn’t even read a terrorist manual.
In fact we offer them conversion kits, so if they want to make their semi-automatic weapons into automatic weapons they can buy that here too.
Really? Where are these conversion kits? Does Wal-Mart stock them? I am not saying that people can’t turn their semi-automatics into automatics (which is still illegal), what I am saying is there is not a market that someone can buy a conversion kit off of Ebay and be set to go. Semi-to-full auto conversion kits are sold in this country, both above ground to FFLs that are allowed to make full auto (for law enforcement) and on the black market. Terrorists wouldn’t be going the FFL route since they are not law enforcement. Which leaves the black market. Besides Vatican City, which country doesn’t have a black market?
It just seems absolutely outrageous that at a time when we are taking off our shoes in the security at the airport lines,
Perhaps it is the taking shoes off that is outrageous. There are 700 million airline passengers a year in America. Taking our shoes off and then putting them back on probably only takes 30 seconds on average. That is 5.8 million hours of time. At a wage rate of $20/hour, we are spending minimum of $100 million/ year of lost productivity to do what? There was one instance of a terrorist trying to ignite his shoes on fire (before the taking off of shoes at screening). He was subdued by passengers. In fact every terrorist attack against airlines since 9/11 has been stopped by the passengers on the aircraft. Funny how knowing that you will die changes your perspective and what actions you are willing to take in an emergency.
The TSA likes to brag about all of the weapons that they confiscate in airports each year including loaded guns. However, having read several of the tests that have been done of airport security and the abysmal pass rate, there are probably hundreds or thousands of passengers a day that have something illicit on the airplane. Yet there haven't been an uptick of airplane bombings - because the people have no ill intentions. Likewise before the TSA found all of this stuff, it was likely getting past security and on to planes. Yet there wasn't a rash of airplane bombings before either. Terrorist attacks on airplanes happen to be a rare event both before the TSA and after the TSA.
and just yesterday morning I was pulled aside because I had a tiny bottle of water that I had forgotten about in a bag that I was taking on a plane,
And that tiny bottle of water posed no threat. In fact, it was so dangerous that they simply tossed it in the garbage can near the screening line. Do you know why a terrorist hasn’t just waited for a packed security line and detonated a bomb there. 1) its not flashy enough, terrorists want to get noticed, and right now the gold standard was 9/11 – unless they can top that, they aren’t going to get the publicity they want 2) while it would provide a temporary disruption at that airport, what are we going to do, move the security barrier back farther? 3) we have already disrupted our economy enough with air travel through the TSA, I doubt that attacks at airports would have any other effect.
so we go through all these measures for security and yet terrorists can come here and acquire weapons in great numbers.
"Measures for security" do not mean that security is present, only that there is the outward appearance of doing something. Do you want to see real security? Go to a Las Vegas casino. Except that you won't "see" it. Doesn't mean that it isn't there though.
Part of living in a country of immigrants that is open to visitors is the fact that some of those immigrants or visitors might not have the best of intentions. The only 100% effective way to stop this is to stop all immigration and tourism. I don’t think that is going to work and I happen to like the immigrants and the tourists. Besides, terrorists can come here and acquire gasoline in large volumes. Is there a push to limit the sales of gasoline or even tanker trucks?
And if you put the availability together with the fact that Congress and the current president have long advocated destroying gun background check data after 24 hours
There is the law, which says we will not have a national gun registry, and to meet this law, we destroy the records that could be used to assemble that registry.
that has gotten in the way of law enforcement who have been trying to get leads on potential terrorists and go after them.
Huh? There is no question on the form that you check if you are a terrorist. Terrorists are not buying guns in large numbers. At least not in the US. If they were, we would have had terrorist shootings all the time, instead we have one – which the US government won’t recognize as a terrorist action, and which very well may have been a lone wolf with terrorist sympathies. The federal government has far better databases to check for terrorists – they are called visitor visas.
When the background checks that are conducted when that data is destroyed right away we are losing an opportunity to go after terrorists.
No, we are preventing a registry of gun owners from being formed. But using this logic, by not having a background check for boxcutters, we are losing an opportunity to go after terrorists. By not asking everyone if they are a terrorist, we are losing an opportunity to go after terrorists. There are only a finite number of resources that can be used. It is to our benefit to use those resources in a way that will provide the best results.
So certainly in a time when library records are being looked at with greater scrutiny and other personal information on Americans yet somehow gun information is held sacred and destroyed because nobody can see that.
Perhaps we need to hold more information sacred. Why does the federal government or any government care what library books I check out (besides, this is so easily bypassed by just reading the books in the library and never checking them out)? The outrage shouldn’t be that gun information is held sacred, the outrage should be that all of our personal information is not held sacred. We live in a society where we are innocent until proven guilty. Furthermore, without a suspicion of guilt and some corroborating evidence, there is no reason for any government agent to go snooping around looking for more evidence of illegal activity.
So again you put that together with the availability and you have a definite destination for terrorists.
No, America is a destination for terrorists because we represent everything they hate. We don’t subscribe to the philosophy that if you don’t follow X group’s interpretation of Y then you are an infidel and deserve to be killed. There is no more better definition of barbarism than that. America has been dragging the rest of the world away from barbarism for a long time – it doesn’t mean we haven’t had our faults or backsliding but the world looks to America as the antithesis of barbarism, otherwise they wouldn’t come running to us when trouble happened. (I mean really, even Great Britain asked us if we would side with them over a second war for the Falklands – thankfully we have said we would stay out of it).
Friday, March 15, 2013
The Cost of Universal Background Checks
The Senate now has a bill that would require universal background checks in the hope that this will keep guns out of the hands of criminals. While we can all admit that it won't keep all of the guns out of their hands (afterall, Great Britain's criminals have had no problem getting their hands on guns), we should ask ourselves two questions before considering whether this is a viable solution 1) How much is this going to cost (and to whom)? 2) How many guns is this going to keep out of criminals hands (and thereby how many crimes are averted)?
OK, that is 4 questions. And I haven't even brought up the 2nd Amendment. Let me look at this issue universally so that it could be applied whether there was a 2nd Amendment or not and whether people had a natural right to self defense or not. In other words, if it passes the "economics" test we can consider it and debate other issues, if it doesn't then there is no need to debate this further - i.e. it is unicorn rainbow farts.
Obviously, I am prejudiced. We all are. The dispicable ones are those who don't admit it. I am prejudiced for facts. I am prejudiced for truth. So, before you say that I am opinionated and discount my opinion, back up your opinion with facts.
Lets start with question 1) How much is this going to cost? Well, last year there were 19.5 million NICS background checks. Not all of these represent a single firearm purchase. Some of them are for carry permits. Some of them are for multiple firearms. Some states allow firearms to be bought with a carry permit without another NICS. This number averaged between 8 and 9 million from 1999 to 2005. It appeared to level off at 14 million in 2010, then election season came. The three highest months were Dec 2012, Feb 2013, and Jan 2013. So, if this keeps up all of 2013, we could see NICS checks of 25 million.
For simplicity sake, lets say the multiple gun sales cancel out the carry permit checks. Also, lets assume that NICS checks are artificially high. Therefore, I'll use 15 million firearm sales checks a year as the baseline. Now, the figure I have heard most bandied about is 40% of firearm sales are in the secondary market (i.e. no background check). Since this is an unregulated market of no records, there is really no way to verify this one way or the other. So without any other information, I'll accept this as is. Coincidentally, I did a tally of my firearms and just under 40% were bought on the secondary market.
So universal background checks will cover an additional 10 million sales. Now the states that already require all private transfers to go through an FFL as well as internet sales give us some idea of what the pricing will be. I have seen rates from $25 to $50 as the basic charge. So, I'll use $35 as the average.
How much is universal background checks going to cost? $350 million a year. This of course assumes that none of the transfers are exempted (which the current bill allows) and that the secondary market isn't depressed because of the increased cost (why would you buy a $75 used rifle if there is going to be a $35 mark-up when you can buy the same rifle from an FFL for $105). So let me cut this down to $200 million for a more realistic idea of what the price entails.
Which leads us to the next question 1a) Who is paying this? Well, that would be the people who are buying guns. What was the problem trying to be solved? Oh yeah, criminals getting their hands on guns. So, how does charging gun owners more money help decrease criminals getting their hands on guns?
Let's go to our next source of information, the Department of Justice report about Firearm Use by Offenders. This compared survey results of incarcerated criminals in 1991 (before background checks) and 1997 (after background checks). Now, I have taken the liberty to do some corrections because the background check requirement didn't go into effect until 1994. Also, some of the prisoners in 1991 would still be prisoners in 1997. So, I am going to assume that 100% of the prisoners from 1991 are still serving time in 1997, therefore, I'll subtract out their numbers from the 1997 numbers and re-calculate (there were significantly more prisoners in 1997 than in 1991, and significantly more prisoners that had firearms in 1997 than in 1991) ro get an approximate idea of how the background check requirement changed the procurement of firearms.
Assuming that all of the friends and family abide by the new law, and assuming each of the 500,000 crimes involving firearms each year represent unique individuals/firearm acquisitions, then 41,000 * $35 = $1.4 million will be paid by the people purposefully supplying firearms. $1.4/$200 million is 0.7% of the total cost will be shouldered by the portion of the population who may be responsible. 99.3% of the additional costs to this are paid for by law abiding gun owners. Can you imagine if we charged the everyone in the country $10 a year to pay for the costs of car accidents, regardless of whether they drove or not or how safe of a driver they were? That is what is being proposed here.
And a reminder for those anti-capitalists. All of this money is not going to crime prevention. All of it is going to FFL dealers. I don't fault them for charging whatever the law will allow. I fault the law for being stupid. Continuing on.
Question 2 How many guns is this going to keep out of the hands of criminals? Well, looking back at the chart above, the DOJ report provides evidence that prior to the background check requirement, 21% of criminals bought guns from retail outlets (I included flea markets and gun shows because they only made up 2% of this figure). After the background check requirement, it appears that the number dropped to 14%. Except that we have the problem of substitution. Because if you will notice Friends and Family had an increase of 6%. But that is a 1% difference still, right? Not quite, at the end of the report it identifies standard errors of up to 2%, for these numbers. So 6% and 7% for purposes of this report are essentially equal.
Remember though that a lot of those criminals in 1991 were still in prison in 1997, so if you look at my estimate, then yes, the background check was very effective at driving criminals away from both retail outlets and friends and family. So, the question then becomes did the number of guns decrease overall? Simply put, no. In 1997 there were 70% more prisoners than in 1991. Furthermore, those prisoners who had a firearm during their latest crime also went up (Table 3). If a larger percentage of criminals have firearms, you can't really argue that a particular gun control measure has been effective at reducing the number of guns criminals get a hold of.
Well, surely we can crack down on the Retail sales to criminals? No, because criminals are already prohibited from buying guns (whether retail or private party). The current background check already drove them out of the retail market. What about that 7.6% that are still buying from retail? Well, take a look at Table 7. 25% of inmates were first time offenders and 20% of them had a firearm for their most recent crime. Which means that they would have passed a background check so buying at retail was not a problem. 25% * 20% = 5%. Close to 7.6%, then if you recognize that using a fake ID and lying on the forms will also get you to pass a background check and the last 2.6% (if it isn't statistical noise anyway) is easily explained (Table 9 .
What about the family and friends aspect? Won't universal background checks prevent those people from providing guns? Probably not. Look at the table again. Using my estimate, the introduction of background checks also drove people out of the family and friends market. Why? Increased enforcement of straw purchaser laws, increased publicity of the fact that providing a firearm to a felon is illegal already. I don't know specifically since you would have to do a survey of family and friends of criminals. The fact remains though, friends and family who were selling firearms to criminals before the background check system were breaking the law. If they were willing to break the law before, what is going to prevent them from continuing to break the law.
Finally, it should be noted that the illegal market has shown that it can adequately supply the firearms needed by criminals. In 1991 it accounted for the largest percentage. In 1997 it was equal with Family and Friends (which had a significant rise). My estimate based on the DOJ numbers is that the illegal market is already supplying the vast majority of firearms, 84%. This market will be unaffected by the universal background check law.
In summary, universal background checks are going to cost about $200 million per year. They won't prevent criminals from getting guns and the vast majority of the cost will be paid by law abiding gun owners. Retail outlets already do not sell to criminals, and law abiding friends and family don't either (those that do are criminals themselves). The illegal gun market has always been a sizeable amount of the source of guns for criminals and could easily expand. So, universal background checks don't pass my simple economics test, therefore, it is a form of sniffing unicorn rainbow farts (don't worry while sniffing farts may not sound appealing, unicorns are imaginary and rainbows are just the reflection of light through droplets of water, in other words a mirage).
OK, that is 4 questions. And I haven't even brought up the 2nd Amendment. Let me look at this issue universally so that it could be applied whether there was a 2nd Amendment or not and whether people had a natural right to self defense or not. In other words, if it passes the "economics" test we can consider it and debate other issues, if it doesn't then there is no need to debate this further - i.e. it is unicorn rainbow farts.
Obviously, I am prejudiced. We all are. The dispicable ones are those who don't admit it. I am prejudiced for facts. I am prejudiced for truth. So, before you say that I am opinionated and discount my opinion, back up your opinion with facts.
