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From military weapon to cultural symbol: how the AR-15 has defined the US gun debate
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2023
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From the piece,
This question is based on a false premise. Neither the Colt AR-15, nor the ArmaLite AR-15 have ever been used "on battlefields".
The man speaks truth. Gun bans aren't going to make anyone, except for police and criminals, safer.
I think it's based on "AR-15" being both a trademark describing specific products and a design pattern for a family of firearms where most components interchange between different manufacturers and models.
The US military M16 rifle and M4 carbine Are AR-15-pattern firearms, and military sales represented the bulk of early sales.
Of course the main difference being that AR15s are semi auto, and M16s and m4s are select fire with an option for full auto or burst, y'know, the thing that is actually functionally different but everyone wants to pretend they don't understand that to make the gun involved in .2% of gun deaths a year more scary so they can drum up support for a ban.
It's relatively easy to convert a semi-automatic AR-15 to fully-automatic. A quick web search suggests an M16 fire control group can be ordered for about $50 online, and installation in an AR-15 requires only drilling a hole. Of course, drilling that hole is illegal.
What's interesting about that is I can't recall hearing about a mass shooter doing it.
Shooting people indiscriminately in a public place is also illegal and they don't seem tp have any compunctions against that.
You write:
However, Wikipedia disagrees, citing use of the AR-15 by South Vietnam:
That is accurate, but it glosses over the designation change. It is noted in the same article:
The version of the AR-15 that was sent overseas in 1961 was fully automatic. The trademark was retained for semi-automatic rifles and there are functional differences in the rifles mentioned.
Yes, it was titled as an AR-15, but it was not a civilian version. The difference is fully automatic vs. semi-automatic here, names aside.
Ah, interesting. I didn't know that a small number of them were actually tested in Vietnam.
This incorrect statement that you pointed out is really, really important. I would say its blatant falsehood, written so plainly in an editorial, is the cornerstone of why gun control laws are not being taken seriously by everyone. Talking heads that rehearse talking points without credibility.
Let's be clear: everyone wants gun safety and responsible laws. What safety and laws mean varies between different people and different political spectrums, however, if responsible people obtain guns more of the time, and gun ownership is reduced in groups that shouldn't own them, then everyone wins. This would mean that there would be less legal hesitance for people to own a gun who want them, and less gun violence, which is ultimately the point.
If inaccurate rhetorics are repeated by politicians and the media (like how AR-15s are used "in the battlefield"), then gun owners and parties that align more with gun ownership will very quickly and appropriately dismiss these concerns, because they are inaccurate. Not only does it not make progress, but it discredits those looking to increase gun safety, because they very blatantly don't have their facts straight.
Funny how the rest of the First World disagrees, and somehow they have far, far fewer mass shootings. But why allow facts get in the way of a cherished rhetoric?
@baldprophet:
And then @spaceghoti:
This is how 2A debates always fucking go, amd have done for decades. Progress will never be made so long as both sides keep ignoring the real goalposts and keep talking past each other instead of listening.
I'll do my best to break this down for both of you chucklefucks:
Baldprophet, it's immaterial if gun bans will make anyone safer or not. The 2A is an Amendment, not a law, which is why gun bans are unconstitutional and an Amendment is required instead. Nothing in the 2A is predicated on safety.
Spaceghoti, it's immaterial how many mass shootings we have. The 2A is an Amendment, not a law, which is why gun bans are unconstitutional and an Amendment is required instead. Nothing in the 2A is predicated on the number of mass shootings we have.
Spaceghoti, you get a second blurb, because Baldprophet brought up the irrelevant safety issue, and then you moved the goalpost. Unless safety and mass shootings are synonymous, which is not something you established in your post, your response to Baldprophet is a non sequitur and utterly irrelevant even to their irrelevant nonsense.
Here's why I don't give a rat's ass about your analysis. The Second Amendment has been interpreted to hold gun ownership as sacrosanct, and it's bullshit. It doesn't say that. Here's what it does say:
Interpreted one way, the way we currently interpret it, there's no way to infringe on the right to own guns. Interpreted another way, the right is to participate in a militia and thus to own and maintain guns for the purposes of national defense. Somehow, all the 2A freaks seem to skip over the first part.
I'm concerned about how guns are being used to create and escalate violence across the nation in numbers we've never seen before. We're the only first world nation in the world that can't seem to figure out the simple and obvious solution that guns don't make us safer. It doesn't save lives. The proliferation of guns among the civilian population has only increased violence, and I really don't give a shit about any other argument.
