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The Center for American Progress reports
Before Stephen Paddock opened fire at a country music festival on the Las Vegas Strip last October, killing 58 and wounding hundreds, most Americans probably hadn't heard of bump-fire stocks--add-ons that lets a semiautomatic rifle fire as quickly as a machine gun. Until that mass shooting, they were a novelty known only among firing-range enthusiasts and Cool Gun YouTube.
Within months of Las Vegas, lawmakers introduced bipartisan legislation[1] to outlaw the devices, and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, or ATF, announced plans to ban them through regulation.[2]
But gun control advocates warn bump stocks are just one part of a much bigger problem. A flood of new gun technologies is pushing the envelope on what a civilian can legally own, skirting laws that have kept the most dangerous weapons off the street for decades.
[...] Weapons like machine guns, silencers, and short-barreled rifles and shotguns are regulated under the National Firearms Act of 1934 and subsequent amendments. To own one of those weapons, a civilian has to go through a lengthy approval process and pay a special tax. The job of deciding whether a gun falls under NFA's restrictions falls to ATF.
Gun manufacturers have used the law's technicalities to create guns that are just as powerful, and deadly, as restricted weapons but without the added tax and strict regulations.
Take the SAINT, by Springfield Armory. It's an AR-15 with a 30-round magazine and a 7.5-inch barrel. That's shorter than the legal rifle length under federal law. But instead of a shoulder stock, the SAINT has a "stabilizing brace" or "forearm brace"--a device designed to attach to a shooter's forearm for one-handed firing rather than resting against their shoulder. By ATF's definition, the SAINT is a pistol, not a rifle, because it isn't meant to be fired from the shoulder. So anyone who can pass a federal background check can buy one online for $989.
[...] Stabilizing braces aren't the only new gun tech to skirt around the National Firearms Act. Franklin Armory's Binary Trigger System fires two rounds with every shot--one when the trigger is depressed and one when it's released, doubling the rate of fire. Like bump stocks and stabilizing braces, binary triggers aren't currently regulated under the National Firearms Act.
In one YouTube video, a man uses a binary trigger to fire a 30-round magazine in less than five seconds. In another, a binary trigger beats out a fully-automatic weapon.
[1] Bogus link in TFA. Fixed in TFS.
[2] Content is behind scripts.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by takyon on Sunday June 24 2018, @12:01PM (4 children)
What is that, satire?
UK gov bans violent porn [boingboing.net]
You're being watched: there's one CCTV camera for every 32 people in UK [theguardian.com]
U.K. Cracking Down On Porn, Blocking It Unless Users Opt In [npr.org]
UK.gov Wants to Legislate on Comms Data Before Next Election [soylentnews.org]
House of Commons Approves UK Emergency Data Retention Law [soylentnews.org]
Open Rights Group To Take Government To Court Over DRIP [soylentnews.org]
UK Convicts People with Manga Images Depicting (Imaginary) Children [soylentnews.org]
UK Home Secretary: Project to End Mobile "Not-Spots" Could Aid Terrorists [soylentnews.org]
Court Rules UK-US Surveillance Data Sharing was Illegal [soylentnews.org]
Privacy International's Campaign to Disclose Illegal GCHQ Spying [soylentnews.org]
UK Sheinwald Report Urges Treaty Forcing US Web Firms' Cooperation in Data Sharing [soylentnews.org]
UK Wants to Ban Unbreakable Encryption, Log which Websites You Visit [soylentnews.org]
One nation under CCTV: the future of automated surveillance [wired.co.uk]
UK Home Secretary Stumbles While Trying to Justify Blanket Cyber-Snooping [soylentnews.org]
Theresa May: UK Should Stay in the EU, but Discard the European Convention on Human Rights [soylentnews.org]
London is a Model Modern Surveillance State and That's Not Going to Change [inverse.com]
UK's New Snoopers' Charter Just Passed an Encryption Backdoor Law by the Backdoor [soylentnews.org]
UK Prime Minister Repeats Calls to Limit Encryption, End Internet "Safe Spaces" [soylentnews.org]
UK's 'Extreme Mass Surveillance' Web Snooping Powers Face Legal Challenge [soylentnews.org]
WhatsApp Refused to add a Backdoor for the UK Government [soylentnews.org]
GCHQ Has Developed More Hacking Capabilities than Expected [soylentnews.org]
UK Prime Minister Theresa May Attacks Encrypted Messaging, Seeks Safe and Ethical AI [soylentnews.org]
Mass surveillance in the United Kingdom [wikipedia.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by ledow on Sunday June 24 2018, @09:00PM (3 children)
Seriously? Do you live in the UK?
You're just parroting the same shit as I can find about the US.
Do I have to give up Facebook details entering the UK? Are the FBI asking Apple to unlock phones? Do the NSA insert code into major encryption standards that allow weaknesses years later? Every headline you quote has an opposite for the US.
The surveillance thing REALLY gives you away though:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/484956/number-of-surveillance-cameras-per-thousand-people-by-country/ [statista.com]
Whoopsie on trying that!