Lets start with question 1) How much is this going to cost? Well, last year there were 19.5 million NICS background checks. Not all of these represent a single firearm purchase. Some of them are for carry permits. Some of them are for multiple firearms. Some states allow firearms to be bought with a carry permit without another NICS. This number averaged between 8 and 9 million from 1999 to 2005. It appeared to level off at 14 million in 2010, then election season came. The three highest months were Dec 2012, Feb 2013, and Jan 2013. So, if this keeps up all of 2013, we could see NICS checks of 25 million.
For simplicity sake, lets say the multiple gun sales cancel out the carry permit checks. Also, lets assume that NICS checks are artificially high. Therefore, I'll use 15 million firearm sales checks a year as the baseline. Now, the figure I have heard most bandied about is 40% of firearm sales are in the secondary market (i.e. no background check). Since this is an unregulated market of no records, there is really no way to verify this one way or the other. So without any other information, I'll accept this as is. Coincidentally, I did a tally of my firearms and just under 40% were bought on the secondary market.
So universal background checks will cover an additional 10 million sales. Now the states that already require all private transfers to go through an FFL as well as internet sales give us some idea of what the pricing will be. I have seen rates from $25 to $50 as the basic charge. So, I'll use $35 as the average.
How much is universal background checks going to cost? $350 million a year. This of course assumes that none of the transfers are exempted (which the current bill allows) and that the secondary market isn't depressed because of the increased cost (why would you buy a $75 used rifle if there is going to be a $35 mark-up when you can buy the same rifle from an FFL for $105). So let me cut this down to $200 million for a more realistic idea of what the price entails.
Which leads us to the next question 1a) Who is paying this? Well, that would be the people who are buying guns. What was the problem trying to be solved? Oh yeah, criminals getting their hands on guns. So, how does charging gun owners more money help decrease criminals getting their hands on guns?
Let's go to our next source of information, the Department of Justice report about Firearm Use by Offenders. This compared survey results of incarcerated criminals in 1991 (before background checks) and 1997 (after background checks). Now, I have taken the liberty to do some corrections because the background check requirement didn't go into effect until 1994. Also, some of the prisoners in 1991 would still be prisoners in 1997. So, I am going to assume that 100% of the prisoners from 1991 are still serving time in 1997, therefore, I'll subtract out their numbers from the 1997 numbers and re-calculate (there were significantly more prisoners in 1997 than in 1991, and significantly more prisoners that had firearms in 1997 than in 1991) ro get an approximate idea of how the background check requirement changed the procurement of firearms.
Reputo Estimate w/ NICS
|
DOJ FUO 1997 Inmates
|
DOJ FUO 1991 Inmates
| |
| Retail |
7.6%
|
13.9%
|
20.8%
|
| Friends/Family |
8.2%
|
39.6%
|
33.8%
|
| Illegal |
84.2%
|
39.2%
|
40.8%
|
Assuming that all of the friends and family abide by the new law, and assuming each of the 500,000 crimes involving firearms each year represent unique individuals/firearm acquisitions, then 41,000 * $35 = $1.4 million will be paid by the people purposefully supplying firearms. $1.4/$200 million is 0.7% of the total cost will be shouldered by the portion of the population who may be responsible. 99.3% of the additional costs to this are paid for by law abiding gun owners. Can you imagine if we charged the everyone in the country $10 a year to pay for the costs of car accidents, regardless of whether they drove or not or how safe of a driver they were? That is what is being proposed here.
And a reminder for those anti-capitalists. All of this money is not going to crime prevention. All of it is going to FFL dealers. I don't fault them for charging whatever the law will allow. I fault the law for being stupid. Continuing on.
Question 2 How many guns is this going to keep out of the hands of criminals? Well, looking back at the chart above, the DOJ report provides evidence that prior to the background check requirement, 21% of criminals bought guns from retail outlets (I included flea markets and gun shows because they only made up 2% of this figure). After the background check requirement, it appears that the number dropped to 14%. Except that we have the problem of substitution. Because if you will notice Friends and Family had an increase of 6%. But that is a 1% difference still, right? Not quite, at the end of the report it identifies standard errors of up to 2%, for these numbers. So 6% and 7% for purposes of this report are essentially equal.
Remember though that a lot of those criminals in 1991 were still in prison in 1997, so if you look at my estimate, then yes, the background check was very effective at driving criminals away from both retail outlets and friends and family. So, the question then becomes did the number of guns decrease overall? Simply put, no. In 1997 there were 70% more prisoners than in 1991. Furthermore, those prisoners who had a firearm during their latest crime also went up (Table 3). If a larger percentage of criminals have firearms, you can't really argue that a particular gun control measure has been effective at reducing the number of guns criminals get a hold of.
Well, surely we can crack down on the Retail sales to criminals? No, because criminals are already prohibited from buying guns (whether retail or private party). The current background check already drove them out of the retail market. What about that 7.6% that are still buying from retail? Well, take a look at Table 7. 25% of inmates were first time offenders and 20% of them had a firearm for their most recent crime. Which means that they would have passed a background check so buying at retail was not a problem. 25% * 20% = 5%. Close to 7.6%, then if you recognize that using a fake ID and lying on the forms will also get you to pass a background check and the last 2.6% (if it isn't statistical noise anyway) is easily explained (Table 9 .
What about the family and friends aspect? Won't universal background checks prevent those people from providing guns? Probably not. Look at the table again. Using my estimate, the introduction of background checks also drove people out of the family and friends market. Why? Increased enforcement of straw purchaser laws, increased publicity of the fact that providing a firearm to a felon is illegal already. I don't know specifically since you would have to do a survey of family and friends of criminals. The fact remains though, friends and family who were selling firearms to criminals before the background check system were breaking the law. If they were willing to break the law before, what is going to prevent them from continuing to break the law.
Finally, it should be noted that the illegal market has shown that it can adequately supply the firearms needed by criminals. In 1991 it accounted for the largest percentage. In 1997 it was equal with Family and Friends (which had a significant rise). My estimate based on the DOJ numbers is that the illegal market is already supplying the vast majority of firearms, 84%. This market will be unaffected by the universal background check law.
In summary, universal background checks are going to cost about $200 million per year. They won't prevent criminals from getting guns and the vast majority of the cost will be paid by law abiding gun owners. Retail outlets already do not sell to criminals, and law abiding friends and family don't either (those that do are criminals themselves). The illegal gun market has always been a sizeable amount of the source of guns for criminals and could easily expand. So, universal background checks don't pass my simple economics test, therefore, it is a form of sniffing unicorn rainbow farts (don't worry while sniffing farts may not sound appealing, unicorns are imaginary and rainbows are just the reflection of light through droplets of water, in other words a mirage).
Tuesday, March 12, 2013
GUN "Almost" FACTS 101: Waiting Periods
There is a series of videos from the organization "Protest Easy Guns" titled Gun Facts 101 that can be found on YouTube. Comments are not allowed so originally I had the idea of fisking them with my own video. Alas, that takes way too much time. So I just will do a line by line analysis of the "Almost Facts" (in italics) that are presented. This one is on Waiting Periods.
The waiting period can make sure that the individual involved takes some time to think over their purchase.
Buying a firearm is usually a big ticket item. Typical quality handguns run the gambit of $500-$1000. The most popular rifle in the US, the AR-15, runs around $1200 (although the recent buying spree has jacked those prices up to $2000 or more). So, buying a gun is not like buying a candybar. But few people I know – let me rephrase that – no one I know buys guns like candybars. I have thought over every single purchase of a firearm I made. Usually for days or weeks before. Afterall, I am basically spending the equivalent of a month of food for my family to buy a gun. That being said – a government mandated waiting period is crap! Do you support a government mandated waiting period before buying a car? What about a waiting period before visiting a doctor (I know Obamacare is sort of making that a default)? How about a waiting period before paying your credit card bill? All of these are major decisions that people should take time to think over. Of course, that is part of being an adult, knowing when you should take some time and when you don’t need to. We don’t need the government to tell us.
You can avoid some impulse purchases by imposing a waiting period.
This is absolutely true. But it also assumes that it is to your benefit to wait all the time. It isn’t. One time I decided to buy a Saiga-12 at a gun show. I went there specifically for it. I had researched it for two months before hand (a self imposed waiting limit). While there, at another vendor I saw a Saiga 7.62 for an excellent price. I took another stroll around the tables and impulsively decided to buy that one too! Good thing, I haven’t found it since for any less than $100 more than what I paid. Impulse purchases are good sometimes. Not everyone is a criminal. In fact, very little of the population are criminals that need guns (less than a couple percent of the population). Can you imagine if we had laws to control all the bad things that only apply to 2% of the population? (Murder, rape, and assault are already illegal, yet that hasn’t caused them to decrease). That would not be a fun place to live in this country. There are more drunk drivers than criminals with guns and yet we still allow alcohol to be served freely.
Sometimes with gun crime, especially in cases of domestic violence, we see an impulsive action.
Ummm … NO! What you see in domestic violence (according to the UCR and NCVS) is a long pattern of escalating violence. Sometimes just from one party, but in many cases from both parties (yes, that would be women beating up their husbands). The current law prohibits persons convicted of domestic violence (even misdemeanors) from possessing firearms (although in California there is a backlog for confiscating them so what good does the law do?). The problem here is that in the vast majority of cases where the police are called to a home for domestic violence, no charges are filed. Ergo, no conviction. Plenty of spouses have shown that if a gun isn’t handy, they will just use a kitchen knife or a baseball bat. The one thing they are not doing is leaving the home, driving down to Walmart, buying a gun, driving home, and shooting their husband. This is the only time a waiting period would be effective, yet the number of times this scenario has happened in the US is probably less than 5. Ever. On the other hand in states that do have waiting periods, there have been plenty of times when someone took out a restraining order, tried to buy a gun, had to wait, and while waiting, they were assaulted (in some cases raped and murdered) by the person who didn’t bother to obey the restraining order. Funny how criminals don’t follow the law. Now, in the case of these dead people, you can’t say that having a firearm would have made the situation worse?
It gives the purchaser time to cool off.
See above. For the vast majority, 99.99999%, of purchases, there is no cooling off needed, because there is nothing to cool off from.
There is potential depending on the state and local laws involved for a background check to go further than the instant background check or if there are questions that are raised in the instant check they can be addressed.
The instant background check is already set up to address this. If it comes back as a hold, then the purchase isn’t made. Law enforcement has 72 hours to make a final determination. If they don’t then the firearm can be sold. If law enforcement does nothing, then this obviously isn’t a priority for them (probably because 99.99% of the time there is no issue – Bayesian logic).
One of the critical things is that this is a very serious purchase and an individual should not be able to just, especially someone who is in an agitated state, the fact that they can just go in and buy a gun and act on that impulse.
My guess is that the agitated impulse buy is a creation of Hollywood. I know that I have seen it at least 3 times on different crime shows. I honestly have never read of a single incident like it in a newspaper or on the internet. All of the gun stores I have been to, and the vendors at gun shows had responsible sellers. As a businessman, I highly doubt that any of them would sell a firearm to someone who is visibly agitated.
There is a home near where I live, a mansion. More of a mega mansion. It is completely not appropriate for the neighborhood and looks out of place in a big way. After two years, no one had moved in and I asked around and found out the backstory. There was a couple who were going through a separation/divorce. Apparently the wife built the mansion as a means to get revenge and tie up a significant amount of the couple’s funds. Should we have waiting periods for things like this also?
But most important of all, waiting periods have not been shown to have any affect on the crime rate. That is not me talking, that is the National Academy of Sciences and the Bureau of Justice Statistics. If things don’t work, we shouldn’t do them.
The waiting period can make sure that the individual involved takes some time to think over their purchase.
Buying a firearm is usually a big ticket item. Typical quality handguns run the gambit of $500-$1000. The most popular rifle in the US, the AR-15, runs around $1200 (although the recent buying spree has jacked those prices up to $2000 or more). So, buying a gun is not like buying a candybar. But few people I know – let me rephrase that – no one I know buys guns like candybars. I have thought over every single purchase of a firearm I made. Usually for days or weeks before. Afterall, I am basically spending the equivalent of a month of food for my family to buy a gun. That being said – a government mandated waiting period is crap! Do you support a government mandated waiting period before buying a car? What about a waiting period before visiting a doctor (I know Obamacare is sort of making that a default)? How about a waiting period before paying your credit card bill? All of these are major decisions that people should take time to think over. Of course, that is part of being an adult, knowing when you should take some time and when you don’t need to. We don’t need the government to tell us.
You can avoid some impulse purchases by imposing a waiting period.
This is absolutely true. But it also assumes that it is to your benefit to wait all the time. It isn’t. One time I decided to buy a Saiga-12 at a gun show. I went there specifically for it. I had researched it for two months before hand (a self imposed waiting limit). While there, at another vendor I saw a Saiga 7.62 for an excellent price. I took another stroll around the tables and impulsively decided to buy that one too! Good thing, I haven’t found it since for any less than $100 more than what I paid. Impulse purchases are good sometimes. Not everyone is a criminal. In fact, very little of the population are criminals that need guns (less than a couple percent of the population). Can you imagine if we had laws to control all the bad things that only apply to 2% of the population? (Murder, rape, and assault are already illegal, yet that hasn’t caused them to decrease). That would not be a fun place to live in this country. There are more drunk drivers than criminals with guns and yet we still allow alcohol to be served freely.
