- California authorities found a man illegally owning 248 guns and 1 million rounds of ammo.
- The state attorney general said he also had 3,000 magazines and several grenades in his home.
- The guns included 11 machine guns, 133 handguns, and 60 assault rifles, authorities said.
Lemmy Users: Gun control works great! Machine guns are illegal so nobody will have any, we are all safe!
California man: Hold my beer…
Gun control does work great, when implemented on a national level.
Literally no science to support the notion it doesn’t.
Only brainwashed Americans think it doesn’t work.
The US has the right to bear arms enshrined in our constitution. I don’t need any justification beyond it is my right. Feel free to give away you personal rights in your own country, I could care less.
Gun control doesn’t work because criminals don’t pay attention to laws. The only people who will follow the law are the non-criminals.
Of course they do. They make the same calculation you do when you decide to drive over the speed limit: how likely am I to get caught, how serious will it be if I get caught, do I really need to take this risk, etc. That’s why some criminals only break the speed limit, other criminals only steal things from empty stores, other criminals inflate the value of their real estate holdings to get cheap loans, commit campaign fraud to hide an affair with a porn star, and then attempt to launch a coup to stay in power.
Let’s look at how similar criminals might make a decision about using a gun as part of their crime in London vs. St. Louis.
Pretty much any crime done with a gun increases penalties here in the US.
That is a nicely organized wall of text, you seem to have put a lot of effort into it. Too bad it is mostly opinion and isn’t true.
Merely possessing a firearm while committing a crime in St Louis is a class D felony and is punishable by up to 7 years in prison and a $10,000 fine.
Using a firearm in a criminal offense is also a class D felony and is punishable by up to 15 years in prison depending upon the criminal history of the defendant. In the US multiple crimes can stack the charges. So a defendant could be looking at a lifetime conviction.
Some very basic Googling would have revealed this to you. Most of this can be found under MO statute 571.
I’m not an expert on UK law but from some more basic googling it seems the laws range from 7 years for purchasing to life for the actual use of a firearm.
Once again laws don’t deter criminals, they just punish honest citizens.
That’s an idiotic point of view. There aren’t “criminals” and “non-criminals”. Virtually everybody is a criminal, it’s just that most people only break minor laws, like running red lights, infringing copyrights, littering, etc. Those people don’t break other laws because the risk vs. reward calculation doesn’t work out for them.
Even a big criminal like Donald Trump who has broken dozens if not hundreds of laws isn’t out shooting people because that’s not the kind of crime he does.
There isn’t some magic switch that turns someone from “honest citizen” to “criminal”, it’s a whole spectrum of law breaking. Even that old lady who goes to church every day probably goes faster than the speed limit, parks illegally, etc. For someone in the middle of the spectrum, say someone who cheats on their taxes, tries to scam old church-going ladies out of their money, etc. there are kinds of crimes they’ll do, and other kinds of crimes they won’t do.
Way at the criminal end of the spectrum, you have people who commit violent crimes. But, not every violent crime involves a gun. Muggers and carjackers don’t always use guns because the extra punishment is a slight deterrent. So, the law deters them. However, since the US is a society of gun nuts, it doesn’t offer as much of a deterrent as it would in some place like the UK or Japan.
You mean you “couldn’t care less”, not you “could care less”.
Dear America — David Mitchell’s soapbox
You’re repeating bad NRA propaganda. There is zero evidence that gun control doesn’t work, and a literal fuckton of evidence that it does.
So be brainwashed if you will, but there is literally no science at all to support your side, so you’re essentially worse than a Flat Earther in this argument. Since they at least offer attempts at explaining their insanity. You don’t, you just say something without having any actual evidence for it.
https://epirev.oxfordjournals.org/content/38/1/140.full.pdf+html
Interesting point, post us up some sources on that. I’d hate to be talking out my ass or ya know, making shit up.
Unless you consider the illegal acquisition of 248 guns to be evidence that it doesn’t work.
Is it more difficult to bring something into the country across the border, or to transport an item between two states?
If it isn’t obvious to you that only banning something on the state level is SIGNIFICANTLY less effective than nationally, I can only assume you’ve never actually left the country.
Saw a police shooting video recently where the suspect barricaded in a car with a hostage. Suspect returned fire (full auto).
After the police shot him and freed the hostage, they went to clear the gun. It was a full auto HK UMP, which civilians in the US cannot legally buy or possess in any practical scenario (yes I am aware a SOT could have one for LE demonstration but that’s relatively rare and not what this was).
In other words full auto MGs are being used by criminals who have cartel connections. The cartels get them from Mexican or South/Central American police and military who either are corrupted and resell the weapons, or are overt criminals themselves.
US has created a clown world where middle class software engineers are being hassled by the feds over having a braced AR pistol. ATF has jailed people over a drawing on a flat piece of metal. Meanwhile criminal element are running around with full auto UMPs and illegally modified Glocks. It is the exact opposite of what should be happening.
In other words… you had to make it clear that the weapon wasn’t legal, and even then you had to admit that there were some scenarios where it might be legal.
Here’s how that sentence would go in a sane countr:
“It was a gun, and not a hunting gun, so obviously illegal.”
When civilians can legally own a whole variety of guns, including guns that look nearly identical to the ones that are illegal, it’s a lot easier for people to get their hands on the illegal guns. England doesn’t have this problem. Japan doesn’t have this problem. Even Canada doesn’t have this problem. It’s not that there aren’t criminals in those places, it’s that gun control laws work.
You’re not making the point you think you are. That fringe scenario I described has no statistical significance in terms of crime. It is a special subset of dealers that demonstrate weapons to police customers. I guarantee you England, Canada and Japan also have some process for this, and it doesn’t impact their crime rates in any meaningful way either.