| HN Mirror

I'm not the author, but I'll recap some of the points I've made all over this thread.

1) Where you claim it makes a more effective killing machine, another might easily say that it makes a much safer hunting weapon, or more easy to use for wounded, injured, disabled or handicapped hunters or veterans.

2) There are many, many ways that criminals could exploit even every day items to achieve extremely deadly results, and until we're ready to ban every single one of them (which admittedly, Mayor Bloomberg seems poised to do), we should not punish the majority for the very unlikely potential criminal use by a very small minority.

3) It's an advancement in technology that I worry may be stifled for private industry and instead hoarded for military application, which will almost certainly lead to slower development in the technology. Imagine further into the future, as the technology evolves, it might be able to distinguish between humans and potential prey. Or even perform sentiment analysis on humans to differentiate between humans at peace and humans that are actively trying to kill you.

Also, for the record, I'm not suggesting that being afraid of the potential for technology such as this is completely unreasonable, but I am arguing that in this country, at least for now, we do have a Bill of Rights that protects our right to bear arms and this, such as it is, classifies as such, and should not be bannable on the meritless assumption that every would-be shooter will now plunk down $17,000 and become a super-villain just because they can.

1) I agree you'd have to include that in the weighing of pros vs cons. I think many people who argue that this weapon should be illegal for the average person would concede that it would make sense to legalize it for people with a disability.

2) Come on, seriously? You say "even every day items". It makes less sense to ban every day items than it does to ban extravagant items that very few people, if any, need or even want. I can kill someone with a fork. More people have been killed with forks than with this weapon. Are you willing to (digitally) stand here and suggest to all of us that it doesn't make sense to ban this rifle until we ban forks?

And where is your line? Every rational person has a line at which they say "X weapon clearly should be illegal for every day people to own." So where's yours? Do you not feel high explosives should be regulated? If farmers decided sarin gas (since it was mentioned elsewhere in this conversation) was a good pesticide, would you be all for it? Wherever you draw your line, it's just as arbitrary as anyone else's.

3) I'm simply not seeing any novel technology here. Motion tracking? It's been done. Servos being controlled by a microprocessor? It's been done. Distance gauging? Trajectory adjustment? Where is the new technology that we'd all miss out on?

Regarding the note about the bill of rights, what a horribly conceived piece of writing is the second amendment. It asserts the right to "bear arms" but doesn't give any hint as to the definition of "arms". An H-bomb classifies as an "arm" just as perfectly as this firearm does. We've outgrown that short-sighted text.

You might feel that way, but I doubt if the Founders would, considering that the majority of firearms, munitions, warships and cannons used to win our independence were provided by civilians. In short though, I don't have to draw that line, as the Supreme Court has effectively already done so, as they define arms being man-portable and "in common use" as a protected class of firearms for the purposes of this debate, though as I recall, Atonin Scalia did make a casual reference to rocket launchers as being too exotic for protections to apply.

US v Miller, another landmark case regarding the second amendment, defines protected weapons as those being of use to a militia. Before we go down that rabbit hole, a milita is defined by 10 US Code § 311 as all men aged 17 to 45, and has been expanded by the Supreme Court to include women as well.

As for the tech, I agree that the individual components are nothing new, but the aggregate of the parts is something new and noteworthy. For what it's worth, I also consider the Gibson robot tuner as noteworthy, as well as the Raspberry Pi, though clearly neither was exactly groundbreaking on the grand order of things.

[0] http://www.jaegerkorps.org/NRA/The%20Revolutionary%20Charlev...

sethrin 4827 days ago

>You might feel that way, but I doubt if the Founders would, considering that the majority of firearms, munitions, warships and cannons used to win our independence were provided by civilians.

If by civilians you mean the French, you would be accurate. The idea of a civilian warship or artillery piece is as ludicrous then as now. It's not like people have this stuff just lying around the farmhouse. France spent billions of livres fighting the British in that period, more than 1 billion directly on the American conflict. It is entirely accurate to describe the Revolutionary War as a proxy war.