Sometimes with gun crime, especially in cases of domestic violence, we see an impulsive action.
Ummm … NO! What you see in domestic violence (according to the UCR and NCVS) is a long pattern of escalating violence. Sometimes just from one party, but in many cases from both parties (yes, that would be women beating up their husbands). The current law prohibits persons convicted of domestic violence (even misdemeanors) from possessing firearms (although in California there is a backlog for confiscating them so what good does the law do?). The problem here is that in the vast majority of cases where the police are called to a home for domestic violence, no charges are filed. Ergo, no conviction. Plenty of spouses have shown that if a gun isn’t handy, they will just use a kitchen knife or a baseball bat. The one thing they are not doing is leaving the home, driving down to Walmart, buying a gun, driving home, and shooting their husband. This is the only time a waiting period would be effective, yet the number of times this scenario has happened in the US is probably less than 5. Ever. On the other hand in states that do have waiting periods, there have been plenty of times when someone took out a restraining order, tried to buy a gun, had to wait, and while waiting, they were assaulted (in some cases raped and murdered) by the person who didn’t bother to obey the restraining order. Funny how criminals don’t follow the law. Now, in the case of these dead people, you can’t say that having a firearm would have made the situation worse?
It gives the purchaser time to cool off.
See above. For the vast majority, 99.99999%, of purchases, there is no cooling off needed, because there is nothing to cool off from.
There is potential depending on the state and local laws involved for a background check to go further than the instant background check or if there are questions that are raised in the instant check they can be addressed.
The instant background check is already set up to address this. If it comes back as a hold, then the purchase isn’t made. Law enforcement has 72 hours to make a final determination. If they don’t then the firearm can be sold. If law enforcement does nothing, then this obviously isn’t a priority for them (probably because 99.99% of the time there is no issue – Bayesian logic).
One of the critical things is that this is a very serious purchase and an individual should not be able to just, especially someone who is in an agitated state, the fact that they can just go in and buy a gun and act on that impulse.
My guess is that the agitated impulse buy is a creation of Hollywood. I know that I have seen it at least 3 times on different crime shows. I honestly have never read of a single incident like it in a newspaper or on the internet. All of the gun stores I have been to, and the vendors at gun shows had responsible sellers. As a businessman, I highly doubt that any of them would sell a firearm to someone who is visibly agitated.
There is a home near where I live, a mansion. More of a mega mansion. It is completely not appropriate for the neighborhood and looks out of place in a big way. After two years, no one had moved in and I asked around and found out the backstory. There was a couple who were going through a separation/divorce. Apparently the wife built the mansion as a means to get revenge and tie up a significant amount of the couple’s funds. Should we have waiting periods for things like this also?
But most important of all, waiting periods have not been shown to have any affect on the crime rate. That is not me talking, that is the National Academy of Sciences and the Bureau of Justice Statistics. If things don’t work, we shouldn’t do them.
Monday, March 11, 2013
Motivational Posters: Teacher Edition
With South Dakota passing a bill to allow teachers to be armed, my supermodel wife was willing to pose for another round of photos.
We home school our kids, and they are surrounded by a wide array of armament at all times of the day. Most of it intellectual, but there is some metallurgical stuff too!
Trust, that is what allowing people to be armed is about. Why would you trust a police officer any more than you would a teacher? More than likely, your child will have very few interactions with a police officer in his/her life.
There are all sorts of subjects that can be taught with a firearms theme.
Educate the children. There is nothing better you can do.
And just to whet your appetite, I got Russian Origami shirt (from Linoge) for my wife and she has consented to photos of that as well. I just need to think of some clever phrases (I'm willing to take suggestions).
We home school our kids, and they are surrounded by a wide array of armament at all times of the day. Most of it intellectual, but there is some metallurgical stuff too!
Trust, that is what allowing people to be armed is about. Why would you trust a police officer any more than you would a teacher? More than likely, your child will have very few interactions with a police officer in his/her life.
There are all sorts of subjects that can be taught with a firearms theme.
Educate the children. There is nothing better you can do.
And just to whet your appetite, I got Russian Origami shirt (from Linoge) for my wife and she has consented to photos of that as well. I just need to think of some clever phrases (I'm willing to take suggestions).
Wednesday, March 6, 2013
Death of the Cannon
In 2009, I built myself a cannon. You can read about it here, here, and here. Over the last three years, it has brought much joy to people. It was used at a family reunion, to celebrate holidays, and just for fun in the backyard with friends. The cannon was first shot off on January 1, 2010. It had its final shot on December 31, 2012. Three years of black powder goodness.
I was down at my brother's place, and we had decided to make some potato guns to entertain the kids. We used some PVC left over from construction of his house and the remainder of my other cannon that I had never finished. After about 30 minutes of work we had a 3" shooter and a 2" shooter. Later that afternoon, we took the kids (age 5 to 13) out to fire off some spuds.
THWUMPF! That is the sound of igniting hairspray as the best of Idaho's soil goes sailing through the air, landing 200 yards away. THWUMPF! THWUMPF! THWUMPF!
One bottle of hairspray and a 5 lb sack of potatoes is a lot of fun. The kids were practically beating each other up for a turn to press the trigger.
On New Year's Eve we planned a big night of exploding goodness. It started with a trip to the grocery store, oranges would fit, along with another sack of potatoes. To stay with the vegetable theme, for the cannon I selected a large onion, a grapefruit, and something from the lettuce family.
Then it rained that afternoon. By evening it was still drizzly. We decided to do it anyway, blowing stuff up at night to celebrate the new year is a time honored tradition in America that a little precipitation is not going to get in the way of.
So, we started with some stuffed animals. The cannon performed beautifully as usual and the kids were pleased to ring in the New Year. Then the rain started more, things were getting wet and icy (it had snowed earlier in the day). So, I decided one more shot, the lettcue thing. I loaded up 6 tablespoons of blackpowder, stuffed in the wadding, and then the lettuce. It fit snugly, but not quite as snug as the stuffed animals do.
In conjunction, my brother and I decided to light off the spud guns at the same time. Did you know that the explosion in a spud gun is bright enough to cause the gun to glow? It is a great sight at night (although slightly ennerving at first when you realize that this is about 3/16" to 1/4" of white plastic that is glowing momentarily). Everything was loaded up, and I lit the fuse on the cannon.
10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 ... KA-BOOOOOM!
The sound reverberated off of the hills and sounded only slighly quieter but much deeper than a shotgun blast. The blast had knocked the cannon backwards and it skidded along the ground until it hit the deck. It was pouring down rain now, so I left the cannon out until the next morning and just grabbed my explosion tool box.
The next morning when I went out to retrieve the cannon, I found this:
That final blast had literally blown the end off of the cannon. It wasn't that there was too large of a charge, I had put up to 8 tablespoons of powder in it before. But in retrospection, there were three possible contributing factors.
1) The angle at which the cannon was aimed. Since I am using this for enjoyment of friends and family, I like to have a nice arcing shot (more like a mortar than howitzer), I I usually set up the cannon at a 60-70 degree angle. This allows the ground to be used as a backstop and absorb much of the recoil. Since the cannon was seen skidding across the ground after the shot, it is entirely possible that I had a shallower angle, which would mean that the recoil forces could send the cannon flying backwards.
2) The cold weather might have made the material brittle. I had set up the cannon earlier in the afternoon, so by the time we were shooting it, it was probably at 20- 30 degrees. The break was a clean circumferential break, it didn't shatter, so that is telling me that the force of the combustion chamber acting backwards caused the break. If the combustion chamber couldn't contain the pressure, then I would expect the whole thing to blow up, or at least have evidence of shattering the PVC shell. There was no evidence that this happened.
3) The lettuce probably had way more friction than a teddy bear. Plush stuffed animals with their cotton/nylon fur glide out of the tube. Lettuce leaves tend to grip the sides and only move on brute force. I know this from ramming stuffed animals down the tube. Once I get them moving, as long as I apply pressure, they continue to move (i.e. I just have to overcome starting friction). When putting the lettuce in, there was comparatively less force required, but each push only moved it down the barrel a little ways.
Of course, it may have been the deck that arrested the movement which ultimately caused the cannon to fail. But, that is life. On to my next adventure.
I was down at my brother's place, and we had decided to make some potato guns to entertain the kids. We used some PVC left over from construction of his house and the remainder of my other cannon that I had never finished. After about 30 minutes of work we had a 3" shooter and a 2" shooter. Later that afternoon, we took the kids (age 5 to 13) out to fire off some spuds.
THWUMPF! That is the sound of igniting hairspray as the best of Idaho's soil goes sailing through the air, landing 200 yards away. THWUMPF! THWUMPF! THWUMPF!
One bottle of hairspray and a 5 lb sack of potatoes is a lot of fun. The kids were practically beating each other up for a turn to press the trigger.
On New Year's Eve we planned a big night of exploding goodness. It started with a trip to the grocery store, oranges would fit, along with another sack of potatoes. To stay with the vegetable theme, for the cannon I selected a large onion, a grapefruit, and something from the lettuce family.
Then it rained that afternoon. By evening it was still drizzly. We decided to do it anyway, blowing stuff up at night to celebrate the new year is a time honored tradition in America that a little precipitation is not going to get in the way of.
So, we started with some stuffed animals. The cannon performed beautifully as usual and the kids were pleased to ring in the New Year. Then the rain started more, things were getting wet and icy (it had snowed earlier in the day). So, I decided one more shot, the lettcue thing. I loaded up 6 tablespoons of blackpowder, stuffed in the wadding, and then the lettuce. It fit snugly, but not quite as snug as the stuffed animals do.
In conjunction, my brother and I decided to light off the spud guns at the same time. Did you know that the explosion in a spud gun is bright enough to cause the gun to glow? It is a great sight at night (although slightly ennerving at first when you realize that this is about 3/16" to 1/4" of white plastic that is glowing momentarily). Everything was loaded up, and I lit the fuse on the cannon.
10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 ... KA-BOOOOOM!
The sound reverberated off of the hills and sounded only slighly quieter but much deeper than a shotgun blast. The blast had knocked the cannon backwards and it skidded along the ground until it hit the deck. It was pouring down rain now, so I left the cannon out until the next morning and just grabbed my explosion tool box.
The next morning when I went out to retrieve the cannon, I found this:
That final blast had literally blown the end off of the cannon. It wasn't that there was too large of a charge, I had put up to 8 tablespoons of powder in it before. But in retrospection, there were three possible contributing factors.
1) The angle at which the cannon was aimed. Since I am using this for enjoyment of friends and family, I like to have a nice arcing shot (more like a mortar than howitzer), I I usually set up the cannon at a 60-70 degree angle. This allows the ground to be used as a backstop and absorb much of the recoil. Since the cannon was seen skidding across the ground after the shot, it is entirely possible that I had a shallower angle, which would mean that the recoil forces could send the cannon flying backwards.
2) The cold weather might have made the material brittle. I had set up the cannon earlier in the afternoon, so by the time we were shooting it, it was probably at 20- 30 degrees. The break was a clean circumferential break, it didn't shatter, so that is telling me that the force of the combustion chamber acting backwards caused the break. If the combustion chamber couldn't contain the pressure, then I would expect the whole thing to blow up, or at least have evidence of shattering the PVC shell. There was no evidence that this happened.
3) The lettuce probably had way more friction than a teddy bear. Plush stuffed animals with their cotton/nylon fur glide out of the tube. Lettuce leaves tend to grip the sides and only move on brute force. I know this from ramming stuffed animals down the tube. Once I get them moving, as long as I apply pressure, they continue to move (i.e. I just have to overcome starting friction). When putting the lettuce in, there was comparatively less force required, but each push only moved it down the barrel a little ways.
Of course, it may have been the deck that arrested the movement which ultimately caused the cannon to fail. But, that is life. On to my next adventure.
Tuesday, March 5, 2013
GUN "Almost" FACTS 101: High Capacity Magazines
There is a series of videos from the organization "Protest Easy Guns" titled Gun Facts 101 that can be found on YouTube. Comments are not allowed so originally I had the idea of fisking them with my own video. Alas, that takes way too much time. So I just will do a line by line analysis of the "Almost Facts" (in italics) that are presented. This one is on High Capacity Magazines.
A high capacity magazine is filled with bullets.
Not to start off by being a English grammar junkie, be “A high capacity magazine may be filled with cartridges” would be a more accurate statement. A bullet and a cartridge are not the same thing. A cartridge is a combination of shell, primer, gunpowder, and bullet. Only the bullet comes out the muzzle of the gun (if you have more than the bullet coming out the front end of the gun, then you have some bigger problems to worry about). If you loaded a magazine with bullets, you would have a great paperweight. If you want to look at it from a weapon standpoint it would be a blunt force object, although, there are many cheaper, more available, and more effective alternatives (i.e. rocks). So, if you want a high capacity magazine to be effective, then you need to fill it with cartridges. Also, when you buy a high capacity magazine, there won’t be any cartridges in it. You have to buy those separately. I know, I know, I am nitpicking here, but if your organization is suppose to “educate” people then you open yourself up to nitpicking when you are wrong.
