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Originally posted by debaser
The next weapon the military will field will be the OICW, which fires 5.56mm ammunition, just like the M-16.
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Whereas the Germans, the Belgians, and probably a good number of other European armies to follow, will likely go with caseless.
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Do you not feel it should be a balanced against the hardship it would cause to legal gun owners?
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A balance always has to be struck, but I'm okay with a bit of hardship on legal gun owners so long as the hardship on the illegal ones is greater. This is one of the reasons that *smarter* laws, not necessarily more draconian, are what I want.
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First, no insurance company would touch that. If they did the premiums would be so outrageous that only the wealthy could afford to legaly own firearms. But why would the poor need to defend themselves. Never mind that it would be a de-facto registration of gun owners.
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Here's why I think you're wrong: a person killed in a car accident is no less dead than a person killed with a gun. The opportunities for legal action and liability are certainly no less. But insurance companies do cover vehicular liability. I believe insurance companies would touch it, and they'd make it affordable, too. The reason why is revenue. If the number of gun incidents is so much smaller than the total number of guns owned, then the insurance companies make money. It's the same thing that they do with cars. They profit because the number of vehicular liability claims is so vastly smaller than the total number of vehicles insured.
As far as the de-facto registration of gun owners, you're completely right. That's another reason why I favor it.
I think that guns should be registered much as we do cars. Cars are marked in multiple locations with their VIN, which can be removed but it's non-trivial to do so. Guns should be the same; marked in multiple locations with their "GIN". That'll cut down, if not eliminate, the ability of people to "deregister" their guns with nothng more than a Dremel tool. You pay a nominal fee every year to keep your car registered. That works for guns, too. $5 or $10 per gun per year. When you transfer a car to a new owner, you have to notify the state of that transaction. Guns should require the same process. That'll crimp one of the larger sources of criminal weapons: guns purchased legally and then transferred to a new owner without paperwork. Most folks wouldn't want to pay a fee each year for a gun they don't own, and I don't know of a whole lot of people who would be willing to do so on a large scale. Every couple of years (at least here in CA), you have to have your car smog-checked. I like the idea for guns - not a smog check, but an ownership check. Once a year you go in, the gun is scanned, your ID and paperwork are scanned with it, you hand over $5, and your gun is re-registered for another year. We voluntarily put up with these "hardships" for our cars, which can kill but not nearly so efficiently as guns. Why don't we have similar circumstances for weapons?
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The reason gun safety should be mandatory is that it is the people who wouldn't take it who are the ones who usually accidentaly shoot themselves or others. They either think they know it all already, or they never think about it at all.
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I don't disagree with this, but continue to assert that it shouldn't be a mandatory bit of school education. You wanna get a gun? Fine, take your class, pass your test, and you're set. You don't wanna get a gun? Then save yourself the hassle.
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What does the mterial the stock is made of have anything to do with it at all?
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It doesn't. The fact that the gun stock is made of wood was something I put in there to make my hypothetical assault weapon more believable. After all, this was a small gun-maker, quite likely without the opportunity to make polycarbonate weapons.
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I never said I agreed with the law. I was just trying to show you that if you wanted to arbitrarily toss around a term as loaded as "assault weapon' (no pun intended), that you might want to understand what one is, or at least what the rest of the people involved in this debate (on a national level) consider one to be.
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I was rather well aware of the gun laws, actually, before you posted the text. My point was that that law is swiss-cheesed with holes. Therefore, it's an arbitrary definition. If I'm going to be confronted with one person's arbitrary definition and my own, I'll use my own, thanks. I'm quite aware that some may disagree. That's why my definition was originally presented as just that:
my personal definition. By the way, if you don't agree with the law, that means you have your own personal definition of what an assault weapon is. Pretty arbitrary, I'd say.
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You also now know that the definition is completely arbitrary, having nothing to do with the capabilities of the weapon in question.
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Which is exactly why it needs to be fixed. Smarter laws that scale to fit evolving circumstances, not more and more laws, more rigidly defined.
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Why not, but the death penalty if the victim dies.
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Not the death penalty (except perhaps in egregious cases), mainly because I don't really think too highly of the death penalty as it exists today. Too many questions and too many problems. I also tend to think that life imprisonment is a fate worse than death, which suits me just fine. At least there's no real way of quibbling with the definition of "life imprisonment without the possibility of parole or reprieve".