Until the gun worshipers stop getting in the way of any kind of commonsense reform, up to and including a new Amendment to clarify or repeal the Second Amendment, I will continue to advocate for the banning of all guns. Because I consider human lives far more important than someone's fetish.
And that's all I have to say to all of you.
That’s one interpretation. Let’s see if the founding fathers wrote anything else to clarify what they meant…
"A free people ought not only to be armed, but disciplined..."
"No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms."
"I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery."
"What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance. Let them take arms."
"The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes.... Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man."
"A strong body makes the mind strong. As to the species of exercises, I advise the gun. While this gives moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprise and independence to the mind. Games played with the ball, and others of that nature, are too violent for the body and stamp no character on the mind. Let your gun therefore be your constant companion of your walks." - Thomas Jefferson, letter to Peter Carr, August 19, 1785
"The Constitution of most of our states (and of the United States) assert that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves; that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed."
"On every occasion [of Constitutional interpretation] let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying [to force] what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, [instead let us] conform to the probable one in which it was passed."
"I enclose you a list of the killed, wounded, and captives of the enemy from the commencement of hostilities at Lexington in April, 1775, until November, 1777, since which there has been no event of any consequence ... I think that upon the whole it has been about one half the number lost by them, in some instances more, but in others less. This difference is ascribed to our superiority in taking aim when we fire; every soldier in our army having been intimate with his gun from his infancy."
"To disarm the people...[i]s the most effectual way to enslave them."
"I ask who are the militia? They consist now of the whole people, except a few public officers."
"Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed, as they are in almost every country in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops."
"Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of."
"The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the best and most natural defense of a free country."
"...the ultimate authority, wherever the derivative may be found, resides in the people alone..."
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
“A militia when properly formed are in fact the people themselves…and include, according to the past and general usuage of the states, all men capable of bearing arms… "To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them."
"Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are ruined.... The great object is that every man be armed. Everyone who is able might have a gun."
"The supposed quietude of a good man allures the ruffian; while on the other hand, arms, like law, discourage and keep the invader and the plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property. The balance ofpower is the scale of peace. The same balance would be preserved were all the world destitute of arms, for all would be alike; but since some will not, others dare not lay them aside. And while a single nation refuses to lay them down, it is proper that all should keep them up. Horrid mischief would ensue were one-half the world deprived of the use of them; for while avarice and ambition have a place in the heart of man, the weak will become a prey to the strong. The history of every age and nation establishes these truths, and facts need but little arguments when they prove themselves."
"The Constitution shall never be construed to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms."
"The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers; and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them."
"What, Sir, is the use of a militia? It is to prevent the establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty .... Whenever Governments mean to invade the rights and liberties of the people, they always attempt to destroy the militia, in order to raise an army upon their ruins."
"For it is a truth, which the experience of ages has attested, that the people are always most in danger when the means of injuring their rights are in the possession of those of whom they entertain the least suspicion."
"If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is then no resource left but in the exertion of that original right of self-defense which is paramount to all positive forms of government, and which against the usurpations of the national rulers, may be exerted with infinitely better prospect of success than against those of the rulers of an individual state. In a single state, if the persons intrusted with supreme power become usurpers, the different parcels, subdivisions, or districts of which it consists, having no distinct government in each, can take no regular measures for defense. The citizens must rush tumultuously to arms, without concert, without system, without resource; except in their courage and despair."
"[I]f circumstances should at any time oblige the government to form an army of any magnitude that army can never be formidable to the liberties of the people while there is a large body of citizens, little, if at all, inferior to them in discipline and the use of arms, who stand ready to defend their own rights and those of their fellow-citizens. This appears to me the only substitute that can be devised for a standing army, and the best possible security against it, if it should exist."
"As civil rulers, not having their duty to the people before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as the military forces which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow citizens, the people are confirmed by the article in their right to keep and bear their private arms."
Yes, let's hear what rich white misogynist racist's said about muskets hundreds of years ago. Definitely should hold importance nowadays.
OP was making an argument based on the constitution, I was simply working within the framework they established to make a counterargument. I could have just as easily quoted Marx, Che, Malcolm X, or any of dozens of others of more modern political icons of the left that understand what happens to a populace once they’ve been disarmed. Spoiler alert: they say the same things the framers of the constitution said.