And the number of bullets can be anywhere from say well six is considered rather standard
Actually, there is no such thing as a universal standard. Some handguns have a standard magazine capacity (assuming that a standard magazine fits completely – or nearly completely – into the grip) of 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, or 17. Its all a function of the cartridge size, grip width, and grip length. For the most popular sizes of handgun (.380, 9 mm, .40, .45) very few can be purchased with a OEM 6 round capacity or less magazine. For rifles and shotguns it gets even more complicated.
Tubular magazines may hold only two or three rounds, but that is usually because there is a plug taking up the extra space. Why the plug? Because many state laws limit the amount of ammunition loaded into a firearm while hunting. I don’t hunt, so any firearm I own currently or in the future would have such ridiculousness removed so that I can have the maximum designed capacity or greater. Anything less just means I need to reload more when I go to the range. Standard tubular magazines can fit as many cartridges as will fit along the length of the barrel. For a .22 Short, this could be upwards of 20 rounds is an off the shell rifle.
For detachable magazines, the options are nearly limitless (and the standard magazine that is purchased with a firearm is likewise nearly limitless). For instance, the standard image one has of the Tommy Gun is probably with a 50 or 75 round drum magazine.
and that’s basically around the capacity that hunters use.
No, not really. That’s what SOME hunter’s use because they are limited by state laws. And in a lot of cases, hunter's only need one round (particularly if you hunt with a muzzle loader). In some places (or with some calibers), there are no such limits. For instance, there are crazy people who hunt hogs or bears or other wildlife with handguns that have capacities of more than 6 rounds. This is far more sporting than using a rifle at 300 yards, but in this case “more sporting” to me also means more insane. Our primate hunting instincts and skills long since were discarded on our evolutionary journey to the top of the food chain. In any case, hunters use magazines with less than six rounds because A) they only plan on taking 1 shot or B) state law limits them to less than six rounds. The firearm still works the same way with 7-30 rounds in it.
High capacity is considered generally anything above six rounds of bullets as you see in this picture here, in the magazine.
Um, actually, the only time that high capacity magazine was defined in federal legislation (1994 Assault Weapons Ban) the cutoff was set at 10 rounds. More than 10 rounds was considered “high” capacity. New York has now defined it as 7 rounds. But other states have defined it as 15 rounds or 20 rounds, so even the various governments who believe in high capacity magazine limits haven't come to a consensus as to how many that is.
The capacity can go up to 20 rounds, 30 rounds, 40.
I know, isn’t it great! And then if you have a belt-fed weapon it has the same effect of having a 100, 200, 500, 1000 or more round magazine. So, if great hunters only use 1 shot per trip, why have 20, 30, or 40 round magazines? Because everyone who shoots is not a great hunter, or even a hunter period. As mentioned before, “high” capacity magazines allow me to reload less at the range.
This is an example of a magazine in an assault pistol.
you generally will see what folks call banana clips sometimes they’ll use that expression.
Well, if we are talking about third world nations, former eastern bloc countries, communist countries, or terrorists then yes. The “banana clip” (it is really a magazine, not a clip) is a unique feature of the AK-47 and its 7.62 x 39mm derivatives because…..
Because as the number of bullets increase, the magazine kind of comes around in a curved shape.
Actually, it has nothing to do with the number of cartridges (not bullets). It has to do with the geometry of the cartridge. Most cartridges are straight walled (i.e. the shell is cylindrical). The 7.62x39mm round is tapered (i.e. the shell is conical). The 5.56 round used in the M-16 is straight walled. Sometimes, on their magazines, there will be a slight angle. This angle serves no function in regards to the ammunition, although it may aid when using the magazine as a grip. Personally, I think the designers were just jealous with the total coolness of the AK-47 and wanted to pretend that their weapon was just as cool. Its not. Face it, for all of its backwardness, some good things came out of the Soviet Union. They are primarily limited to the AK-47 and Anna Kournikova. (The Mosin-Nagant was developed in Tsarist Russian so it doesn’t count).
There are also round magazines that can hold even greater than 50 rounds.
These are properly called drum magazines. Having cartridges stacked up in a magazine has practical limits to the amount you can put in. A drum uses a spiral or circular spring to put 50, 75, 100, or 150 rounds in a fairly compact package. For more than this, you basically have to go the belt-fed route.
And the reason that these are so dangerous is that as the Long Island Railroad Shooter showed,
No, the Long Island Railroad Shooter was dangerous, irrespective of whether he had a gun in his hand or a Molotov cocktail or a pipe bomb (of course then he wouldn’t be called a shooter, but a bomber or an arsonist – either way, he is still a murderer).
when you put a high capacity magazine in a gun you can just keep firing.
…Until your cartridges run out, in which case you need to reload.
It makes it much more difficult for Law Enforcement to take the person down
What makes it difficult for shooters bent on mass murder to be taken down by law enforcement is not the “high” capacity magazine of the shooter, its that the law enforcement personnel are not there when the shooting starts (and usually not there for several minutes after the shooting starts). Gun Free Zones make it more difficult to take a shooter down.
and we end with tragically many more victims when high capacity magazines are used.
Depending on how you define “high” capacity. Using the AWB definition of 10 rounds as the cutoff most mass shootings were accomplished with low capacity magazines. Even when a weapon was used that had a "high capacity" magazine (such as Aurora, Newtown, or Virginia Tech), the shooter also used another weapon which did not have a "high capacity" magazine. In most of these mass shootings, the perpetrator had several (in some cases dozens) of magazines and did frequent reloads to the point that even though a "high capacity" magazine may have been used, it was reloaded before being fully expended. In other words, a low capacity magazine could have been substituted just as easily.
So when the Assault Weapons Ban expired in the United States in ’04, the ban on high capacity magazines also expired.
Of course, the ban didn’t actually ban the magazines. It just banned the manufacture of new magazines. All of the old magazines were still legal to own, sell, and use.
So it’s only in a few localities where that ban exists.
Massachusetts and New York have been known recently as the keepers of Liberty. Oh wait, I was thinking about the beginning of the country. Recently, Massachusetts and New York have been the epitome of the nanny state. Unsuprisingly, comparing crime in areas that have the ban and don't have the ban has shown that it has done nothing to decrease crime or mass shootings.
So in most of the United States it is now legal to purchase high capacity magazines.
It’s also legal to purchase “high” capacity gasoline vehicles. You don’t even need a driver’s license to go fill up two five gallon gas cans. Flour is sold in 50 lb bags to every Tom, Dick, and Harry. Matches are given away like candy. Bleach and Ammonia can be found in most every grocery store in the US and aren’t even in locked cabinets (in most cases there isn’t even a foil seal on them).
And this is good, because a criminal justice system that is focused on the object rather than the person will provide little justice and breed more criminals.
A high capacity magazine is filled with bullets.
Not to start off by being a English grammar junkie, be “A high capacity magazine may be filled with cartridges” would be a more accurate statement. A bullet and a cartridge are not the same thing. A cartridge is a combination of shell, primer, gunpowder, and bullet. Only the bullet comes out the muzzle of the gun (if you have more than the bullet coming out the front end of the gun, then you have some bigger problems to worry about). If you loaded a magazine with bullets, you would have a great paperweight. If you want to look at it from a weapon standpoint it would be a blunt force object, although, there are many cheaper, more available, and more effective alternatives (i.e. rocks). So, if you want a high capacity magazine to be effective, then you need to fill it with cartridges. Also, when you buy a high capacity magazine, there won’t be any cartridges in it. You have to buy those separately. I know, I know, I am nitpicking here, but if your organization is suppose to “educate” people then you open yourself up to nitpicking when you are wrong.
And the number of bullets can be anywhere from say well six is considered rather standard
Actually, there is no such thing as a universal standard. Some handguns have a standard magazine capacity (assuming that a standard magazine fits completely – or nearly completely – into the grip) of 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, or 17. Its all a function of the cartridge size, grip width, and grip length. For the most popular sizes of handgun (.380, 9 mm, .40, .45) very few can be purchased with a OEM 6 round capacity or less magazine. For rifles and shotguns it gets even more complicated.
Tubular magazines may hold only two or three rounds, but that is usually because there is a plug taking up the extra space. Why the plug? Because many state laws limit the amount of ammunition loaded into a firearm while hunting. I don’t hunt, so any firearm I own currently or in the future would have such ridiculousness removed so that I can have the maximum designed capacity or greater. Anything less just means I need to reload more when I go to the range. Standard tubular magazines can fit as many cartridges as will fit along the length of the barrel. For a .22 Short, this could be upwards of 20 rounds is an off the shell rifle.
For detachable magazines, the options are nearly limitless (and the standard magazine that is purchased with a firearm is likewise nearly limitless). For instance, the standard image one has of the Tommy Gun is probably with a 50 or 75 round drum magazine.
and that’s basically around the capacity that hunters use.
No, not really. That’s what SOME hunter’s use because they are limited by state laws. And in a lot of cases, hunter's only need one round (particularly if you hunt with a muzzle loader). In some places (or with some calibers), there are no such limits. For instance, there are crazy people who hunt hogs or bears or other wildlife with handguns that have capacities of more than 6 rounds. This is far more sporting than using a rifle at 300 yards, but in this case “more sporting” to me also means more insane. Our primate hunting instincts and skills long since were discarded on our evolutionary journey to the top of the food chain. In any case, hunters use magazines with less than six rounds because A) they only plan on taking 1 shot or B) state law limits them to less than six rounds. The firearm still works the same way with 7-30 rounds in it.
High capacity is considered generally anything above six rounds of bullets as you see in this picture here, in the magazine.
Um, actually, the only time that high capacity magazine was defined in federal legislation (1994 Assault Weapons Ban) the cutoff was set at 10 rounds. More than 10 rounds was considered “high” capacity. New York has now defined it as 7 rounds. But other states have defined it as 15 rounds or 20 rounds, so even the various governments who believe in high capacity magazine limits haven't come to a consensus as to how many that is.
The capacity can go up to 20 rounds, 30 rounds, 40.
I know, isn’t it great! And then if you have a belt-fed weapon it has the same effect of having a 100, 200, 500, 1000 or more round magazine. So, if great hunters only use 1 shot per trip, why have 20, 30, or 40 round magazines? Because everyone who shoots is not a great hunter, or even a hunter period. As mentioned before, “high” capacity magazines allow me to reload less at the range.
This is an example of a magazine in an assault pistol.
And this is an example of a cute cuddly sidearm. See its pink!
An assault rifle generally has a magazine that hangs down
Unless it comes out the side, or the top, or contained within the pistol grip, or is belt fed like I mentioned above. All of these configurations have their advantages and disadvantages. All of them have varying capacities.
and ones that we have seen in photos from the Iraq war we see a lot of soldiers with them
That is because soldiers shoot their guns a lot in combat (just like I shoot my guns a lot at the range – except that I am not trying to kill anyone and no one is shooting back). So it would make no sense to reload after six rounds. These photos are not limited to the Iraq War. Any war since the beginning of the 20th Century has featured “high” capacity magazines (they have also featured a lot of “low” capacity magazines).you generally will see what folks call banana clips sometimes they’ll use that expression.
Well, if we are talking about third world nations, former eastern bloc countries, communist countries, or terrorists then yes. The “banana clip” (it is really a magazine, not a clip) is a unique feature of the AK-47 and its 7.62 x 39mm derivatives because…..
Because as the number of bullets increase, the magazine kind of comes around in a curved shape.
Actually, it has nothing to do with the number of cartridges (not bullets). It has to do with the geometry of the cartridge. Most cartridges are straight walled (i.e. the shell is cylindrical). The 7.62x39mm round is tapered (i.e. the shell is conical). The 5.56 round used in the M-16 is straight walled. Sometimes, on their magazines, there will be a slight angle. This angle serves no function in regards to the ammunition, although it may aid when using the magazine as a grip. Personally, I think the designers were just jealous with the total coolness of the AK-47 and wanted to pretend that their weapon was just as cool. Its not. Face it, for all of its backwardness, some good things came out of the Soviet Union. They are primarily limited to the AK-47 and Anna Kournikova. (The Mosin-Nagant was developed in Tsarist Russian so it doesn’t count).
There are also round magazines that can hold even greater than 50 rounds.
These are properly called drum magazines. Having cartridges stacked up in a magazine has practical limits to the amount you can put in. A drum uses a spiral or circular spring to put 50, 75, 100, or 150 rounds in a fairly compact package. For more than this, you basically have to go the belt-fed route.
And the reason that these are so dangerous is that as the Long Island Railroad Shooter showed,
No, the Long Island Railroad Shooter was dangerous, irrespective of whether he had a gun in his hand or a Molotov cocktail or a pipe bomb (of course then he wouldn’t be called a shooter, but a bomber or an arsonist – either way, he is still a murderer).
when you put a high capacity magazine in a gun you can just keep firing.
…Until your cartridges run out, in which case you need to reload.
