This is literally a Chris Rock joke from the bigger and blacker tour.
That's completely backwards. The people who use the most ammo are generally the responsible gun owners who practice regularly. Meanwhile, you only need a handful of bullets to kill a lot of people, and one is enough to cause an accident. It punishes the gun owners you least want to punish while doing absolutely nothing to address the actual problems.
Norm Stamper, former Seattle Police Chief, was recommending this 20+ years ago. Its slightly more viable than trying to get the massive quantity of guns off the streets.
This is not how it works in Sweden, if you have a license for a gun you are allowed to buy the ammunition for the specific caliber and have at home.
“Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary”
Unironically, Chris Rock said exactly this in his 1999 comedy special "Bigger and Blacker".
the key is to put a bright beautiful future ahead of a person, that could be lost if they commit a crime. simple as that.
Pretty easy to make bullets tbh. And honestly I'm pro-gun. Arm the homeless. Arm trans people. Arm migrants.
Everyone needs to arm now. I did 2 years ago as a gun hating leftist, if I can, you can too.
Isn’t the real problem the frickin bullet?
Terminology is going to matter here. Modern ammunition that you're probably thinking of is sold as a self contained cartridge with a bullet (the projectile part only) at one end, some powder inside a case (brass or steel or aluminum most of the time), and a primer at the other end. You poke the primer in a very specific way which lights the powder which builds up pressure which causes the bullet to leave the case and down a barrel. The terminology matters because in the past there have been attempts to regulate the bullets by giving them each an individual serial number, or by using "microstamping" on the firing pin of the firearm to mark the case. Those proposed technologies won't work because just standard usage of the firearm would cause any marks or microstamping to become useless very quickly, and very often the first level of argument against such a law is that the person who wrote it didn't know enough about the technology to be trying to legislate it.
So yeah you can fire a bullet so many different ways, a rusty nail and hammer will do the trick.
Please don't try this. Firing a cartridge this way without the structure of the firearm around it will cause it to go off in a completely uncontrolled fashion. It's a recipe for risking losing fingers or an eye, or worse.
ammo is much harder to manufacture and easier to regulate.
The person who assassinated the former PM of Japan assembled all of the gear he had from hardware store level parts, even making his own blackpowder. That's in Japan where gun ownership isn't common. Since he accomplished it there it's unlikely to be able to prevented in the US.
The kinds of laws/regulations you're proposing are currently being used in California with regards to 3D printers. They were unworkable crap that invited government insight into everyone's home if that person happens to own a 3D printer, and they'll create a lot of privacy issues without solving any gun problems (the laws mandated 3D printers reject printing anything that might be a "gun part").
You're really proposing mandating a firearms technology level at no better than sometime in the late 1800s which won't work to solve any societal problems we're having now, but will hamper people banking on having them around for self defense.
Maybe consider the problem from another perspective when considering firearms regulations? Also consider that the internet just estimated that there are at least several hundred billion rounds of ammunition in the US. You won't design a process that effectively regulates them all without moving everyone into open air prisons devoid of their possessions, and you'd not be able to pull off something like that without a bunch of said ammo. You didn't get rid of it; you just took it out of one group's hands.
That's pretty epic. Didn't know the Japanese guy built everything from scratch
It's not intended as an epic story, rather a story about how a lot of people seem to think there's a huge moat to creating a firearm, but there really isn't.
I mean I didn't agree with the whole assassination deal, but the method is interesting
There seems to be some idea that firearm manufacturing is some version of witchcraft when the reality is that it's closer to the professor with his coconuts on Gilligan's Island. The arguments tend to go something like: "That's impossible" when actually it really isn't. "That's illegal" when not only is it not, but it's specifically protected. "You shouldn't do that" when some people just like to tinker. "That should be banned" without understanding that the regulatory framework to truly ban it would require tracking everything and every one at all times.
That last one is where you get into a lot of very hairy issues. Apps to track women's periods have been datamined, and some states propose using the data to look for possible pregnancies and termination of pregnancies. You can track every purchase of barstock, milling machines, routers, tampons, router bits, buckets, bags of salt, car batteries, and every web page access, and you'll still not stop it, but the amount of privacy you lost in trade for the attempt is staggering.
The best comment in this thread, by far, is this one as a proposed solution to the problem, but of course nobody wants to try that. Instead we want to throw regulatory spaghetti against a wall and demand that people accept less durable materials to work with or demand that people be less innovative. History suggests those approaches won't work.