As far as their moral failings, they were a product of their time. 200 years from now you will be remembered as a savage, ignorant moron too. That’s of course assuming you do anything with your life worth remembering 200 years from now…
The fastest growing segment of gun owners in the US is women and LGBTQ+ people, and it’s not because their heart isn’t breaking whenever a school gets shot up. It’s because they know that guns are never going away, and the right is not getting any less violent, so you better be prepared to protect yourself, because those fascist cops don’t give a fuck about you.
Thank you for making my point so thoroughly. They believed in strong, disciplined militias. And they never imagined the horrors of modern weapons technology inflicted on civilian populations by fellow civilians.
If that’s your takeaway then I suggest you return to grade school and have them teach you how to read again, because the whole comprehension part seems to have sailed right over your head.
It may help with his reading comprehension to use the text in an analogy, like:
"A well balanced breakfast, being necessary to the start of a healthy day, the right of the people to keep and eat food shall not be infringed."
This way it is clear, "a well balanced breakfast" isn't who has the right to keep and eat food, "the people" are, because breakfast is important.
Sure, if you're operating on a third grade reading level.
Dang I was 100% with you until the last paragraph, taking hard-stances just makes people dig-in their heels.
I want access to guns so my trans/PoC/whatever friends can never have their rights taken away. So if a round of J6'ers is ever successful, they can resist.
That being said of course there should be some reasonable laws, you probably shouldn't be able to pick up a sport-type rifle same-day by just answering a few questions on a questionnaire; we make people get licenses and prove they can drive, I'm not sure guns should be any different.
Driving a car isn't a right enshrined in the constitution. Owning a firearm, however, is.
Except arming your trans/PoC friends is likely to get them killed even more than when they don't. The presence of guns escalates violence, far more often than it de-escalates.
Furthermore, arming everyone increases the chances that innocent bystanders will get hit. Or do you think everyone ever hit by a bullet was its target? The myth about the "good guy with a gun" is exactly that: a myth. The good guys don't hit their targets with that much accuracy. I'm sorry if this ruined anyone's "Die Hard" fantasies, but those fantasies are literally killing people every day.
So if we take away guns, only criminals will have guns, right. Sure, I'll concede that. Those with guns will be criminals. They'll also be far less likely to shoot you while they commit a crime because they'll have no reason to think you're going to shoot them first. I would rather be robbed than shot. I can get more money. I can't get more life.
Last, I find it curious that you took my conditional statement as an absolute. I pointed out that in light of the unwillingness of 2A freaks to consider any compromise, my only option is to demand all guns be taken away. What other choice do I have? If compromise were possible then I would accept that. I'm not going to make perfect the enemy of good. But thanks to the gun lobby and the Federalist Society, we can't have any restrictions on gun ownership and zero discussion on the impact guns are having on the health of our society. To balance that extreme, it is necessary for people who care about human lives to go to the other extreme.
When gun advocates are finally willing to acknowledge the problems they're creating, I'm willing to talk. Until then, I see no reason why I should give any more ground than they are.
Your dogmatic fundamentalism prevents your words from being persuasive.
I don't have the words to describe how much that hurts my feelings.
Sorry bud, but safety is absolutely a factor. The top mass murders of the 20th century (body counts in tens of millions) were preceded by the disarmament of the targeted groups by the government. The Second Amendment exists to help prevent that kind of thing happening here.
As long as the police are generally corrupt and unreliable, and as long as the United States has a standing army, there will never be an amendment revoking the right to keep and bear arms. If such an amendment does come to pass, there will be a civil war and likely an end to the American experiment.
This is the most stupid "argument" in this discussion so far. As if a bunch of armed civilian loonies could prevent the government from going rogue.
See: Vietnam. See: Afghanistan.
Both of these countries laugh at that notion.
And Iraq. And Syria. Or, shit, France in the late 18th C.
The rest of the First World are entitled to their irrelevant opinions. They are also free to actually state facts and share sources.
I'm glad you asked!
Thanks.
What would you suggest as an alternative to a ban, since letting people shoot up schools, churches, and bowling alleys isn't tenable.
Well, hey, I'm glad you asked!
Let's start with something that should be obvious, but isn't: mass murders are a tiny percentage of all the murders in the US annually. Seriously. If you remove ordinary crime (e.g., gang violence, robberies, fight at a party, etc.) and domestic violence from the mass shootings, you end up with a total of about 100 people killed in 2022, out of a total of 19,200 murders (assuming I'm reading the most recent numbers correctly), or about .5% of all murders.