From the NRA's magazine[0]: >The New Hampshire shipments equipped much of the Patriot army at Saratoga in October 1777, and, by 1778, the majority of Washington’s regiments had replaced their earlier disparate mix of arms with French ones.

There is a staggering amount of historical revisionism to minimize the role of France in this war, and to omit any context or ulterior motive for them doing so. France was the world's major military power, as well as the largest and most populous country in Europe, and had been for centuries. War between England and France was more often than not the case for nearly 500 years between 1337 and 1815. The American war was by no means the largest or most important of these conflicts.

There's a reason that the treaty ending the war was signed in Paris, and it's not because of their fabulous wine and cheese spread. Speeches from the British Parliament will attest that they knew their enemies were Bourbon, and not American. Which should surprise no one except, lamentably, most Americans.

Later on, yes, many of our weapons came from France and Spain. Before that though, almost all of the arms provided (including cannons and ships) were done so by either civilian owners or confiscation.

[0] http://www.history.army.mil/books/RevWar/risch/chpt-12.htm

sethrin 4825 days ago

"Later on" being what? 1777 is year 2 of 8. All of the sources that I've been able to find give the number of foreign-supplied arms as being significantly greater than those of US manufacture. For example, the first shipment of French rifles was equal in number to more than half of the Kentucky Long Rifles ever produced, and I believe also greater than the number of rifles that the Continental Army possessed at the time. Perhaps you can supply some better numbers.

Few if any of the supplied ships were warships, fewer answered directly to the Continental Navy, and none were Ships of the Line, which meant their combat utility was, shall we say, limited. What I read here[0] about the supply of cannon is pretty dismal and does not really support your claim. It is rather abundantly clear that, to the degree that arms and equipment were contributed freely by private citizens, this happened very early in the war, and had no effect on the outcome. You may feel free to show otherwise.

So, this firearm and its particular technology not being "in common use", it would then seem reasonable to argue that it should be illegal.

You may not think the automation this gun provides is exotic enough to warrant being illegal, but surely you can agree that reasonable people could interpret "in common use" in that way?

I acknowledge that it very well could be read that way, but Alan Gura (the attorney of record in DC v Heller) held in his argument (which was confirmed by SCOTUS) that it can't be circular reasoning -- e.g., you can't ban a weapon to take it out of common use, then argue that it is not in common use because of the ban to prevent it from being unbanned.

That was, effectively the case in Heller, because DC had banned all handguns completely, making them clearly NOT in common use, which they felt allowed them to perpetuate their ban. DC's law was overturned on that logic.

That said, how do you prevent the banning of every new type of gun/handgun/rifle/taser/whatever if the claim is that "Well, it's never been sold, so it's obviously not in common use, so it can't be bannable?" In reality, this isn't even really a gun at all, but a complicated aiming system. The gun it's attached to is the Surgeon equivalent of a Robot tuner on a Gibson guitar (which is why I brought it up elsewhere). According to the ATF, the lower receiver of a gun like this is the only part that is the 'gun'. What this means is that I can buy the lower receiver by itself, with no firing group, no barrel, no butt stock, etc., and that constitutes the sale of a firearm. As such, as it seems that all the tech for this thing is basically in the reticle (except for the trigger group, which is still not technically part of the gun), this is really just an accessory.

How do I prevent the banning of every new type of gun/handgun/rifle/taser/whatever? Easy. If I'm the dictator the first thing I do is throw out that sad excuse for an amendment. It's much too vague to be useful.

People hold up the Bill of Rights as if the amendments were etched in stone by God.

Whether any given weapon should or shouldn't be legal depends on a lot of things, including the state of the country at any given time. The idea that the right to bear firearms (some arbitrary invention) belongs on the same document as eternally useful rights like the right of free speech is silly and was a huge mistake.

Downvoting well articulated arguments because they disagree with your own? Cowards.

All I can say is, wasn't me. And in fact, I've upvoted your arguments since the one accidental downvote.