From my perspective both should be regulated.
So yeah you can fire a bullet so many different ways, a rusty nail and hammer will do the trick.
Well, there's also the not-small matter of aiming, or firing again if the first shot didn't put a satisfactory hole where you wanted. Or just getting the bullet going fast enough to do damage, without a barrel to channel and contain the blast.
It's not like the whole history of firearms after the cartridge was invented was a waste of time.
You can make guns easy peasy
Ehhh... You can make guns. Metalworking in general is beyond most people, though. And, if you want to rifle a barrel, it's not clear if standard machine shop equipment will be enough (that's a pretty small, tight space for a lathe tool). Easy peasy is a bit of a stretch.
but ammo is much harder to manufacture and easier to regulate
People can and do reload their own ammo. I don't know if anybody DIYs their own smokeless powder, and that would probably be highly illegal, but I've heard of people making their own black powder.
I wouldn't say ammo is easier to regulate at all. The average gun owner keeps several boxes of handgun ammo and 500-1000 rounds of rifle ammo on hand to start so none of that ammo will be caught by your regulation.
If you outright banned the new purchase of ammo it would take years before the effects are really noticed, especially considering the rush to buy up every bullet on the market before the ban went into effect. Afterwords you'd see gun owners driving to a state without an ammo ban.
If you slapped a max limit on ownership, say you can't have more than 50 rounds of ammo per gun, that wouldn't have stopped almost any of the mass shooters in the last 10 years who almost all fired less than 50 shots on their rampages. Not to mention enforcing that law would be next to impossible because you'd basically need a signed warrant to check a house for illegal amounts of ammo or catch them in transit.
If you put a massive tax on ammo combined with a max purchase limit, let's say 1,000% tax and a limit of 50 rounds per ID card per day, it would be business as usual, just more expensive.
One thing that might be worth exploring would be an ammo purchase registry. Gun owners haaaaaate their names on lists aand fight it tooth an nail on guns, but they don't have the protection of the 2nd amendment for ammo. Who knows it might have a chilling effect. Or just drive more transactions through the gun show/private seller loop holes.
Gun owners haaaaaate their names on lists aand fight it tooth an nail on guns, but they don’t have the protection of the 2nd amendment for ammo.
Winds are blowing the other way: short barreled rifles and shotguns, as well as suppressors no longer go through the NFA process as of like two days ago, so details are in short supply.
Gun owners haaaaaate their names on lists
I maintain that lists of all kinds are the bigger threat to the country right now. With all the data that has already been gathered it's just a matter of time before some upstart company tells a government agency that it can play the Kevin Bacon game with their database and produce a list of that will result in results. Company gets to keep a local copy of the database because nobody thought about data privacy/protections when they cut the check.
If you slapped a max limit on ownership, say you can’t have more than 50 rounds of ammo per gun, that wouldn’t have stopped almost any of the mass shooters in the last 10 years who almost all fired less than 50 shots on their rampages.
It would; however, put a damper on anyone funding their own training. I doubt anyone's going from nothing to being a crack shot in 50 rounds, or even 500.
chilling effect
Those are bad everywhere. I wish that court case in DC that decided a defacto ban (on guns) amounted to a for-realsy ban, and was therefore unconstitutional.
You can pack your own ammo pretty easily
You make your own powder? And primer?
No, but I feel like it's easier to get those than a gun
People are working on it.
I'll do you one better.
We should regulate barrels.
A gun rifled barrel is the only part of a gun that can't be reliably and descretely be made at home. You can make your own ammo essentially from house supplies and spent brass casings. With the upsurge of small desk lathes, CNCs and 3D printers you can also fabricate most parts of the receiver at home (which they now regulated too).
But a barrel however, you need very specialised heavily machinery to make a rifled barrel in a way that makes the gun not blow up in your face or be able to hit the broad side of a barn.
The barrel would also tell you a lot about the gun owners habits. If somebody goes through several barrels in a few years, they are probably using the firearm a lot and are therefore well trained and capable.
In my opinion serial numbers should also be stamped or laser engraved on the barrel not the receiver. People would also think twice before filing off the serial number and ruining the structural integrity of the barrel.
Technically you can slap together a home made rifle, as long as it uses a manufactured barrel it will be somewhere in the realm of precision of a fully manufactured firearm, reliability however may differ.