It makes it much more difficult for Law Enforcement to take the person down
What makes it difficult for shooters bent on mass murder to be taken down by law enforcement is not the “high” capacity magazine of the shooter, its that the law enforcement personnel are not there when the shooting starts (and usually not there for several minutes after the shooting starts). Gun Free Zones make it more difficult to take a shooter down.
and we end with tragically many more victims when high capacity magazines are used.
Depending on how you define “high” capacity. Using the AWB definition of 10 rounds as the cutoff most mass shootings were accomplished with low capacity magazines. Even when a weapon was used that had a "high capacity" magazine (such as Aurora, Newtown, or Virginia Tech), the shooter also used another weapon which did not have a "high capacity" magazine. In most of these mass shootings, the perpetrator had several (in some cases dozens) of magazines and did frequent reloads to the point that even though a "high capacity" magazine may have been used, it was reloaded before being fully expended. In other words, a low capacity magazine could have been substituted just as easily.
So when the Assault Weapons Ban expired in the United States in ’04, the ban on high capacity magazines also expired.
Of course, the ban didn’t actually ban the magazines. It just banned the manufacture of new magazines. All of the old magazines were still legal to own, sell, and use.
So it’s only in a few localities where that ban exists.
Massachusetts and New York have been known recently as the keepers of Liberty. Oh wait, I was thinking about the beginning of the country. Recently, Massachusetts and New York have been the epitome of the nanny state. Unsuprisingly, comparing crime in areas that have the ban and don't have the ban has shown that it has done nothing to decrease crime or mass shootings.
So in most of the United States it is now legal to purchase high capacity magazines.
It’s also legal to purchase “high” capacity gasoline vehicles. You don’t even need a driver’s license to go fill up two five gallon gas cans. Flour is sold in 50 lb bags to every Tom, Dick, and Harry. Matches are given away like candy. Bleach and Ammonia can be found in most every grocery store in the US and aren’t even in locked cabinets (in most cases there isn’t even a foil seal on them).
And this is good, because a criminal justice system that is focused on the object rather than the person will provide little justice and breed more criminals.
Friday, March 1, 2013
Security Theater: Our Asinine Gun Laws
People who don't deal with the ins and outs of federal regulations on a daily basis really don't know how ridiculous some of the are. Recognize, federal regulations are written by bureaucrats (who may not have any idea about the subject they are writing regulations on), commented on by the public (who may not have any idea about the subject they are writing regulations on), to implement federal law passed by Congress (who may not have any idea about the subject they are writing regulations on), and enforced by various law enforcement agencies (who also may not have any idea about the subject). Unfortunately, these regulations are enforced against people who are intimately familiar with the subject that is being regulated.
Firearms are a subject that many people not familiar with firearms say have few regulations. The regulations for firearms are located in Title 27 of the Code of Federal Regulations. So lets go through a few of those.
First off, what is a firearm? The regulations define 4 things which are firearms and 1 which is not. 1) any weapon which will expel a projectile by explosive force. 2) the frame or receiver of #1. 3) a muffler or silencer. 4) a destructive device. And the item which is not is 1) antique firearm - any firearm manufactured in or before 1898 or replica of such firearm not designed to take centerfire or rimfire ammunition.
So what are the ramifications of this. Well, lets use the Mosin-Nagant as an example. This rifle has been manufactured since 1891. So by the definitions above, those made from 1891 to 1898 are not firearms. Those made since 1899 are firearms. Even though they all fire the exact same ammunition and in most cases their parts are interchangeable. So the same gun is a firearm but also not a firearm. The implication of this ridiculous designation is that a Mosin-Nagant built before 1898 is not subject to the sale and possession restrictions of the regulations. So, prohibited persons (criminals, mentally ill, etc.) could buy a pre-1898 Mosin-Nagant and not break any law. Also, anyone could have a pre-1898 Mosin-Nagant shipped to their door - no background check, no waiting period, no nothing. But if it was made in 1899 all of the rules apply.
Next, a frame or a receiver is also a firearm. When transporting firearms on aircraft they have to be declared and in a locked case. And the case cannot be opened (even by the TSA) except in the presence of the owner. A frame or a receiver is a single part. It is the part that all of the other parts attach to. By itself, a frame or receiver is incapable of firing a projectile (no firing pin, no barrel, etc.). The BATFE has further ruled that a receiver/frame has to be more than 80% complete to be a receiver/frame (and therefore a firearm). An AK-47 80% receiver can look like a flat sheet of metal with some holes in it. So, I can put 100 of these in my checked baggage and not declare them. Furthermore, I can buy 100 of them and have them shipped to my house (so could a prohibited person) since they are not a firearm, just sheet metal with holes in it. But, if I make just one bend in the flat piece of sheet metal, it is now a firearm and when I go to the airport, I have to have it in a locked case and declare it. If the TSA opens up my bag with flat sheet metal, they are within their rights to do that. If however, they open up my bag with declared bent metal without me present, they have broken the law. Likewise, the same receiver can come pre-bent, just without the holes. Once I drill the first hole it is a firearm.
Next, a sound suppressor or muffler (popularly called a silencer) is also a firearm. So, if I am transporting the silencer on an airplane, I also have to declare it as a firearm (even though I may not have a firearm that it connects to) and have it in a separate locked case (that the TSA can't open outside of my presence).
I have been using the example of transporting firearms on airplanes. Except that falls under the TSA jurisdiction and they are under 49 CFR Subtitle B Chapter XII. Unfortunately, they don't define the term "firearm" so, that 1891 Mosin-Nagant (which according to the BATFE is not a firearm) may have to be declared as a firearm at the airport; and that sound suppressor (which according to the BATFE is a firearm) may not have to be declared. It's a little hazy as to what is what in the world of federal regulations, especially when you have to jump from one agency to another.
Let's look at another area. Importation and manufacture. Here are three rifles. One of them is illegal.
If you guessed the middle one, then you would be wrong. That one is perfectly legal. The top one is the original configuration (minus the magazine) with all Russian parts. And, I lied. The bottom is also the exact same as the top one. However, if I put the American made 30-round magazine shown in the middle on to the other configuration, it would be illegal. If I switched out the 30-round magazine in the middle with the factory provided 10 round magazine, the middle one would be illegal. Regulations require imported rifles to remain in their imported condition, or have a minimum number of US parts installed. Any less than the minimum parts and you have an illegal configuration (which I believe is a felony).
What is most hilarious about this, is there are several internal components which count and you wouldn't be able to tell without disassembling the rifle - except that many of these parts usually don't have a "made in the USA" stamp. So, the only way to show compliance would be to save your receipt - unlike the tax code, there is no time limit so you would need to save these receipts forever. But if you happen to be a closet machinist and manufactured your own parts (which is perfectly legal), you really have no proof that they are USA made parts (unless you video documented the manufacturing process). Talk about a regulatory burden.
One of the types of Federal Firearms License is a Curio & Relic License, or a collectors license. It allows holders to purchase firearms for their private collection that meet certain criteria (mainly being more than 50 years old). They still shoot modern ammunition and some people even use them as their daily carry guns. The process involves a background check by the FBI. Purchases can be made from other FFLs by mail shipped directly to your home. Firearms not on the C&R list, though, cannot be shipped to your home, they must go through a retail FFL. So, let's say I want to buy two guns from Southern Ohio Gun Company. Both in 9mm Makarov. One is a C&R, the other isn't. For the C&R gun, I give them my FFL license number and they ship the gun directly to me. For the other, I have to find an FFL near my home (in my state) to do the transfer. SOG sends the firearm to the FFL, and then I go to the FFL. Do I show them my FFL? No, since this isn't a C&R gun, that won't work. They have to fill out the 4473 and call in to the NICS to do a background check (even though I just got the other gun in the mail the same day). Unless, I happen to have my concealed carry license, in which case they fill out the paperwork, but don't need to call it in (at least in my state, other states are different). Oh yeah, and I probably had to pay them extra for the gun. So in a nutshell, one gun is 51 years old and is shipped right to my door. Another is 49 years old and I have to pay more and involve another company including filling out paperwork. The guns are functionally identical. Makes perfect sense, if you work in the government.
Finally, let me look at another issue. You can have a firearm registered as a short-barrelled rifle if the barrel length is less than 16 inches. So, hypothetically, let's assume you have two of the same rifle, one with a barrel of 16 inches, and one with a barrel of 15.9 inches which is registered with the BATFE. The short barreled rifle is registered by the serial number which is on the receiver, not the barrel. Both operate the exact same (they are both semi-automatic). One day after shooting, you happen to be cleaning both of them and inadvertently assemble the shorter barrel on the non-registered receiver. You have committed a felony. Even though you still own the exact same weapons as before. But don't worry, you're only going to get caught if you tell someone, so quickly you disassemble them and reassemble them correctly.
People like to think that regulations help us and keep us safe. They couldn't be further from the truth. In many cases the regulations are impotent or unenforceable. In others, they are contradictory across departments. Most of them have little semblance of protection. I have only talked about four examples out of thousands. These four do nothing to keep us safer. Would we be better off without these regulations? Absolutely! But no politician wants to go on record as repealing our gun laws. Even if they are stupid and do nothing to help us. The saddest part about all this, like calling the IRS for tax advice, my analysis above could be wrong. I may have said something was legal when it really wasn't, and vice versa.
So the next time someone says guns aren't regulated, laugh in their face. And don't be ashamed if you spray some spit while doing it.
Firearms are a subject that many people not familiar with firearms say have few regulations. The regulations for firearms are located in Title 27 of the Code of Federal Regulations. So lets go through a few of those.
First off, what is a firearm? The regulations define 4 things which are firearms and 1 which is not. 1) any weapon which will expel a projectile by explosive force. 2) the frame or receiver of #1. 3) a muffler or silencer. 4) a destructive device. And the item which is not is 1) antique firearm - any firearm manufactured in or before 1898 or replica of such firearm not designed to take centerfire or rimfire ammunition.
So what are the ramifications of this. Well, lets use the Mosin-Nagant as an example. This rifle has been manufactured since 1891. So by the definitions above, those made from 1891 to 1898 are not firearms. Those made since 1899 are firearms. Even though they all fire the exact same ammunition and in most cases their parts are interchangeable. So the same gun is a firearm but also not a firearm. The implication of this ridiculous designation is that a Mosin-Nagant built before 1898 is not subject to the sale and possession restrictions of the regulations. So, prohibited persons (criminals, mentally ill, etc.) could buy a pre-1898 Mosin-Nagant and not break any law. Also, anyone could have a pre-1898 Mosin-Nagant shipped to their door - no background check, no waiting period, no nothing. But if it was made in 1899 all of the rules apply.
Next, a frame or a receiver is also a firearm. When transporting firearms on aircraft they have to be declared and in a locked case. And the case cannot be opened (even by the TSA) except in the presence of the owner. A frame or a receiver is a single part. It is the part that all of the other parts attach to. By itself, a frame or receiver is incapable of firing a projectile (no firing pin, no barrel, etc.). The BATFE has further ruled that a receiver/frame has to be more than 80% complete to be a receiver/frame (and therefore a firearm). An AK-47 80% receiver can look like a flat sheet of metal with some holes in it. So, I can put 100 of these in my checked baggage and not declare them. Furthermore, I can buy 100 of them and have them shipped to my house (so could a prohibited person) since they are not a firearm, just sheet metal with holes in it. But, if I make just one bend in the flat piece of sheet metal, it is now a firearm and when I go to the airport, I have to have it in a locked case and declare it. If the TSA opens up my bag with flat sheet metal, they are within their rights to do that. If however, they open up my bag with declared bent metal without me present, they have broken the law. Likewise, the same receiver can come pre-bent, just without the holes. Once I drill the first hole it is a firearm.
Next, a sound suppressor or muffler (popularly called a silencer) is also a firearm. So, if I am transporting the silencer on an airplane, I also have to declare it as a firearm (even though I may not have a firearm that it connects to) and have it in a separate locked case (that the TSA can't open outside of my presence).
I have been using the example of transporting firearms on airplanes. Except that falls under the TSA jurisdiction and they are under 49 CFR Subtitle B Chapter XII. Unfortunately, they don't define the term "firearm" so, that 1891 Mosin-Nagant (which according to the BATFE is not a firearm) may have to be declared as a firearm at the airport; and that sound suppressor (which according to the BATFE is a firearm) may not have to be declared. It's a little hazy as to what is what in the world of federal regulations, especially when you have to jump from one agency to another.
Let's look at another area. Importation and manufacture. Here are three rifles. One of them is illegal.
If you guessed the middle one, then you would be wrong. That one is perfectly legal. The top one is the original configuration (minus the magazine) with all Russian parts. And, I lied. The bottom is also the exact same as the top one. However, if I put the American made 30-round magazine shown in the middle on to the other configuration, it would be illegal. If I switched out the 30-round magazine in the middle with the factory provided 10 round magazine, the middle one would be illegal. Regulations require imported rifles to remain in their imported condition, or have a minimum number of US parts installed. Any less than the minimum parts and you have an illegal configuration (which I believe is a felony).
