SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Sunday June 24 2018, @07:41PM (2 children)
Actually Murder rates are down [mises.org], nearly to historic lows. (Foreign source intentionaly sited to avoid the usual argument.)
The mass murders and suicides among young people seem to happen near the end of school years, as people realize they are in a hopeless situation, likely to fail, or find themselves mercilessly mocked.
So do we prevent hopelessness (somehow)?
Or do we teach people to grow a skin?
Or do we bring back corporal punishment so mid-course corrections involve something other than a "talking to"?
We've tried the helicopter parent, everybody is a winner, nobody gets embarrassed, approaches for 40 years now.
Clearly none of these work to prevent mass murders. Desperate kids aren't afraid of dying.
Nobody has a believable explanation for the 30 year spike in murders finally tapering off in the late 90s, and
nobody has a believable explanation for the (perceived) mass murder spike yo today.
But it sure as hell wasn't gun availability, or even full auto gun availability.
(same source as above).
And when you get right down to it, the mass shootings are ALREADY included in the murder totals.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 25 2018, @09:34AM
One hypothesis has the start of the spike correlating with cars become ubiquitous, and the end matching with the end of leaded fuel. Nobody knows exactly how, but there is some suspicion that the brain damage caused by lead can turn people more violent. Disclaimer: Correlation does not imply causation and all that, but at least they are trying to explain it.
Improved news coverage, 24/7 news and most of all, every news channel focusing on pulling in viewers by showing more gory news than the competition.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Monday June 25 2018, @05:52PM
Actually Murder rates are down [mises.org], nearly to historic lows. (Foreign source intentionaly sited to avoid the usual argument.)
The data source for that graph is the FBI... And it's rather odd that you would pick a data set that ends in 2014 given there's more recent data out. Hmm....I wonder why that could be...
US homicide rate spiked nearly 8% in 2016, FBI report finds [cnn.com]