That's why countries like Germany legally define a "firearm" as "A device that expels a projectile through a barrel". The receiver or more precisely the mechanism of operation is herby completely irrelevant (there are exceptions for muscle powered devices).
This would also call for a revision on the idiotic suppressor regulation, which is in essence limiting the use of a device to further protect your hearing. Instead you either register a barrel with a fixed muzzle device or a barrel with a threaded end and you can put whatever you want on it. The government is happy, because it can assume you are a dead silent killer with a scary silencer, and you are happy because you don't have to wait 6 months for a glorified propane tank on the end of your gun.
Some people collect guns like Pokémon cards. Imagine if you can get 1 to 3 barrels and then 40 different receivers without having to register any of them. A lot of AR platfrom barrels are interchangeable, so you can have as many colors, setups from as many different manufacturers as you want. In the end even if somebody decided to go lulu and shoot up a place, they can't use more than 3 of them at once.
Collectors would also profit since now they can have as many historic firearms as they like as long as they all have a dummy barrel. No need to destroy the beautiful mechanics of the gun to deactivate it. And if they decide to actually fire it for demonstration, they can register a separate real barrel.
Edit: English isn't my first language so I mixed up threading and rifeling. Fixed that.
The FGC 9, for example, has a barrel that one can electro-chemically machine with 3d printed jigs, wire, salt water, hydraulic pipe, and a 12v battery
The practical effect of any sort of gun (or bullet) control would be to disarm the working class. I will not be disarmed under any circumstances, and the vast majority of American workers, convinced communists or not, will agree with me on refusing to disarm.
"Where the workers are employed by the state, they must arm and organize themselves into special corps with elected leaders, or as a part of the proletarian guard. Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary." (Marx, Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/communist-league/1850-ad1.htm)
It is absolutely insane listening to people in this thread talk about how the same people that rape girls on islands in all these countries political class should take total control of our ability to arm ourselves. It is either wicked evil or bottom of the barrel stupidity.
Sweet summer child, reloading is a hobby with low level of entry.
Gun nuts, totally freaked out when Obama won. They were convinced he would takr thier ammo…
No, the real problem is neither the gun nor the bullet.
Either one, by themselves or together, are harmless until someone with poor training, education, and/or mental health gets involved.
American detected
There are many countries with many guns and substantially less gun violence than America. The common thread is not the weapon.
Just to have fun by being a bit pedantic, the a bullet is a possible source of toxic lead, and if you are using the colloquialist 'bullet' to mean a charged cartidge containing a bullet, the gunpowder charge makes it a tiny bomb, which can be dangerous as well, even without a gun, especially when exposed to idiots with hammers or fire.
Playing along...
If a lead bullet in a charged and primed casing sits undisturbed in a crowded room, it will neither poison people nor discharge itself
'Undisturbed' is doing a bit of lifting there. The same could be said of a person, generally speaking. Leave most people in a room, they won't hurt anyone either. It's just a matter of what circumstances make each dangerous. If you put bullets in a room and set the room on fire, they act as little bombs. If you do that with a person, it makes them less dangerous, because they're dead. If you put a person in solitary confinement for years on end, they'll come out mentally disturbed, and possibly violent. Do the same with a bullet, and it comes out presenting the same hazards as when it went in.
Sure, and you can walk down the road and get struck by lightning with the same odds of a bullet randomly firing on its own and injuring or killing you.
On the flip side, the reality (to the significant digit) is that a person with a gun but no bullets can hurt you. A person with bullets but no gun can also hurt you. In fact, a person with neither a bullet nor a gun can hurt you too! It happens all the time.
But you know what doesn't happen all the time?
A loaded gun discharging itself without a person attached.
The common theme is not the guns, it's the people. Let's fix that part.
Yeah, I'm with you on the direction to approach from, if slightly different in tack. I was just amusing myself. Hopefully I wasn't causing you too much annoyance.
Nah, not annoyed. Tbh, fixing the people is going to be much harder than just regulating the implements of their destruction.
It has to be possible, though. Some places seem to manage some kind of sanity, at least.
You mean places that support their societies with things like affordable health care? Not sure that type of progressive governance is going to be a reality in the US for some time
Never impossible, but not happening yet. I have a suspicion things will shift more as the cold warriors inevitably succumb to the limits of mortality. All the power and money in the world still can't stop the power of time.
Yep... time heals all wounds, it's up to us to make new ones (and we make them like this)
It's not the gun that kills you.
It's not the projectile that kills you, it's the impact.
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