I take Chipman at his word. If he had his way, he would ban a LOT of guns.
Senator Tom Cotton’s questioning of Chipman was particularly heated as the Arkansas Republican demanded Chipman define ‘assault weapon.’
‘You have called for an assault weapons ban, I have a simple question for you: What is an assault weapon?’ Cotton questioned Biden’s pick to head the ATF.
‘What Congress defines it as,’ Chipman deflected.
‘So you’re asking us to ban assault weapons, we have to write legislation, can you tell me: What is an assault weapon? How would you define it if you were the head of the ATF? How have you defined it over the last several years as your role as a gun control advocate?’ Cotton pushed.
According to firearm sale reports on the southwestern border, Chipman said, ATF defined an assault weapon as ‘any semi-automatic rifle capable of accepting a detachable magazine above the caliber of .22, which would include a .223, which is, you know, largely the AR-15 round.’
He still would not say definitively what he would define as an assault weapon.
‘I’m amazed that that might be the definition of assault weapon,’ Cotton said. ‘That would basically cover every single modern sporting rifle in America today.’
Here is my problem as a non gun owner.
We had a mass shooting in San Jose where 9 people were killed by a thug and co- worker.
It barely made the news.
The violence in the inner cities where so many people innocent people are killed barely make the news.
When it comes to gun violence, is the US any better than a 3rd world country?
I realize guns save lives in many circumstances.
I don’t know the answer but there has to be a solution out there.
Best estimates are 12-15 million homicides in the 20th century. There were 262 MILLION people killed by their own government in the 20th century. That is, governments killed 15 to 20 times more people that criminal homicides.
Bad things happen in isolated instances in an armed populace, horrific things happen to a disarmed populace.
20th Century Democide https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM
Some things don’t have a solution. Or, rather, the solution is worse than the disease.
Our right to keep and bear arms exists so that if we have to, we can follow the path outlined in the DoI and cast off an oppressive government by force. Hunting and self defense are side effects. So to ban guns is to surrender our right to self govern.
There are consequences to that – like plenty of guns in the country that crooks and lunatics can use to do harm. So if we accept that we do not want to surrender guns for the reason above, then we have to find a way to mitigate the negative impacts. In the case of crime, the vast majority of violent acts are committed by a relatively small percentage of the population, and most of them have mental health issues or substance abuse issues. So what to do? In an earlier age, we might have put the insane in asylums and locked the drug addicts in jail. But we, as a society, have also decided that such arbitrary locking up of citizens is a violation of their civil liberties, so we have lax policies that allow people with severe mental health issues to be mainstreamed and addicts to be given their 19th chance. Not arguing the point. I do think we should think long and hard before we let government lock up people based on who they are instead of what they did.
So there’s a price for freedom. A price for not locking people up. A price for an armed, self-governing society. That price is paid, partially, with the victims of heinous crimes.
So, the price of freedom is killing a toddler, a baby, a grandma, a nurse, or a cop? Or killing 9 people or more?
This meme is going around, but it’s rather though invoking…
The only time the left holds a shooter accountable is if they are a cop. Otherwise it’s the Gun’s fault, the Ammo Manufacturer’s fault, the NRA’s fault, the Responsible Gun Owner’s fault, the Court’s fault, the Gun Shop’s fault – never the Criminal’s fault.
I don’t know the answer. Liberals certainly don’t know the answer when they want to defund the cops or cannot chase bad guys like in Chicago.
Liberals show their racism when they defund the police, hinder the cops and allow criminals to roam cities without the fear of going to jail.
I am a firm believer in gun holder’s rights. I am also a believer in gun control laws. I think that red flag laws are a good start. We need a way to be able to disarm people who are not mentally fit to have them, until they prove they are.
Talk about killing someone. CHECK!
Involved in a domestic dispute. CHECK!
But, there needs to be a way to easily get them back once proven, like a cool off period. And it shouldn’t be easy to take them, there should be some sort of process as well.
This won’t stop every instance. Nothing will. But doing NOTHING, which we are very good at, doesn’t seem to work either.
