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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, Insightful) by ElizabethGreene on Sunday June 24 2018, @03:32PM (5 children)
Here's a secret about gun violence discussions.
People love to make statistics say what they want.
Unfortunately you've fallen victim to it here, comparing apples to oranges.
For the US number 70% of the 11.96 deaths per 100,000 are suicides. That's ~40,000 US gun deaths, of which ~12,000 are homicides, accidents, or state violence.
The Serbia data does not include suicide by firearm. (I chose it because it's the first one on the list after the US. Also, the website for it is available in English and I was able to find the data despite the broken link from wiki >> gunpolicy.org (a pro-gun control biased source) >> Serbia's national data bank.)
The US and Serbia firearm homicide numbers are within 5% of each other, not 300%. Serbia has a higher suicide rate than the US, and if you tick in those numbers the US rate is lower.
Every single assumption has to be checked in this conversation because data tampering and outright lies are profligate in it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 24 2018, @09:28PM (2 children)
Just because suicide by firearm is predominately white-on-white crime, that is no reason to leave it out of the statistics!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 25 2018, @01:19AM
Why? Suicidal people could just as easily use any number of other methods, if you're making an argument for gun control you have to remove this entire section of the statistic.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Monday June 25 2018, @03:50AM
One of the highest rates of suicide in the developed western world is in Belgium. Belgium, with its very strict gun laws, has a suicide rate of 20.7/100k. The US by comparison is at 15.3/100k. http://apps.who.int/gho/data/node.sdg.3-4-viz-2?lang=en [who.int]
Apparently, there are other extremely effective means to off one's self.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Sunday June 24 2018, @09:30PM (1 child)
> Every single assumption has to be checked in this conversation because data tampering and outright lies are profligate in it.
And just to say, thank you for contributing, in an article that seems to primarily attract comments based on opinions and political viewpoints, I tried to inject (even if flawed, I guess I really suck at math) some actual hard numbers, and you corrected me, so now we have better data to work with.
So you are saying that there isn't that much of a difference per capita between the top three firearm ownership countries in the world? If so, it means that the USAs deaths are on par with the rest. Just that the larger population means a lot more guns, and a lot more people end up getting killed, so you hear about it more often, even if as a percentage it isn't that far off from smaller countries.
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Monday June 25 2018, @01:29AM
> So you are saying that there isn't that much of a difference per capita between the top three firearm ownership countries in the world?
I'm not prepared to say that; it doesn't "feel right". I have some time, let me run it down.