You seriously have no understanding until you've sampled British (and London especially) culture. Nobody is sitting there going "Oh, no, I'm on cameras 24/7!". Because it's not true. There are more cameras that I've personally installed in my workplace for security that on the 20 mile commute to that workplace.
P.S. On by default family-friendly filters can be overrode in seconds, for the account holder or anyone wanting to bypass. Honestly. You know how I know? I work in a school full of teenage children, and I advise their parents. Literally it's a checkbox on your account when you sign up and it's really "Would you like us to try to block porn categorised websites on this connection?" more than anything else. No worse than enabling SafeSearch and there's no big deal about turning it off (I work in schools, yet all my home and smartphone connections are unfiltered, plus any leased line / business connection is exempt anyway). It's no different to being given a copy of NetNanny by your ISP when you sign up, in essence. And you can choose if you want it or not. And I assure you from my work in secondary schools, no government here is tracking "violent porn" on any connection anyway and flagging anything that's not clearly 100% illegal anyway (outside the scope of violent porn laws which are pretty untested). Pick any famous BDSM website, you'll get on it, no problem.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday June 24 2018, @09:35PM (2 children)
You got emotional, flew too close to the Sun, and now won't accept the truth about your country. Your secret services are about as capable as ours, and your Prime Minister is Theresa May of all people, who has done much more than the FBI to undermine encryption [theregister.co.uk]. Obviously, living in the UK hasn't helped you to gain a good perspective on recent events. You don't have freedom of speech, you are living in a surveillance state, you are on a list for checking that checkbox and for other activities, and things are only going to get worse for you. The headlines you are ignoring will only multiply in the coming years. The cameras will become unnoticeable if they haven't already.
Brexit? Gesundheit.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ledow on Monday June 25 2018, @08:47AM (1 child)
My country is a incompetent bunch of twats who follow the US on whatever ridiculous endeavours they demand because you hold the keys to our nuclear program that HAS NOT CHANGED since the 70's and costs us billions. I am under no illusion. They can't GET to surveillance state as there's nobody left capable of understanding it on civil service wages.
GCHQ were a fine institution. Now they have no resources to fight against actual communications technology and have to go back to what they were before then - spies. I'm under no illusion that they have FULL capability if they so desire. So do the NSA. As you point out - they are as capable as the US ones. Which means they can do the same things as yours are doing. Despite being a tiny ant of a country. And yet somehow you're using that as reason to say that somehow you're better and not subject to the same? The US has the resources, the UK really doesn't. We only just paid off WW2 a few years ago.
We've never had explicit freedom of speech. You're not British, so you don't understand that. We don't need to write it down. We were never oppressed by an invader since... well, Viking times, so there's no need to. It's an inalienable right. Nobody even questions it.
Look up superinjunctions - which were entirely legal and then rendered moot by our media saying "fuck off, that's not how this works". Fuck Theresa May and all who sail in her, and every politician that ever held the post (I am not politically aligned with ANY of them, so attacking one doesn't rile me at all... they are ALL as bad as each other and have been for centuries). I can literally stand on the corner of Hyde Park and yell that if I like. I will DEFINITELY get away with it more than the equivalent in the US. And they're all so incompetent that actually NOTHING CLOSE to a surveillance state or undermining encryption has even happened (and it would have had to happen under the last 2/3 prime ministers to have actually affected anything we're currently using). Google caught the NSA sniffing its internal connections, not EU states. I'd like to point out that GCHQ basically INVENTED public-key encryption, kept it quiet for 40 years, let RSA think they'd invented it themselves in the 70's, and didn't tell anyone until the 90's. That's what spy agencies DO. And we're a damn sight better at it than your guys. But we haven't innovated in that regard in decades because our recruitment, education and civil service pay sucks, even at the upper echelons of the intelligence community.
At absolute best, at the absolute height of hyperbole, however, in terms of actually affecting people's daily lives, we're "just as bad" as the US. Condemning us is condemning yourself to the same extent. Whether BOTH countries are on an inexorable slide into surveillance state is questionable but you would not get one without the other. I believe it's more to do with the availability of technology and private firms holding the cards over critical infrastructure far more than anything that the governments want or could achieve on their own. We can barely run an electronic tax system, let alone a surveillance state.
If you did not see the stats I linked - the US already has more SURVEILLANCE (not just private ownership) cameras per capita than the UK and has had for over a decade. You have things like agencies sniffing cellphones in city centres and near the White House (and getting caught doing so on public record) and all the same problems. And most importantly, you have the funding to enable it.
And now you have a "regime" which is slowly isolating yourself from the rest of the world, for your own desire to "not become like the other countries", using a propaganda of "it's so much worse everywhere else". Come and see. Honestly. Get yourself a passport, pop over to the UK and the EU and see. And see how we laugh at you when you come up with this nonsense.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday June 25 2018, @04:48PM
In no comment did I say that you have to be worse than the U.S. to be a surveillance state.
On most of the rest we agree except:
I already said "You don't have freedom of speech". I didn't launch into a history of it or include any links, but most of us have seen relevant stories [bbc.com] and know that you don't have an explicit 1st Amendment equivalent.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]