I think Owen sums it up pretty well and Jason’s meme is a direct corollary. In a society where the right to bear arms is allowed, there will always be people who disagree. In our case we have liberals who largely oppose freedoms to own firearms. They continually find new ways to campaign against the 2nd and it is the duty of believers in freedom to refute each new campaign.
The latest campaign has been through the media which have recently polarized into political weapons. Rather than impartial news stories, we have news that is routinely skewed and polished to represent the media controller’s political goals instead of a simple relating of recent events. For guns the recent goals have been to highlight police gun misusage in the eventual hope that they can make police gun usage unpopular with the mass’s perception. If they can move to take away guns from the majority of police, it is an obvious necessity to take them away from the populace so criminals won’t have guns either, in their naive opinions. This is a dual campaign, however, also using police misuse as race-baiting for votes makes this a powerful strategy.
If news were to become impartial again, this would all fall apart. It is not a powerful story to find that if nightly news reported all homicides every evening, race is inconsequential to the equation, that the police who enter the same hot zones face possible death or injury every single night, and that the number of times police with guns have saved lives or mitigated disasters outweighs the number of police firearm misuses by an order of magnitude or two at the least.
Similarly TV programming has consistently romanticized, sympathized and even made heroes of murderers while MSM news has made media stars of them so long as they fit their agenda.
I think the answer is clear. If we do want a free society, gun rights are a necessity.
We need a way to be able to disarm people who are not mentally fit to have them, until they prove they are.
See, e.g., Wisconsin Statutes Chapter 51. Fits every one of your criteria.
race is inconsequential to the equation
Umnhhhh…..90% of murder victims in Milwaukee are blacks aged 18-29. Race is nearly the ONLY criteria needed there.
There are already laws on the books about background checks. There are already laws on the books allowing firearms to be taken from people thru due process.
Universal Background Checks:
Background checks are already the law for all firearm sales except private, in state, face to face sales. “internet sales” have to be shipped to a local FFL who does the background check. The common sense laws are already in effect.
Talking about background checks on “sales” is a deliberate attempt to hide the real purpose of universal background checks.
The problem with universal background check proposals is that they talk about gun purchases (change of OWNERSHIP) but write the bills to apply to change of POSSESSION. this criminalizes common activities as loaning your friend a gun at the range, loaning a gun to a new hunter, and temporarily keeping a friend or relative’s guns safe. Previous bills proposed in Wisconsin would have made a criminal of a spouse if their SO went out of town more than 2 weeks.
Red flag laws:
We already have a whole statute (Chapter 51) on dealing with mental issues that includes emergency detention and a court hearing to determine competency. We also have laws on restraining orders and harassment injunctions that include court hearings with a judge that has the ability to remove firearms from a dangerous person. Domestic violence restraining orders mandate surrendering firearms. Red flag laws that take away a persons rights on the barest suspicion are not about safety, they are about confiscation and control.
“Umnhhhh…..90% of murder victims in Milwaukee are blacks aged 18-29. Race is nearly the ONLY criteria needed there.”
You have the wrong context, Dad29. I was speaking of race-baiting used to fire up the lib base and keep blacks voting Democrat. Pointing out that 85-88% of yearly homicides are blacks killed by other blacks shows that racism is inconsequential to the equation of using homicides for race-baiting (and points out the ineffectiveness of Dem managed cities concerning murder). That leaves the race baiting libs the very low number of blacks killed by whites and the average number of 200 blacks killed yearly nation-wide by police to use for race baiting purposes. Fortunately for them, the 1-5 mis-managed police homicides of black people each year multiplied literally a million-fold by MSM can froth up the Dem voters just fine.
My point was that truth would be a huge come down. If MSM showed every killing in detail on the news, I think even blacks would be so de-sensitized that the most brutal cop actions would not even be a blip on their radar, past the direct families involved. And whites would not get out of bed for any specific murder after they have seen thousands of black on black killings every year. With how heterogenous our population is, we are actually quite low in the racism game measured world-wide. If Dems didn’t politicize it every election year, and teach racism intensely in our schools, there wouldn’t be anything like the BLM, except maybe directed inward in black communities where most of the murders are being committed.