No, you are still way off the mark. No weapon can be sold that can be modified with a couple easy steps. While an AR-15 looks like the military M-4, the internal receiver is very different. Also, as your own source states, even if you could, full auto is highly inaccurate and inefficient. You could spray into a crowd and actually not have as much damage as shooting single shots. The rapid recoil is going to throw off the accuracy, and the clip will empty too quick to hit anything. I've shot all my life. Lack of shooting as much as I used to, and staring at computer screens has taken some toll on my skills. But when I was a dead shot I had the opportunity to play with a M-4 with three round burst. From a prone position (laying on the ground using a bipod) I couldn't hit shit with this thing. After my first shot, everything immediately went higher. With full auto, by the fourth round I would have been trimming branches on the tops of the trees.

The best way to explain this is how in almost every case of a public shooting, the shooter ends up with a very low body count compared to the weapons and ammunition they have with them. This is because they just start shooting very quickly and pointing randomly in a panic. Speeding up their shots would actually probably decrease the casualties even more.

Why only hunters? Can I no longer shoot at a range for fun?



This is not legal. Has not been for a very long time. You say it like it is legal to prove your point. Activity like this should be stopped for sure but banning guns does not address this. Current laws do.


Sure is. I buy in bulk as it is much cheaper.



When I was in college I'd shoot a 1000 rounds a weekend from my shotguns and a 100 or more from my handguns and long arms.


Unfortunately this exposes your ignorance to the topic. An ar shoots the 223 Remington round. It is 22 caliber which is the smallest available save the 17 which is very uncommon. There a more powerful rounds in 22. Most states outlawed 22 for deer as it is not powerful enough for a humane kill. Our military uses 22 as it is more likely to injure than kill. Military view is 10 wounded soldiers tie up more resources than 10 dead soldiers. Their choice of weapons is consistent with this philosophy. I personally only hunted with either a 7mm mag or 300 mag. Both far superior to the 223 .


Is there a real difference with semi-automatic and automatic when the modification to make the semi-automatic fire automatically so easily accomplished?

Not so. You say this only to attempt to validate your point. The problem I have is many on tv spew the same garbage to help move their agenda. Their is no accuracy in the news when it comes to guns. There never has been. Many of the past assault bans targeted law abiding citizens. I personally was targeted at a sanctioned sporting event on the first day of the ban 30 years for carrying a semiautomatic 20 gauge shotgun.



Do we ban sex to prevent incest?

Do we ban cars to prevent drunk driving or texting?

Do we ban people from speaking to prevent assault?

Do we abolish money or business transaction to prevent fraud?

None of those make sense as it could never work. The same can easily be said for banning guns. I'm all for things that make sense.

Current laws make sense. No guns for felons, mental people, violent people. We should spend a little more keeping databases up to date. In this day and age keeping good records should be easy.


You cannot legislate away dumbness. It is sad to see kids get killed directly or indirectly by dumb parents but I'm not sure it could ever be stopped. Same goes for almost everything else. Kids get killed climbing in washers, dryers, driving under age. All tragedies. All a result of utter stupidity.

How many times do you wish me to concede that I do not know a great deal about guns save in historical or strategic terms ( bored rifle and artillery made obsolete infantry tactics practiced during the Civil War, making offensive operations 6-10 times more difficult. Machine gun and trench did the same in WWI).

The fact is that most illegal weapons in NY come from Virginia or North Carolina; often purchased at gun shows. Already illegal? I guess this is yet one more instance where law and order types practice and tolerate illegality as long as it is financially ruminative. You are also being petty in pointing out that I wrote hunting but failed to include target shooting. My posts typically go too long and you want them to be framed as legal documents that envision all possible recreational uses of guns? Let in be stated that my conception of limiting guns would not restrict your right to hunt or target shoot. Would you concede that as a civilian you would not need to hunt or target shoot a AK-47 or M-16?

But we move off topic, which is typically what happens in these discussions. One of my FB fiends posted of 2 more children killed by guns last week. You wish to ignore the carnage guns cause because it's the individual not the weapon that does harm. It's a Sophist's argument. I do not ignore the damage that drunk drivers do and I do think holding bar tenders liable for serving a drunks one of those infringements on individual rights that makes sense for the greater good. I do not have an answer for someone walking into a political event and shooting Gabby Gifford. I don't have the solution to solve the Virginia Techs, Columbine. These shootings are not occurring in the Liberal bastions of NYC or Cambridge, MA. They are happening in solidly Conservative, NRA loving Red States.Yet you are making the argument that statistics be damned.

