WWII proved that modern infantry needed to be armed with rifles which had an automatic fire function which could be selected. This was the origin of the assault rifle. Automatic fire means as long as you hold the trigger down, the gun will continue to fire. In the most widely used military arms today the guns have a semiautomatic function too. Semiautomatic means the gun will fire once only for each time the trigger is pulled; it is used to save ammo and for more precise or longer range fire. The American M-16 and M-4's and the Soviet AKs are examples of such arms. A modern military giving its infantry only semiautomatics would be disastrously outgunned. Assault rifles , by definition, must be capable of automatic fire.
Many people of good will maintain that "military guns need not and should not be in the hands of civilians". When it comes to assault rifles, in the U.S. it is as they wish; only a very few civilians, with hard to obtain permits, may own a gun with an automatic fire capability. Civilian models of the M-16, known as the AR-15, and the AK's are widely available in the U.S. but they have only the semiautomatic function. They are not military guns; they are not assault rifles; our troops could not survive with them. Actually, there are many widely available semiautomatic sporting rifles that are more powerful than AR-15 or civilian AKs . If you gave them a fully automatic function they would be uncontrollable.
Lots of good people don't know these things. I'm not interested in hot cars and so I know little about them. Similarly, many people, not being interested in guns, know little about guns. But there are many influential and powerful people who despite knowing the difference between semiautomatic and automatic rifles refer to some of the the rifles available to the public as "assault rifles" identical to the ones carried by our military. They do this to harness the understandable outrage felt by those who think that most civilians are able to obtain true military assault rifles. Their intent is to ban these guns and when their ban fails to stop mass shootings, to outlaw an ever increasing number of privately owned firearms until they have completely disarmed law abiding Americans. Their goal is a far left America, which will by definition be a dictatorship, requiring a thoroughly cowed populace. Some examples of these people are NY and California Governors Cuomo and Brown and NY and California U.S. Senators Schumer and Feinstein (big surprise, eh?).
We've already heard Senator Feinstein express her heartfelt wish to "(make) Mr. and Mrs. America turn 'em all in" and we've heard Charles Schumer sneer at the values held dear by the real America many times. It is said that in aiding Clinton with his 1994 "Assault Weapons Ban" they referred to the popular publication Gun Digest and cynically picked out the "ickiest" looking ones for proscription. Congress wisely let that ban die ten years later. It did no good, nor was it meant to.
An example of true "common sense gun control" would be to ban bump stocks, which can bring a semiautomatic rifle close to automatic capability.
Violating the Constitution and recently institutionalized Constitutional case law; ignoring the fact that amoral monsters, increasingly enabled by a society far too much of which is recklessly contemptuous of traditional values, are the true causes of mass shootings; ignoring the fact that such outrages seldom occurred 60 years ago, when guns were far more readily available and the intimidating fear of the consequences of wrongdoing was real ,and blaming one of the most law abiding segments (and its organizations, notably NRA) of our nation for the murder of children; all of that, makes no "common" sense. Accordingly, we gun owners defy it and propose workable immediate solutions like the physical defense of all schools. Jack
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2 comments:
A very sensible, measured, rational explanation of the issue -- therefore, you should expect a torrent of abuse from the left!
Dr. Waddy: Thanx very much. As John L. Lewis said, "They smote me hip and thigh and right merrily did I return their blows". I welcome any opposition from the left and I don't know why, but I got 8 times the number of hits I usually get today. You may have "hit" it on the head but since I received no derogatory comments, perhaps my views received favorable perusal. My father, a post war industrial union guy, said to me "Lewis was the only one with guts; the rest of them were pukes!" Having some knowledge of the 20th century American labor movement, I might disagree in that I think such as Reuther and Hoffa had plenty of sand. He got out of labor activism because the mob moved in and the leftist mob has certainly followed their lead although they are far too "sensitive" yet to employ the mob's corporal sanctions. As far as "common sense gun control" goes, once again the left prematurely assumes victory. NRA will teach them some respect.
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