Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by fc417fc802 98 days ago
> they serve no real purpose, the only activity that requires high fire rates and larger magazines ...

Did the Australian ban of "military style" rifles include a blanket clause that covers all semi-automatic fire? Or is it an almost entirely aesthetic category as it tends to be whenever such measures are proposed in the US?

When it comes to automatic fire there's a rather famous US case where someone was ultimately convicted for possessing a shoelace (IIRC) attached to some fastening hardware. As to larger magazines, those probably don't even meet the bar for an introductory level highschool shop project.
1 comments
AngryData 98 days ago
From what I understand most semi-auto guns are banned in Australia, but of course they never had a ton of those to start with. But there are still plenty of pump action, lever action, bolt action, etc guns which aren't meaningfully less capable. Shooting twice as fast doesn't mean you can kill twice as fast because you can't aim twice as fast. Like the majority of guns Afgan insurgents had were 60 year old bolt-actions which were quite obviously still capable enough to be deadly even to the top military in the world.
link
fc417fc802 97 days ago
> but of course they never had a ton of those to start with.

Really? The vast majority of weapons in the US are semi-auto so I find this difficult to believe.

> the majority of guns Afgan insurgents had were 60 year old bolt-actions

Were they? I would expect they were AK-47 and similar although I've never looked into it.

link
defrost 97 days ago
> so I find this difficult to believe.

Extrapolating from experience in the USofA to other countries in the world is generally not a good move.

The actual numbers, from the time, suggest maybe 10-15% of guns in Australia were "self loading"

( 20% of guns purchased back, not all were semi-automatic, a good many were old unwanted guns that now faced a registration fee if kept )

From a US academic type study that looked at the Australian (and other) gun buyback scheme post Port Arthur.

  Between 1996 and 1997,643,726 prohibited firearms were handed in.

  Prices were set to reflect "fair value" (market value). Individuals with permits could also turn in firearms that they had failed to register.

  Total public expenditures were about $A320 million ($U.S. 230 million33), approximately $A500 ($U.S. 359) per gun. The buyback program was financed by an additional 0.2 percent levy on national health insurance.

  Estimates of the total stock of guns were few and drew on limited survey data.

  Estimates ranged as high as 11 million, but the high figures had no known provenance. Gun Control Australia cited a figure of about 4.25 million, building on the only academic estimate, then roughly twenty years old.

  The most targeted population survey of gun ownership was conducted by Newspoll; the resulting estimate was approximately 2.5 million firearms in 1997, after the gun buyback.

  If that is approximately correct, it suggests that there were about 3.2 million firearms in 1996 and that the buyback led to the removal of approximately 20 percent of the total stock.

  In U.S. terms that would be equivalent to the removal of 40 million firearms
~ https://popcenter.asu.edu/sites/g/files/litvpz3631/files/pro...

( Note: I skimmed it, it looks more or less okay, several things caught my eye as problematic but the above passage looks pretty ballpark.

Further: I'm having busy days ATM - if I can claw out the time I might loop back to give a longer comment / reply to your upthread question(s) )

link