My Sister-in-law was the victim of the first suicide bomb to be directed at purely civilian areas in Israel. There is not a single public space--no restaurant, mall or store--you can enter without having your bag and person searched. I'd expect Keven to bitch at this infringement on his liberty but it strikes me as eminently reasonable and strikes the right balance between the safety of the many vs the rights of the individual. I am not suggesting I'm competent to write legislation that might protect the many while preserving your right to recreational use of weaponry. Perhaps, Kevin, you'd make the suggestion rather than make arguments that are contradicted by empirical reality.

There are laws against fraud even though most business transactions are not fraudulent.
There are laws against drunk driving even though the overwhelming majority of drivers are not drunk.
There are indeed laws prohibiting incest even though the majority of sexual acts are not incestuous.
We do indeed have laws against the incitement to riot.
We do have laws against excessive noise.
We do have laws that prevent you from opening a retail store in a residential neighborhood even though few wish to do this
We have laws limiting the number of people not of the same family occupying a single family residence even though most who live in such homes are indeed related.

The overwhelming majority of people do follow laws and it is from a minority that we legislate.

Reagan...

September 1999 - a gunman opened fire at a prayer service in Fort Worth, Texas, killing six people before committing suicide.

October 2002 - a series of sniper-style shootings occurred in Washington DC, leaving 10 dead.

August 2003 - in Chicago, a laid-off worker shot and killed six of his former workmates.

November 2004 - in Birchwood, Wisconsin, a hunter killed six other hunters and wounded two others after an argument with them.

March 2005 - a man opened fire at a church service in Brookfield, Wisconsin, killing seven people.

October 2006 - a truck driver killed five schoolgirls and seriously wounded six others in a school in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania before taking his own life.

April 2007 - student Seung-Hui Cho shot and killed 32 people and wounded 15 others at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, before shooting himself, making it the deadliest mass shooting in the United States after 2000.

August 2007 - Three Delaware State University students were shot and killed in “execution style” by a 28-year-old and two 15-year-old boys. A fourth student was shot and stabbed.

September 2007 - A freshman student at Delaware State University shot and wounded two other students at a campus dining hall.

December 2007 - a 20-year-old man killed nine people and injured five others in a shopping center in Omaha, Nebraska.

December 2007 - a woman and her boyfriend shot dead six members of her family on Christmas Eve in Carnation, Washington.

February 2008 - a shooter who is still at large tied up and shot six women at a suburban clothing store in Chicago, leaving five of them dead and the remaining one injured.

February 2008 - a man opened fire in a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois, killing five students and wounding 16 others before laying down his weapon and surrendering.

July 2008 – A former student shot three people in a computer lab at South Mountain Community College, Phoenix, Arizona.

September 2008 - a mentally ill man who was released from jail one month earlier shot eight people in Alger, Washington, leaving six of them dead and the rest two wounded.

October 2008 - Several men in a car drove up to a dormitory at the University of Central Arkansas and opened fire, killing two students and injuring a third person.

December 2008 - a man dressed in a Santa Claus suit opened fire at a family Christmas party in Covina, California, then set fire on the house and killed himself. Police later found nine people dead in the debris of the house.

March 2009 - a 28-year-old laid-off worker opened fire while driving a car through several towns in Alabama, killing 10 people.

March 2009 - a heavily-armed gunman shot dead eight people, many of them elderly and sick people, in a private-owned nursing home in North Carolina.

March 2009 - six people were shot dead in a high-grade apartment building in Santa Clara, California.

April 2009 – An 18-year-old former student followed a pizza deliveryman into his old dormitory, and shot the deliveryman, a dorm monitor, and himself at Hampton University, Virginia.

April 2009 - a man shot dead 13 people at a civic center in Binghamton, New York.

July 2009 - Six people, including one student, were shot in a drive-by shooting at a community rally on the campus of Texas Southern University, Houston.

November 2009 - U.S. army psychologist Major Nidal Hasan opened fire at a military base in Fort Hood, Texas, leaving 13 dead and 42 others wounded.

February 2010 – A professor opened fire 50 minutes into at a Biological Sciences Department faculty meeting at the University of Alabama, killing three colleagues and wounding three others

January 2011 - a gunman opened fire at a public gathering outside a grocery in Tuscon, Arizona, killing six people including a nine-year-old girl and wounding at least 12 others. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was severely injured with a gunshot to the head.

This isn't something a coward does, it's what a person does when they decide, for whatever reason or impulse, that they need to do it. There's a difference. A coward DOESN'T act when the risk to them is great unless it's to hide or run away- they don't go in, well prepared but deluded, to carry out some deviated plan.

If he wasn't drugged or acting when they showed him in court, he's not well.

The death penalty means nothing to someone who doesn't have a grasp of reality. Prison isn't a deterrent to someone who has nothing to lose.