What is most hilarious about this, is there are several internal components which count and you wouldn't be able to tell without disassembling the rifle - except that many of these parts usually don't have a "made in the USA" stamp. So, the only way to show compliance would be to save your receipt - unlike the tax code, there is no time limit so you would need to save these receipts forever. But if you happen to be a closet machinist and manufactured your own parts (which is perfectly legal), you really have no proof that they are USA made parts (unless you video documented the manufacturing process). Talk about a regulatory burden.
One of the types of Federal Firearms License is a Curio & Relic License, or a collectors license. It allows holders to purchase firearms for their private collection that meet certain criteria (mainly being more than 50 years old). They still shoot modern ammunition and some people even use them as their daily carry guns. The process involves a background check by the FBI. Purchases can be made from other FFLs by mail shipped directly to your home. Firearms not on the C&R list, though, cannot be shipped to your home, they must go through a retail FFL. So, let's say I want to buy two guns from Southern Ohio Gun Company. Both in 9mm Makarov. One is a C&R, the other isn't. For the C&R gun, I give them my FFL license number and they ship the gun directly to me. For the other, I have to find an FFL near my home (in my state) to do the transfer. SOG sends the firearm to the FFL, and then I go to the FFL. Do I show them my FFL? No, since this isn't a C&R gun, that won't work. They have to fill out the 4473 and call in to the NICS to do a background check (even though I just got the other gun in the mail the same day). Unless, I happen to have my concealed carry license, in which case they fill out the paperwork, but don't need to call it in (at least in my state, other states are different). Oh yeah, and I probably had to pay them extra for the gun. So in a nutshell, one gun is 51 years old and is shipped right to my door. Another is 49 years old and I have to pay more and involve another company including filling out paperwork. The guns are functionally identical. Makes perfect sense, if you work in the government.
Finally, let me look at another issue. You can have a firearm registered as a short-barrelled rifle if the barrel length is less than 16 inches. So, hypothetically, let's assume you have two of the same rifle, one with a barrel of 16 inches, and one with a barrel of 15.9 inches which is registered with the BATFE. The short barreled rifle is registered by the serial number which is on the receiver, not the barrel. Both operate the exact same (they are both semi-automatic). One day after shooting, you happen to be cleaning both of them and inadvertently assemble the shorter barrel on the non-registered receiver. You have committed a felony. Even though you still own the exact same weapons as before. But don't worry, you're only going to get caught if you tell someone, so quickly you disassemble them and reassemble them correctly.
People like to think that regulations help us and keep us safe. They couldn't be further from the truth. In many cases the regulations are impotent or unenforceable. In others, they are contradictory across departments. Most of them have little semblance of protection. I have only talked about four examples out of thousands. These four do nothing to keep us safer. Would we be better off without these regulations? Absolutely! But no politician wants to go on record as repealing our gun laws. Even if they are stupid and do nothing to help us. The saddest part about all this, like calling the IRS for tax advice, my analysis above could be wrong. I may have said something was legal when it really wasn't, and vice versa.
So the next time someone says guns aren't regulated, laugh in their face. And don't be ashamed if you spray some spit while doing it.
Monday, February 18, 2013
Why Would Anyone Need More Than 7 Rounds?
New York's new law is that no more than 7 rounds in a magazine. Is this even a realistic amount for the situations that we know happen? If Law Enforcement had to live with these rules would anything change. Let me start out by saying that crimes committed with firearms are rare. That is not to say they don't happen, but compared to other types of crime, they are rare in the US. By this I mean the chances of you as an individual being involved in one are rather small.
In 2008 RAND published a study of NYPD firearms training. Based on Table 2.3, less than 0.4% of police officers will discharge their firearm (other than at a shooting range) in any given year. Less than half of these incidents are defending against a suspect. So, most of the shootings by NY police are accidental or against dogs (why don't they show this on TV and movies).
The bullet points above and below that table are very informative. Average hit rate was 18% for gunfights and 30% when the subject did not return fire. Close range hit rates were 37% (less than 7 yards) while longer range fell to 23%. Remember these are the people that have firearms training as part of their job. They specifically qualify on the use of a firearm. 30% isn't that bad when you get right down to it. The subject is moving, while the officer is also probably moving for cover or doesn't have time to line up an optimal shot. My guess is that the majority of static range training is a waste of time for them.
The really interesting statistic is the shots fired per incident. 7.6 per officer per incident involving return fire and only 3.5 for no return fire. So, in 10-15 incidents a year, out of 37,000 officers, they will need more than 7 rounds.
But if the argument is that it is rare a civilian will ever be in a situation like that, I whole heartedly agree. There is only a 0.2% chance each year that an individual will be on the receiving end of a gun crime (I'm using this as a proxy for when a gun may be "needed" because it is a lowball figure, there are plenty of other instances when deadly force is threatened - by other weapons or number of assailants - where a gun may be "needed"). Some may argue that not all of these incidents require deadly force, in fact the vast majority will be robberies or assaults that leave only minor injuries or none at all. Yes, that is true. And in the cops case, the vast majority of shooting incidents involved no return fire at all, so that logic could be applied there in saying the cops use of force was also unjustified. Only the problem is, until the incident is over, you have no idea what the intention of the criminal is. Even if they tell you they aren't going to hurt you, the fact that they have violated the law in their crime means they can't be trusted.
But wait, remember that statistic above, only 0.4% of officers discharge their weapon each year and half of those are against dogs or accidental discharges? So, only 0.2% "needed" to discharge their weapon against another person. Funny how those numbers line up. Yet we still arm 100% of police officers with a handgun, while only about 30-40% of the population as a whole has access to a handgun and only 2-3% carry one daily. Because once again, we don't know the intent of the criminal mind until after the fact. And if the intent was murder, it is too late once we know (after we're dead) to use deadly force. Therefore, every deadly threat (i.e. words or actions with the tools to back it up) should be met with deadly force. Regardless if you wear a badge or not. Otherwise, you are trusting the benificence of criminals.
If the chance of "needing" a firearm for police and civilians is the same, then shouldn't we also have access to the same firearms and magazines? Once again New York, you fail.
In 2008 RAND published a study of NYPD firearms training. Based on Table 2.3, less than 0.4% of police officers will discharge their firearm (other than at a shooting range) in any given year. Less than half of these incidents are defending against a suspect. So, most of the shootings by NY police are accidental or against dogs (why don't they show this on TV and movies).
The bullet points above and below that table are very informative. Average hit rate was 18% for gunfights and 30% when the subject did not return fire. Close range hit rates were 37% (less than 7 yards) while longer range fell to 23%. Remember these are the people that have firearms training as part of their job. They specifically qualify on the use of a firearm. 30% isn't that bad when you get right down to it. The subject is moving, while the officer is also probably moving for cover or doesn't have time to line up an optimal shot. My guess is that the majority of static range training is a waste of time for them.
The really interesting statistic is the shots fired per incident. 7.6 per officer per incident involving return fire and only 3.5 for no return fire. So, in 10-15 incidents a year, out of 37,000 officers, they will need more than 7 rounds.
But if the argument is that it is rare a civilian will ever be in a situation like that, I whole heartedly agree. There is only a 0.2% chance each year that an individual will be on the receiving end of a gun crime (I'm using this as a proxy for when a gun may be "needed" because it is a lowball figure, there are plenty of other instances when deadly force is threatened - by other weapons or number of assailants - where a gun may be "needed"). Some may argue that not all of these incidents require deadly force, in fact the vast majority will be robberies or assaults that leave only minor injuries or none at all. Yes, that is true. And in the cops case, the vast majority of shooting incidents involved no return fire at all, so that logic could be applied there in saying the cops use of force was also unjustified. Only the problem is, until the incident is over, you have no idea what the intention of the criminal is. Even if they tell you they aren't going to hurt you, the fact that they have violated the law in their crime means they can't be trusted.
But wait, remember that statistic above, only 0.4% of officers discharge their weapon each year and half of those are against dogs or accidental discharges? So, only 0.2% "needed" to discharge their weapon against another person. Funny how those numbers line up. Yet we still arm 100% of police officers with a handgun, while only about 30-40% of the population as a whole has access to a handgun and only 2-3% carry one daily. Because once again, we don't know the intent of the criminal mind until after the fact. And if the intent was murder, it is too late once we know (after we're dead) to use deadly force. Therefore, every deadly threat (i.e. words or actions with the tools to back it up) should be met with deadly force. Regardless if you wear a badge or not. Otherwise, you are trusting the benificence of criminals.
If the chance of "needing" a firearm for police and civilians is the same, then shouldn't we also have access to the same firearms and magazines? Once again New York, you fail.
Friday, February 15, 2013
Only Trust the Cops with Guns
We can trust them completely. Afterall, they have gone through intense psychological examination to make sure that they are the most stable people. They have had hours of training on firearm usage. They are expert marksman who shoot thousands of rounds to qualify. Blah, blah, blah.
In the last week, Cleveland police killed an unarmed couple in their car (after a car chase, but reading the reports it sounds like the car chase started after the police started shooting - if the police start shooting at you, are you going to hang around, but we'll never know because their dead); the LAPD shot completely innocent people in their hunt for Dorner (not once but at least in two incidents); Dorner was a former police officer himself. And those were just the ones that made national headlines.
There are about 700,000 police officers in the US. There are more than 8 million people with permits to carry firearms. Yet in the last week there has not been a single national news story about a concealed carry person killing or wounding an innocent bystander. None. Is this a statistical anomaly? Not at all, scan over the last year or two and you will find dozens of stories of police killing or injuring innocent bystanders and the only national news story that comes close for a concealed carry holder is Zimmerman, and that is still going to trial to determine if it was self defense. (And don't forget that in New York last year during one incident the police killed or injured more innocent people than the perpetrator they were trying to apprehend did).
So, even though there are 11 times as many people packing heat than there are cops on the street, the civilians have "bad" shoots 20-30 times less often than the police? And many people think that law enforcement should be the only ones with guns on the street? You have got to be nuts!
So, lets make a deal. Gun control supporters want compromise, I'll offer a compromise. They have proposed universal background checks, an Assault Weapons ban, and magazine/clip limits. Three things I don't support in the least. In return, I want repeal of the Hughes Amendment (allows new machine guns to be sold to civilians - although still would be registered), removal of silencers, short barrelled rifles and shotguns from the Gun Control Act registry, and reciprocity of carry in all states and all places that armed police can go (i.e. removal of Gun Free Zones). That's three options for both sides. We can choose which ones of the others to get rid of one by one until we have a deal (my guess is the deal will be nothing).
In the last week, Cleveland police killed an unarmed couple in their car (after a car chase, but reading the reports it sounds like the car chase started after the police started shooting - if the police start shooting at you, are you going to hang around, but we'll never know because their dead); the LAPD shot completely innocent people in their hunt for Dorner (not once but at least in two incidents); Dorner was a former police officer himself. And those were just the ones that made national headlines.
There are about 700,000 police officers in the US. There are more than 8 million people with permits to carry firearms. Yet in the last week there has not been a single national news story about a concealed carry person killing or wounding an innocent bystander. None. Is this a statistical anomaly? Not at all, scan over the last year or two and you will find dozens of stories of police killing or injuring innocent bystanders and the only national news story that comes close for a concealed carry holder is Zimmerman, and that is still going to trial to determine if it was self defense. (And don't forget that in New York last year during one incident the police killed or injured more innocent people than the perpetrator they were trying to apprehend did).
So, even though there are 11 times as many people packing heat than there are cops on the street, the civilians have "bad" shoots 20-30 times less often than the police? And many people think that law enforcement should be the only ones with guns on the street? You have got to be nuts!
So, lets make a deal. Gun control supporters want compromise, I'll offer a compromise. They have proposed universal background checks, an Assault Weapons ban, and magazine/clip limits. Three things I don't support in the least. In return, I want repeal of the Hughes Amendment (allows new machine guns to be sold to civilians - although still would be registered), removal of silencers, short barrelled rifles and shotguns from the Gun Control Act registry, and reciprocity of carry in all states and all places that armed police can go (i.e. removal of Gun Free Zones). That's three options for both sides. We can choose which ones of the others to get rid of one by one until we have a deal (my guess is the deal will be nothing).
Monday, February 11, 2013
No One is Proposing a Gun Confiscation
That is what I have been reading in the news for the last two months. It is what people on Facebook keep telling me. Its on the TV and the Radio. So it must be true.
California must not be no one. Because someone is proposing a confiscation. Sure it may not be anyone just yet, but it certainly isn't no one.
California must not be no one. Because someone is proposing a confiscation. Sure it may not be anyone just yet, but it certainly isn't no one.
Thursday, January 31, 2013
ATF Botches Another Sting Operation
After reading this article, I am amazed that anyone has faith in the current ATF. This is the kind of bumbling that we laugh at in movies like "Police Academy" however, Hollywood in all of their imagination, has never come up with something so hilarious.
Or so serious. Because this is real life. That money being used to pay premium prices for guns that were bought from Gander Mountain, are your tax dollars. The guns (including a REAL assault rifle, the fully automatic kind) they lost are also real and on the street.
And somehow, a new and improved background check for me is going to stop firearm crime.
Doing something isn't helping. Maybe we should stop doing something...
Or so serious. Because this is real life. That money being used to pay premium prices for guns that were bought from Gander Mountain, are your tax dollars. The guns (including a REAL assault rifle, the fully automatic kind) they lost are also real and on the street.
