News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
Ultimately, guns are not very complicated machines. I'm making a semi-automatic rifle in my home office right now out of stuff you can get at a hardware store & some 3D printed parts, and I'm amazed at how simple it all is.
A lot of proposed gun control feels like trying to put the genie back in the bottle. Even states with hefty assault weapon bans like California and Maryland still have plenty of legal loopholes allowing people to own semi-automatic guns, and gun manufacturers are finding more all the time. I honestly think that anything short of straight up banning the sale of gunpowder will have a temporary at best effect on gun violence, and do less than nothing at worst.
The fact of the matter is that gun control bills at the federal level will cost a lot of political capital. A federal challenge to the 2nd amendment will rally conservatives in the same way that the recent overturning of Roe caused a surge for liberals. This is to say nothing about enforcement: it's a common position among gun owners that they would simply refuse to comply with a gun confiscation / surrender, and I believe a significant chunk of them would follow through with that. See the recent ATF rules about pistol braces for an example of mass non-compliance.
So, we can fight the uphill battle of gun control for perhaps marginal returns, or we can try to address the things that drive people to violence in the first place. And I'm not just saying "muh mental health" either; we need to address housing costs, healthcare costs, education costs, wages stagnating behind inflation, broken-windows policing, the war on drugs, the mainstreaming of far-right propoganda, the decay of public schooling, white supremacy, queerphobia, misogyny, climate change & doomerism, corporate personhood, and a fuckload of other things making people angry and desparate and hopeless enough to kill people & themselves.
I firmly believe that addressing the material conditions that create killers will prevent more murders than any gun control bill, especially in the USA.
Then they need to be arrested. Noone should be trusted with guns and other dangerous weapons or machines if they deliberately break the laws surrounding the ownership of them. We don't let people drive after they lost their licencse.
The estimates for the number of pistol braces out there ranged from 3 million on the low end, to 40 million on the high end. During the grace period to register braced firearms as SBRs without having to pay the tax stamp, the ATF received 255,162 applications to do so.
Even if we take the low number & account for folks destroying or converting their firearms, we can reasonably estimate a rate of non-compliance in the hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions. There is a very real possibility that arresting all those people would literally double the already ludicrous US prison population overnight. In a country that already has a worryingly militarized police force, I cannot imagine the mass arrest of millions of armed people will reduce gun violence.
I understood "not surrendering" as Police shows up and demands to be handed over the braced gun, to be met with a closed door or at gunpoint.
If people need to be told to hand it over, but comply then, i guess it can be handled with a fine. I still stand by this being a clear indication of being unfit for gun ownership though.
Any officer enforcing this would be killed and most cops would just outright refuse to enforce it anyway. There's a logistical problem of how this would even be done.
I lived in a town with maybe five cops for it and the three surrounding towns. Cops would to on several hour patrols, so if you called 911 at the wrong time it could take an hour for the police to actually show up. They knew about meth cooks in the area and they left them alone because the cops knew they would wind up dead and no one would ever find them.
Now, the whole population of the area was a few thousand people and most of them were armed. Now, if they couldn't deal with the meth cooks that no one liked, how exactly would they deal with the big chunk of the population that includes small business owners, members of the city council, and maybe the mayor?
This sounds like a case for a crackdown by the federal police then. And even more of a reason to take illegal weapons from people, who are willing to murder police officers with it.
What you describe is practically half an insurrection already. And this sounds like the kind of area, from where exactly that could happen with enough methed up MAGAhats. So instead of the 2A helping people to protect themselves from a hostile and unlawful government it will help hostile and unlawful people to establish an undemocratic regime and abolish the constitutional order.
Lol, yeah, the FBI that's been cracking down on the left for 100 years while ignoring the Klan? That's who you're taking about? They would rather join the insurrection. Who do you think these cops are?
They already won. That's the point.
I appreciate that you've been a good faith interlocutor so far, but I wanna push back on this just a little more.
The current rules governing SBRs in the United States were established in the 1930s in anticipation of an outright ban on handguns. The thought was that "sawed-off" or short-barreled rifles would be a way for people to circumvent the ban. And, because the law enforcement thinking at the time was distinctly classist, the mechanism for keeping these guns out of the hands of criminals was not an outright ban but a ludicrously high tax, in the neighborhood of $4500 in today's money.
But that ban on pistols never materialized. So now, we're left with a nearly 100 year old vestigial law that doesn't really serve much of a purpose: short-barreled rifles aren't any more deadly than full-length rifles (they tend to fire the same bullet louder and slower), and they aren't any more concealable than handguns. There really isn't an obvious public good that is served by these laws, and their enforcement gives away that the ATF understands that on some level: basically no one is ever charged for just having an unregistered SBR, it's almost always a rider-on to a different crime ~~or an excuse for a cop to fuck you up if they don't like you.~~
Enter pistol braces. Ostensibly, they are a device that assists shooters that have lost the use of one of their hands to stabilize an AR pistol with the forearm of their one good hand (and to be clear, they serve that purpose well). However, some people notice that they happen to be shaped in a way that provides a lot of the function that a stock would, and begin using them on AR pistols as a way of getting the ergonomics and aesthetics of an SBR without paying the additional tax and waiting months for approval.
And for a really long time, the ATF was okay with this. Pistol braces were specifically allowed. That was, until a few years ago, the ATF decided to... Change their mind? "Re-interpret" existing rules was I think what officially happened. No new laws were passed, no democratic process took place, and no clear and present danger was being addressed. They just kinda decided "Hey these are illegal now, you have X days to comply".
Does aquiescing to that "interpretation change" have anything to do with being a responsible gun owner? To my mind, whether someone complies with that or not says more about their obideience to authority / fear of consequences than it does their responsibility or danger to society. There is no inherent moral good to following the law, and history is filled with responsible people who flout pointless or harmful laws.
You know, I would push back on this a little bit. It's not really a necessity that they're more lethal than rifles, and more concealable than handguns, they can still do plenty of damage while occupying the middle category.
Handgun cartridges usually travel at below the necessary 2100 fps required to create permanent hydrostatic wound cavities, which means they need more shots on target to do a similar amount of damage. Unlike sawed off shotguns (which I think are registered as destructive devices? idk), which tend to be unwieldy to fire, especially at range, an SBR can be fitted with a suppressor, and has the potential to fire hotter and lighter loads capable of defeating level 3+ body armor, unlike a handgun. Probably not at the same time as a suppressor would be used, but, dealer's choice, I guess. All of this is in a package that can potentially be carried, somewhat easily, in a large to mid-sized coat along with spare magazines. Unlike a normal rifle, which might require something like a larger trench coat, or poncho, or what have you. SBRs are also going to be much more usable at range compared to your conventional handgun, it's sort of along the lines of an advanced PDW in that respect, with maybe a slightly larger form factor.
So, if we're kind of, thinking about the possible attack vectors that this could be used for, I think it's understandable why federal law enforcement might be a little bit more concerned about this, compared to long rifles, handguns, or shotguns, which occupy more distinct niches that are perhaps a little bit easier to safeguard against with conventional tactics. No comment on the pistol brace thing, that was kinda stupid, but the SBR ban doesn't make absolutely no sense, as long as you're evaluating it from a very particular perspective.
A perspective that can't see bullpups, apparently