Where the problems began, IMO, when the "if it feels good, do it" crowd got too much attention and people saw that as a valid way to go through life. That idea has no place for responsibility and the consequences that come with a person's actions. People stopped disciplining their kids, allowing corporal punishment in schools and judges & DAs began to allow minor charges to replace the ones that would have put people in prison for what they did. This ends up with repeat offense in far too many cases. Also, extremely graphic violence means nothing to most people because they're no longer shocked by seeing it. We have watched people die on TV- that never happened in the past, unless the news feed was live and it was impossible to edit the video. Personally, I don't see a need to show actual death or acts of violence. People have a hard time separating real life from fiction- watching something on TV, movies or in animation seems real, but there's no connection to reality, regardless of what "Reality TV" does.

Re: cigarettes- people who are addicted won't stop using what they're addicted to, unless they want to. I have heard people say that nicotine is harder to quit than heroin, but I don't know how many of them have been addicted to both. The warning has been on cigarette packs since the '60s. I remember seeing anti-smoking ads on TV that were in B&W, starting in the middle '60s. Do these work? Not for most smokers. Some people won't stop, even thought they have COPD, heart disease or cancer- why would a little warning stop them? I have seen people in parking lots burning a grit, sitting next to their oxygen tank. I would assume the O2 was turned off, since they didn't explode. That's just stupid!

The fact that these are all illegal, yet ineffective, proves that this is an issue of behavior, or mental illness. If a person commits any of these, it's because they don't see anything wrong with it. If they do see these as wrong and still commit them, it's because they can't control their actions. Legislators seem to think that people will obey all of the laws (ignoring, for the purposes of this debate, the fact that THEY don't obey all of them) that are enacted. They think "OK, full-auto firearms are illegal- problem solved!" but don't accept the fact that, if someone want something, they'll damn well get it. A felon may not be able to buy a gun legally, but gun parts can be bought and assembled. AFAIK, no records are kept for most parts sales. Also, AFAIK, someone could buy a gun at a gun show and sell it to a felon without LE knowing about it and without the seller getting into trouble.

If I'm wrong, correct me.

This list is probably pretty small compared to say for instance, suicide bombings where guns are not used. And we know there were plenty of mass murders long before the gun was even invented. People kill people with whatever they can, sad but true...

Might ne part of why Holmes' gun jammed. That, or he may not have cleaned it regularly/well. Happy it did, though. If he did practice firing it, it's too bad the breach didn't explode.

Thanks to some boys in Louisiana, that I highly envy, with their own TV show, Fins just found what he wants for Christmas.

[Link: kriss-usa.com]

Maybe we should ban cars, they kill far more people every year than guns do. How about being over weight? consider that 111,909 people die every year from obese related issues. So If you feed your child junk food year after year leading to an over weight condition, ultimately leading to their death at some point could you not be considered guilty just the same as leaving an loaded UN-locked gun on the coffee table?

That appears to be a list of all the spree shootings the last 13 yrs. A bunch of lives that were lost for no reason! I'll give you some advice though. Using spree shootings as your argument for banning guns isn't the best way. At most you listed less then 1/2% of the people that have been killed by guns in one year, and that was for a 13 year period. You're point should be that everyday 44 people on average are killed by guns. Everyday 44 people die and there's no press coverage of them. For the most part only the spree shootings get the coverage. So the democrats are the ones that push the most for gun control and most media outlets are liberal but we don't hear about the everyday gun deaths. Sounds to me like they don't think that gun deaths is a widespread problem.

Let's be honest here I'd be willing to bet that most of the victims aren't exactly the innocent type. Someone with a criminal record that might have gang tattoos doesn't make most people teary-eyed. That's why spree shootings get so much press, it's innocent people. More innocent people die from cigarette smoke, 2nd hand, every year then guns. So where's the outcry? Where's the press coverage?

Of course we could always go by the numbers. How many guns are there in the US that have NEVER been used to kill someone? Roughly 200 million! Someone wanna do the math for me and give me a percentage. Think it's something like .000001%

If AR-15s were such a problem wouldn't there have been alot more people killed by them? How many people have been killed by legally owned automatic weapons since the 1934 National Firearms Act? Google it the answer will shock you. There have been two deaths in 78 years, one was committed by a cop.

Just over 50% of murders are committed using a gun. So that means that just under 50% of the murders were committed without a gun, banning guns won't stop murder. Wanna know what the reason for alot of the murders is? Drugs. Drugs are the main reason for most of the crimes in this country actually. If you don't believe me just look at the penal statistics. Most of the inmates are in for drug related crimes. Stop the drugs and you can make a difference in murders, robberies, and other crimes that are committed. Instead of focusing all the attention on guns maybe we should focus our attention on the real problem, drugs.

More then likely the 100 round drum magazine he used caused the jam, luckily. Those drum magazines are notoriously unreliable. Thankfully he didn't do his research.