And somehow, a new and improved background check for me is going to stop firearm crime.
Doing something isn't helping. Maybe we should stop doing something...
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
Stockpile, Cache, Armory, Arsenal
I read about these words a lot in the media. I am not sure the writers know what they mean. A couple of guns? A few guns? 500 rounds of ammunition? Sorry if I don't get excited when you say some criminal's arsenal consists of a handgun, a shotgun, AND a rifle. I know people who carry that when they go to a 3-gun match. How did 3 guns get to be an "arsenal."
Then there are the large "cache's" of ammunition. 100 rounds. 200 rounds. God forbid he has 1000 rounds! Um, its small little bits not much larger than a nut. Once again, I know of people who have this much ammunition on their person or in their vehicle on a daily basis. I've had people pay me for rides to work using a couple hundred rounds of ammunition. It really doesn't take up that much space.
Let me put it in perspective a bit. A box of 50 rounds of 9mm is approximately the size of a block of cream cheese. That's it. And that includes an inordinate amount of packaging. A 550 round box of .22 LR is about the size of a recipe card box (the 3x5 kind). 500 rounds of most rifle ammunition will fit into a box about the size of two Harry Potter books. One round of 7.62x39 is about half the size of a sharpie marker cap. A pack of five 12 gauge shotgun shells is the size of a small point and shoot camera. Do you have a visual image yet that ammunition just doesn't take up that much space?
I have at least 3 or 4 "stockpiles" around my house based on these definitions. Heck, whenever I load magazines to go to the range, I have a new "stockpile". I have, literally, thousands (as in X followed by at least three zeros) of rounds of ammunition. I have a couple of friends who have in the neighborhood of 100,000 rounds or more.
Are we paranoid? No more than you are for filling your gas tank when it gets near empty. I have a 20 mile round trip commute to work. I fill the entire tank up every time I stop for gas so that I only have to stop for gas once every three weeks (or about every 21 uses of my car) rather than every day by only putting in what I am going to use for the day. Likewise, I shoot around 500 rounds of ammunition for every time I go to the range. To be comparable, whenever I top off on ammo buying, I should have 10,500 rounds. So, no, it is no more paranoid than buying milk by the gallon instead of a half pint.
Most people who have "stockpiles" of ammo do so because they don't want to go to the store all the time. Most criminals probably only have as much ammo as they can carry, but I am not sure that anyone has ever done a study on how much ammunition criminals "stockpile." If news stories are an accurate representation, they stockpile a whole lot less than I do.
Then there are the large "cache's" of ammunition. 100 rounds. 200 rounds. God forbid he has 1000 rounds! Um, its small little bits not much larger than a nut. Once again, I know of people who have this much ammunition on their person or in their vehicle on a daily basis. I've had people pay me for rides to work using a couple hundred rounds of ammunition. It really doesn't take up that much space.
Let me put it in perspective a bit. A box of 50 rounds of 9mm is approximately the size of a block of cream cheese. That's it. And that includes an inordinate amount of packaging. A 550 round box of .22 LR is about the size of a recipe card box (the 3x5 kind). 500 rounds of most rifle ammunition will fit into a box about the size of two Harry Potter books. One round of 7.62x39 is about half the size of a sharpie marker cap. A pack of five 12 gauge shotgun shells is the size of a small point and shoot camera. Do you have a visual image yet that ammunition just doesn't take up that much space?
I have at least 3 or 4 "stockpiles" around my house based on these definitions. Heck, whenever I load magazines to go to the range, I have a new "stockpile". I have, literally, thousands (as in X followed by at least three zeros) of rounds of ammunition. I have a couple of friends who have in the neighborhood of 100,000 rounds or more.
Are we paranoid? No more than you are for filling your gas tank when it gets near empty. I have a 20 mile round trip commute to work. I fill the entire tank up every time I stop for gas so that I only have to stop for gas once every three weeks (or about every 21 uses of my car) rather than every day by only putting in what I am going to use for the day. Likewise, I shoot around 500 rounds of ammunition for every time I go to the range. To be comparable, whenever I top off on ammo buying, I should have 10,500 rounds. So, no, it is no more paranoid than buying milk by the gallon instead of a half pint.
Most people who have "stockpiles" of ammo do so because they don't want to go to the store all the time. Most criminals probably only have as much ammo as they can carry, but I am not sure that anyone has ever done a study on how much ammunition criminals "stockpile." If news stories are an accurate representation, they stockpile a whole lot less than I do.
Monday, January 28, 2013
Motivational Posters - Pregnant Wife Edition
Well, my wife hasn't been in the spotlight in a while, and while the pictures to create these are a few years old now, the inspiration from them is timeless. First, while I recognize that there are people on both sides of the IWB or OWB debate, this one might be a little more controversial.
In the late 90s and early 00s, cell phones were getting skinnier. Since we don't have one and everything had a cell phone pocket, I thought up a new use for them.
Be sure to come back for more, I'll need to get my wife set up for another photo shoot!
In the late 90s and early 00s, cell phones were getting skinnier. Since we don't have one and everything had a cell phone pocket, I thought up a new use for them.
Be sure to come back for more, I'll need to get my wife set up for another photo shoot!
Friday, January 25, 2013
Christmas Ammunition
Someone commented to me that they didn't think my Christmas present of ammunition was very ... Christmassy (you know, that peace, love, good will towards men thing). So, see if you can guess which is the correct response:
a) Don't worry, it was full metal jacket stuff and I only use that for target practice, hollow point is the preferred type for perforating bad people.
b) The Son of God only used a whip to clean the temple because a Glock would have been too messy and a 1911 only carries 7+1 rounds (besides the fact that they hadn't been invented yet).
c) It's OK, it was Winchester White Box, made in the USA. All of the materials (lead, copper, and brass) are fully recycleable or (in the case of gunpowder) completely organic/natural/not harmful to the environment.
d) The Barrett .50 BMG wouldn't fit in the stocking.
a) Don't worry, it was full metal jacket stuff and I only use that for target practice, hollow point is the preferred type for perforating bad people.
b) The Son of God only used a whip to clean the temple because a Glock would have been too messy and a 1911 only carries 7+1 rounds (besides the fact that they hadn't been invented yet).
c) It's OK, it was Winchester White Box, made in the USA. All of the materials (lead, copper, and brass) are fully recycleable or (in the case of gunpowder) completely organic/natural/not harmful to the environment.
d) The Barrett .50 BMG wouldn't fit in the stocking.
Friday, January 18, 2013
New York Forgets About Police Officers
In New York's ram-em-through gun law, they forgot to include exemptions for their law enforcement officers. Seems once the law becomes effective, they will all be law breakers with their service pistols, issued by the government. The best quote though is below:
State Senator Eric Adams, a former NYPD Captain, told us he's going to push for an amendment next week to exempt police officers from the high-capacity magazine ban. In his words, "You can't give more ammo to the criminals"
NY doesn't want its police officers (who may arrive on the scene 1-20 minutes after being called) to face criminals with less than 15 rounds in a magazine, but it doesn't care if victims (who are already on the scene because they are the scene) only have 7 rounds.
Criminals vs. Police Officers - BAD.
Criminals vs. Victims - GOOD.
I sure hope Texas' plea to gun owners from NY to move there is effective.
State Senator Eric Adams, a former NYPD Captain, told us he's going to push for an amendment next week to exempt police officers from the high-capacity magazine ban. In his words, "You can't give more ammo to the criminals"
NY doesn't want its police officers (who may arrive on the scene 1-20 minutes after being called) to face criminals with less than 15 rounds in a magazine, but it doesn't care if victims (who are already on the scene because they are the scene) only have 7 rounds.
Criminals vs. Police Officers - BAD.
Criminals vs. Victims - GOOD.
I sure hope Texas' plea to gun owners from NY to move there is effective.
Thursday, January 17, 2013
A Housewife with Some Sense on Guns
This is my cousin-in-law (is that really a thing?):
http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fprepared-housewives.com%2F2013%2F01%2F17%2Fend-the-violence%2F&h=MAQF45VM7
Great sense of humor!
http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fprepared-housewives.com%2F2013%2F01%2F17%2Fend-the-violence%2F&h=MAQF45VM7
Great sense of humor!
Good Luck New York! Hope Those Gun Laws Work Out for You...
While reading this, please keep in mind that the number of guns in the US has increased each and every year since at least 1965. Furthermore, it is estimated that the number of guns in the US is increasing at a faster rate than population such that now we (probably) have more guns than people. Read on...
New York became the first state to pass gun control legislation since the Newtown murders. Obama has made it known that he is signing executive orders to ... follow the laws that were already passed. Meanwhile he is also trying to get Congress to pass some of the same stuff that New York did. In a nutshell, New York is requiring the registration of existing assault weapons and banning their sale and transfer, and limiting magazine capacity to 7 rounds. Plus all of the grandfathered 10+ round magazines are no longer grandfathered, but must be disposed of within a year. All of this to decrease gun crime and make everyone safer. Of course, the law makers don't realize that they already had an AWB ban (the new one makes it a one cosmetic feature test rather than a two cosmetic feature test - and I am not being sarcastic about that, they are cosmetic features which do not affect the firepower of the rifle at all) and a magazine limit left over from the Federal AWB and magazine limits which expired in 2004.
First point to understand. Rifles are used in very few murders throughout the country and especially so in New York. Based on FBI statistics, all rifles (of which assault weapons are a subset) are used in about 1% of murders. There is enough variability from year to year that I can guarantee no affect to crime will be measured - because none can be, which is what was found with the last assault weapons ban.
Second point to understand. Magazines are used in handguns and handguns are used in the majority of murders. However, the vast majority of murders only have one victim, and the vast majority of the time, that victim is not shot more than 7 times. (Shots tend to attract attention and most criminals don't like to draw attention to themselves in the process of committing a crime.) I make these statements without citing evidence, because I haven't come across a source for this evidence. Which makes my statements just as supported as anyone who arbitrarily chooses a number that is going to make us safer and reduce crime. So, even if criminals decided to obey the magazine law, the law is not going to hinder them from carrying out their plans.
But, I like to see some sort of evidence to support my position, so I went and gathered data from the FBI Uniform Crime Reports. Since gun control laws are suppose to decrease gun crime, they should have a noticeable affect on the murder rate because approximately 70% of murders are committed with guns. The FBI has statistics going back to 1965 for NY.
Some things to learn from this graphic. First, in spite of the murder rate being 1/100 of overall violent crime rate, it is a very good proxy for what the violent crime rate is doing. The increases and decreases line up almost perfectly. In most cases the relative magnitude between periods is fairly uniform as well. Except that crimes committed with guns are a minority of violent crimes, only around 20% of violent crimes are committed with guns. If the availability of guns is a contributor to crime, then murder and violent crime should not be so closely correlated. Some other factor or factors have to be the impetus behind violent crime (and therefore gun crime).
Second, on the graph I have listed the major gun control legislation with bars indicating when it was in effect. If gun control were effective at reducing gun crimes, then we should see a drop in murders that is relationally 3 times the drop in violent crime when new gun control is implemented. We don't. In some cases we see the exact opposite. After the 1968 Gun Control Act, murders went up, but violent crime went up even more. One could argue that gun control in this case resulted in more crime and more murders, not a good thing in either case. In 1986, FOPA passed and violent crime and murders both went up again, with violent crime again outpacing the increases of murder. More evidence that gun control had no positive effect on our crime rates. In 1994 AWB were passed and crime went down. But violent crime (remember only 25% of it involves guns), went down proportionately more than murder rates did. Of course there were other provisions to this bill so perhaps they were the major contributors. Except that crime rates and murder had already been decreasing for 2-4 years prior to the passage of the bill, so maybe there wasn't anything to this bill (which is what the government found when they studied the issue). Finally, in 2004 we had an excellent opportunity for a test case. The Federal AWB ended, but NY kept theirs (including the magazine restriction to 10 rounds). If gun control really was effective, then we should see a dramatic difference between NY and the US as a whole. We didn't, more on that later.
Third, murder rates have remained relatively stable since 1998. Yes, there has continued to be a downward trend, but nothing like the upward or downward swings that the previous 30 years had had. Violent crime didn't reach a leveling off until 2004, but is also has seen relatively minor changes compared to the 30 previous years.
Fourth, while not on the chart, it is interesting to note that violent video games never even got off the ground until the early to mid 90s - the video graphics technology wasn't there before. By the time that the market was going strong in the late 90s, murder rates were already below anything seen since 1970. Perhaps this explains why we haven't seen a further drop, on the other hand, we haven't seen an increase either so if video games are to blame, then they certainly aren't doing too much.
Next, I expanded out to look at all of the types of violent crime. Some quick figures about gun usage based on Department of Justice Statistics. Guns are used to commit these crimes the following percentage of the time: murder 70%, rape 10%, robbery 40%, aggravated assault 20% (I just label it assault in the chart for simplicity). So, what I would expect from effective gun crime prevention legislation is that there should be little to no change in rape, barely noticeable in assaults, a noticeable change in robbery, and a significant change in murder.