Murder rates are, in turn, dwarfed by suicides; there are typically 2-3x as many completed suicides as there are murders of all types.
When you look at murder rates broken down by weapon type, rifles account for approximately 5% of gun homicides. (Although 32% of the firearm homicides don't specify what kind of firearm is used, it seems likely that it roughly approximates the other numbers.) So it's clear that rifles--including AR-15 rifles--are not the primary driver of gun homicide numbers, or even a particularly large one.
So, given that gun deaths are suicides, and most gun homicides are some subset of ordinary crime (rather than mass-murder/active shooter events), the greatest effects are going to be seen in measures that reduce crimes in general.
So, if you really want to reduce the overall death rate, the first and biggest thing to do would be to have some form of national healthcare that is able to quickly and efficiently get help to people that are suicidal.
If you want to reduce the murder rate, then you need to look at things that drive crime. I suspect that you'd get large reductions by focusing on significant reductions in income inequalities, elimination of poverty, national healthcare (including access to mental healthcare), education reform (esp. elimination of private/home/selective schooling, and properly funding public schools), criminal justice and policing reform, and housing that costs less than 25% of a single adult's take-home pay. Most ordinary crime is from desperation or hopelessness, and violence is a result of that ordinary crime. Beyond that, you'd need to look at ways of reducing or eliminating systemic racism and misogyny, as both are underlying motivators for racially- and gender-motivated crime. (Which partially goes back to public education.)
In order to prevent violence before it happens, without trampling on civil rights, we need to make society more equitable and just for everyone, and we need a strongly progressive tax system to pay for it, with the highest marginal tax rates going back to pre-Nixon levels.
Yes, I've heard this one before. "It doesn't happen that often so we don't need to do anything about it." That's a classic.
And the best part is people who like guns don't even vote for better mental health care or improved education or anything that will actually reduce gun deaths. They just vote against any restrictions on gun ownership.
Republicans are generally against any kind of gov't intervention to correct underlying causalities, that much is true. OTOH, Dems say they support fixing underlying issues, but even states with Democratic supermajorities are unwilling to address systemic problems, and simply go after banning guns. Take housing issues, for instance; it's a plank of the nat'l Democratic party that there should be affordable housing available to everyone. But when majority Democratic cities try to approve affordable housing, Democrats turn up in opposition to it, because NIMBY. Dems say that they want to do certain things, things that would be good for everyone, but then they can't get support in their own party to actually do those things. Republicans just don't give a fuck about helping people. Despite the base of Dems favoring reducing funding for law enforcement and being in favor of criminal justice reform, the party as a whole keeps increasing funding for cops without doing shit for social programs. Hey, here's another example - my former city, Chicago, has been overwhelmingly Democratic for something like 40 years. My former therapist in Chicago had worked with a community mental health program, helping people with chronic homelessness etc., until funding was cut for the programs, and he lost his job. Who cut the funding? Democrats. Who cut the funding in Chicago for violence prevention/intervention programs that were showing significant reduction in violent crime? Democrats. Who kept voting to move money away from public schools to charter and magnet schools in Chicago? Yet again: Democrats.
So don't give me that shit about Republicans being the only ones voting against actually fixing problems.
I believe that "gun free zones" should only exist with the presence of robust security systems. Having an easily-entered school with little, if any physical security designated as a "gun free zone" makes it a target for the fringe minority of people who have a desire to commit mass murder.
I also think that more meaningful social improvements need to be made, including addressing housing affordability, wealth equality, access to affordable health care, and addressing the decades-long mental health crisis.
I won't ever be supportive of a ban on guns for the same reason the United States refuses to sign on to certain arms treaties (such as the ones against cluster munitions and land mines): I refuse to go along with anything that would limit my ability to defend myself. The government won't guarantee my safety, so why should I give up the most effective tool for preventing myself from being a victim of violence?
I don't care what you wouldn't be supportive of. I care that the only people who seem to want to do anything about this are the ones pushing gun bans. The people who like guns don't seem to give a shit, at least not based on how they vote.
Also, once we harden targets like schools, won't they move on to softer ones like grocery stores, churches, and night clubs?
Flip side of that argument: Once we ban guns, won't they just find other weapons to commit murder with? I'm confident that they will.
Ah, and now we're back the good ol' "But then they'll use knives" argument.
Round and round we go, ever since Columbine