This does not match that at all. Lets go through each one. I already pointed out how murder doesn't fit the mold for any of the gun control regulations passed. Next is rape, the type of violent crime that least uses guns in its commission. The US rape rate mirrors the violent crime rate. NY tracked the US rate up until the late 1970s and then leveled off (while the US rate continued it's rise). In the mid 80's, the NY rate started a decline which accelerated with the overall decline of violent crime in the early 90s. No evidence that gun legislation affected this in the least, which is expected. Rape rates move independent of gun control.
Up until the early 2000's, NY has had a robbery rate that far exceeded the US rate. In some years, NY's robbery rate exceeded the total violent crime rate for the nation. After gun control legislation passes, the robbery rate changes in the same manner as the murder rate or the violent crime rate, which is to say, it doesn't provide any supporting evidence that gun control works.
While having more assaults per 100,000 than the US as a whole for 30 years, NY finally crossed under the US curve in 1995. Of course, the results of gun control legislation match what occurred for the violent crime rate. Since 2008, assaults have climbed to match what the US rate is. Overall, the data doesn't match the hypothesis, so the hypothesis cannot be correct.
Earlier I mentioned that NY gave us a test bed by keeping their assault weapons ban and magazine restrictions. So, I looked a little closer at the last ten years in NY. Surely, if the AWB and magazine restrictions (which NY just made more stringent) had an effect it would show up here.
Not to beat a dead horse, but it hasn't. The only area that NY and the US are different in is assaults, and as I mentioned before, NY is on the rise. But, once rates get low enough, there are only going to be minor changes, so let me see if I can amplify those minor changes. I started by taking each rate from NY as a percentage from of the US (>100% means NY rate is higher than US, etc.). Next, I found the year to year change: negative numbers mean one of two things (both of which are in NY's favor) 1) the rate in NY is decreasing faster than the US rate (or crime is decreasing faster in NY than in the US) or 2) the rate in NY is increasing less than the US rate (or crime is increasing faster in the US than in NY). Likewise, positive numbers mean the opposite (bad for NY compared to the US).
I added a polynomial trendline in black and marked the end of the US AWB in red - remember, NY still has it. It appears that NY was seeing decreased crime (or less increases) compared to the US from 1974 to 2006. Neither one of those years correspond to a gun control legislation in their favor. If gun control legislation were effective, we should have seen greater negative numbers after the red line. Unfortunately for NY, since 2006 crime rates have been stagnant, while for the US it continues to decline. If this means that there is some threshold below which we cannot reduce crime rates for our society and NY has reached it, then any gun control legislation under the guise of reducing crime at this point in NY is a farce. As it is, there is ample evidence that gun control legislation to reduce crime is a farce under any circumstances.
But don't we need to do something? Why? If whatever we are proposing to do has already been shown to be ineffective, why burden the government with more laws to enforce or burden the people with more laws to break. But, what if one life were saved? One life hasn't been saved. There is no evidence that gun control has helped the crime situation. If you think that one life will be saved, show me the evidence.
On the other hand, what if I told you that there isn't a damn thing we can do about crime? What if I said that the primary cause of crime is so completely out of our control (because the solutions are horrifying to any sane person), that there is no point in trying. Playing around, I created the following graph that shows a pretty darn good correlation between something and violent crime.
In both NY and the US, the percentage of Males between the ages of 20 and 39 is one of the best predictors of the violent crime rate. I would have extended the graph all the way back to 1965, except I only could find reliable population demographic data back to 1981. The crime rates are from the FBI, the population data is from the CDC's WISQARS database.
We have long known that Males disproportionately are responsible for crime. We also know that the 20-39 age range is the most common age for violent crime offenders. For nearly 20 years in the US (and 17 years in NY), the violent crime rate (which is a proxy for murder rate and gun crime rate) is directly predictable by the ratio of males between the ages of 20-39. What is the solution? Lock up all men? Kill them all at 20? Drug them all into submission? I am talking about a stage in life that half of the population goes through for approximately 1/4 of their life. When the number of men in this age range is a higher percentage of the population, we have more violent crime. When it decreases, crime goes down.
Do I believe this is the major cause? I don't know, I stumbled across this while I was playing with other numbers and will have to do some more research. This is by far one of the closest approximations of estimating crime that I have found. It is far more predictive than the number of guns or the strength of the gun control laws. But people don't want to be told they can't do anything.
We want to control things. In the end, we can't. Life will go on.
New York became the first state to pass gun control legislation since the Newtown murders. Obama has made it known that he is signing executive orders to ... follow the laws that were already passed. Meanwhile he is also trying to get Congress to pass some of the same stuff that New York did. In a nutshell, New York is requiring the registration of existing assault weapons and banning their sale and transfer, and limiting magazine capacity to 7 rounds. Plus all of the grandfathered 10+ round magazines are no longer grandfathered, but must be disposed of within a year. All of this to decrease gun crime and make everyone safer. Of course, the law makers don't realize that they already had an AWB ban (the new one makes it a one cosmetic feature test rather than a two cosmetic feature test - and I am not being sarcastic about that, they are cosmetic features which do not affect the firepower of the rifle at all) and a magazine limit left over from the Federal AWB and magazine limits which expired in 2004.
First point to understand. Rifles are used in very few murders throughout the country and especially so in New York. Based on FBI statistics, all rifles (of which assault weapons are a subset) are used in about 1% of murders. There is enough variability from year to year that I can guarantee no affect to crime will be measured - because none can be, which is what was found with the last assault weapons ban.
Second point to understand. Magazines are used in handguns and handguns are used in the majority of murders. However, the vast majority of murders only have one victim, and the vast majority of the time, that victim is not shot more than 7 times. (Shots tend to attract attention and most criminals don't like to draw attention to themselves in the process of committing a crime.) I make these statements without citing evidence, because I haven't come across a source for this evidence. Which makes my statements just as supported as anyone who arbitrarily chooses a number that is going to make us safer and reduce crime. So, even if criminals decided to obey the magazine law, the law is not going to hinder them from carrying out their plans.
But, I like to see some sort of evidence to support my position, so I went and gathered data from the FBI Uniform Crime Reports. Since gun control laws are suppose to decrease gun crime, they should have a noticeable affect on the murder rate because approximately 70% of murders are committed with guns. The FBI has statistics going back to 1965 for NY.
Some things to learn from this graphic. First, in spite of the murder rate being 1/100 of overall violent crime rate, it is a very good proxy for what the violent crime rate is doing. The increases and decreases line up almost perfectly. In most cases the relative magnitude between periods is fairly uniform as well. Except that crimes committed with guns are a minority of violent crimes, only around 20% of violent crimes are committed with guns. If the availability of guns is a contributor to crime, then murder and violent crime should not be so closely correlated. Some other factor or factors have to be the impetus behind violent crime (and therefore gun crime).
Second, on the graph I have listed the major gun control legislation with bars indicating when it was in effect. If gun control were effective at reducing gun crimes, then we should see a drop in murders that is relationally 3 times the drop in violent crime when new gun control is implemented. We don't. In some cases we see the exact opposite. After the 1968 Gun Control Act, murders went up, but violent crime went up even more. One could argue that gun control in this case resulted in more crime and more murders, not a good thing in either case. In 1986, FOPA passed and violent crime and murders both went up again, with violent crime again outpacing the increases of murder. More evidence that gun control had no positive effect on our crime rates. In 1994 AWB were passed and crime went down. But violent crime (remember only 25% of it involves guns), went down proportionately more than murder rates did. Of course there were other provisions to this bill so perhaps they were the major contributors. Except that crime rates and murder had already been decreasing for 2-4 years prior to the passage of the bill, so maybe there wasn't anything to this bill (which is what the government found when they studied the issue). Finally, in 2004 we had an excellent opportunity for a test case. The Federal AWB ended, but NY kept theirs (including the magazine restriction to 10 rounds). If gun control really was effective, then we should see a dramatic difference between NY and the US as a whole. We didn't, more on that later.
Third, murder rates have remained relatively stable since 1998. Yes, there has continued to be a downward trend, but nothing like the upward or downward swings that the previous 30 years had had. Violent crime didn't reach a leveling off until 2004, but is also has seen relatively minor changes compared to the 30 previous years.
Fourth, while not on the chart, it is interesting to note that violent video games never even got off the ground until the early to mid 90s - the video graphics technology wasn't there before. By the time that the market was going strong in the late 90s, murder rates were already below anything seen since 1970. Perhaps this explains why we haven't seen a further drop, on the other hand, we haven't seen an increase either so if video games are to blame, then they certainly aren't doing too much.
Next, I expanded out to look at all of the types of violent crime. Some quick figures about gun usage based on Department of Justice Statistics. Guns are used to commit these crimes the following percentage of the time: murder 70%, rape 10%, robbery 40%, aggravated assault 20% (I just label it assault in the chart for simplicity). So, what I would expect from effective gun crime prevention legislation is that there should be little to no change in rape, barely noticeable in assaults, a noticeable change in robbery, and a significant change in murder.
This does not match that at all. Lets go through each one. I already pointed out how murder doesn't fit the mold for any of the gun control regulations passed. Next is rape, the type of violent crime that least uses guns in its commission. The US rape rate mirrors the violent crime rate. NY tracked the US rate up until the late 1970s and then leveled off (while the US rate continued it's rise). In the mid 80's, the NY rate started a decline which accelerated with the overall decline of violent crime in the early 90s. No evidence that gun legislation affected this in the least, which is expected. Rape rates move independent of gun control.
Up until the early 2000's, NY has had a robbery rate that far exceeded the US rate. In some years, NY's robbery rate exceeded the total violent crime rate for the nation. After gun control legislation passes, the robbery rate changes in the same manner as the murder rate or the violent crime rate, which is to say, it doesn't provide any supporting evidence that gun control works.
While having more assaults per 100,000 than the US as a whole for 30 years, NY finally crossed under the US curve in 1995. Of course, the results of gun control legislation match what occurred for the violent crime rate. Since 2008, assaults have climbed to match what the US rate is. Overall, the data doesn't match the hypothesis, so the hypothesis cannot be correct.
Earlier I mentioned that NY gave us a test bed by keeping their assault weapons ban and magazine restrictions. So, I looked a little closer at the last ten years in NY. Surely, if the AWB and magazine restrictions (which NY just made more stringent) had an effect it would show up here.
Not to beat a dead horse, but it hasn't. The only area that NY and the US are different in is assaults, and as I mentioned before, NY is on the rise. But, once rates get low enough, there are only going to be minor changes, so let me see if I can amplify those minor changes. I started by taking each rate from NY as a percentage from of the US (>100% means NY rate is higher than US, etc.). Next, I found the year to year change: negative numbers mean one of two things (both of which are in NY's favor) 1) the rate in NY is decreasing faster than the US rate (or crime is decreasing faster in NY than in the US) or 2) the rate in NY is increasing less than the US rate (or crime is increasing faster in the US than in NY). Likewise, positive numbers mean the opposite (bad for NY compared to the US).
I added a polynomial trendline in black and marked the end of the US AWB in red - remember, NY still has it. It appears that NY was seeing decreased crime (or less increases) compared to the US from 1974 to 2006. Neither one of those years correspond to a gun control legislation in their favor. If gun control legislation were effective, we should have seen greater negative numbers after the red line. Unfortunately for NY, since 2006 crime rates have been stagnant, while for the US it continues to decline. If this means that there is some threshold below which we cannot reduce crime rates for our society and NY has reached it, then any gun control legislation under the guise of reducing crime at this point in NY is a farce. As it is, there is ample evidence that gun control legislation to reduce crime is a farce under any circumstances.
But don't we need to do something? Why? If whatever we are proposing to do has already been shown to be ineffective, why burden the government with more laws to enforce or burden the people with more laws to break. But, what if one life were saved? One life hasn't been saved. There is no evidence that gun control has helped the crime situation. If you think that one life will be saved, show me the evidence.
On the other hand, what if I told you that there isn't a damn thing we can do about crime? What if I said that the primary cause of crime is so completely out of our control (because the solutions are horrifying to any sane person), that there is no point in trying. Playing around, I created the following graph that shows a pretty darn good correlation between something and violent crime.
In both NY and the US, the percentage of Males between the ages of 20 and 39 is one of the best predictors of the violent crime rate. I would have extended the graph all the way back to 1965, except I only could find reliable population demographic data back to 1981. The crime rates are from the FBI, the population data is from the CDC's WISQARS database.
We have long known that Males disproportionately are responsible for crime. We also know that the 20-39 age range is the most common age for violent crime offenders. For nearly 20 years in the US (and 17 years in NY), the violent crime rate (which is a proxy for murder rate and gun crime rate) is directly predictable by the ratio of males between the ages of 20-39. What is the solution? Lock up all men? Kill them all at 20? Drug them all into submission? I am talking about a stage in life that half of the population goes through for approximately 1/4 of their life. When the number of men in this age range is a higher percentage of the population, we have more violent crime. When it decreases, crime goes down.
Do I believe this is the major cause? I don't know, I stumbled across this while I was playing with other numbers and will have to do some more research. This is by far one of the closest approximations of estimating crime that I have found. It is far more predictive than the number of guns or the strength of the gun control laws. But people don't want to be told they can't do anything.
We want to control things. In the end, we can't. Life will go on.
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