My sister's daughter's schoolmate was just murdered by her father, who then killed her mom before himself. That doesn't happen in Europe. A culture accepting such gun prevalence reflects its religious disregard for this life.

I'm sorry that happened to you man.

I will say that this country's disregard for life is evidenced not just in gun prevalence but the public health care system, economic and racial inequality, the military and prison industrial complex, the care for the homeless, the disabled, and pretty much everything this country does.

We love to lie about christian values, but in reality this country values self interested corporatism and capitalism. The rest is just lipservice and wishful thinking, or lies we tell ourselves to keep numb to the atrocity we live in.

I'm sorry that happened. I've lost two close friends to drunk driving when I was in high school and I can't imagine your nieces pain.

Misread this as "lost two close friends to drunk driving when i was high in school"

I lost two close highs when I was driving in drunk school.

Not trying to downplay it, but I'm pretty sure that murder-suicide happens everywhere...

Yes, though far more often in the US than in Europe or wherever else loose guns are rare, making both murder and suicide much more difficult to actualize, allowing people more time to calm down or flee. Every American should know this, with many accepting it for religious reasons.

What's the murder rate in your city? Mine is 0.8

USA #1 !

I don't personally want one but I don't like this.

What animal do need that rate of fire to shoot?

Guns aren't just for hunting.

And automatic weapons have only one purpose...anything else is just practicing in order to perform their primary mission...to kill human beings. No one said you can't own a fully automatic weapon...hell a 50cal if you want one... just get a license. You can't order one off Amazon with a only a credit card.

Automatic is different from machine gun. Automatic means that it puts a new round in the chamber and readies it to fire automatically. With a falling block action you have to drop the block, pull out the spent cartridge, out a new one in, close the action and then cock the hammer. A bolt action combines all those actions with pulling the bolt back and moving it back forward. A machine gun does all those actions and fires again until you stop it by either letting go of the trigger or in the case of a minigun disconnecting power to the motor.

You can own a machine gun without wanting to murder people. Maybe you would only use it for that objective. There is also hog hunting and just having fun. It isn't my cup of tea but then again neither is gay sex, abortion, throwing rocks, or racing.

You can't "just get a license". That isn't the law. The machine guns that were already in peoples hands before the machine gun ban in 1968 are exempt but anything made after that are not legal. You can't get a NFA tax stamp for a bump stock. In 2010 the price of one of those preban machine guns was $16k. They go for around $25k-30k now and that is before paper work and taxes. You also have to have an special FFL handle it and write the ATF whenever you want to move it.

The usage of the term automatic may vary according to context. Gun specialists point out that the word automatic is sometimes misunderstood to mean fully automatic fire when used to refer to a self-loading, semi-automatic firearm not capable of fully automatic fire. In this case, automatic refers to the loading mechanism, not the firing capability.

The term "automatic pistol" almost exclusively refers to a semi-automatic (i.e. not fully automatic) pistol. With handguns, the term "automatic" is commonly used to distinguish semi-automatic pistols from revolvers. The term "auto-loader" may also be used to describe a semi-automatic handgun. However, to avoid confusion, the term "automatic rifle" is generally, conventionally and best restricted to a rifle capable of fully automatic fire. Both uses of the term "automatic" can be found; the exact meaning must be determined from context.

--https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-automatic_firearm#Fully_automatic_compared_to_semi-automatic

This is part of that moving baseline. Damn words keep changing meanings. I've heard of lever cation rifles being called semiautomatic. Wikipedia tends to have a liberal slant do to demographics. Until last year I had never heard of fully automatic. And gun owners have no control of what terminology is being used. It is all NRA (ridiculously scare mongers), less informed news writers and anti gun groups that are defining the conversation.

You hadn't? I heard about fully automatic when I took my rifle shooting merit badge back in the 90s. We didn't fire any, but it was part of the basic education.

I probably learned the term from the war novels, "men's adventure" stories, and coffee table books about military hardware that were a staple of red-blooded American boys in the early 80s.

Also, I don't think I've ever heard anyone call a semi-automatic hand gun an "automatic" outside of 1940s detective fiction.

I grew up in southern California. Everyone that I was around who thought me about guns were very technical and it is not talked about casually here. I had several friends who weren't allowed to play with toy guns in the 80s. So if you were into gun you had to be all in. I've known one guy who owns one pistol just because. Everyone else who owns guns competes, hunts multiple times a year, or collects guns. Most of the guys that I learned from are well into there 80s now. Maybe this has colored my view and given me an older more technical nomenclature.

I grew up in the part of California where a trip to the "big city" meant Yreka, then Alaska and rural Washington State. All of my male relatives owned and used guns recreationally, several of them used them professionally at some point in their lives, and one was a legit off-the-grid, log cabin-dwelling Alaskan mountain man for whom hunting wasn't a sport but a means of basic survival.

I'm not a gun-hating pinko socialist because I'm afraid of or uneducated about guns, I'm a gun-hating pinko socialist because I want to see my country join the civilized world.

I respect that.

Do Army technical manuals also have a liberal slant? This one, from 1969, refers to the M1918A2 as " a fully automatic, air-cooled, gas-operated, magazine fed, shoulder-type weapon."

I didn't read a lot of military rifle technical manuals, but as a military lawyer I have read a lot of military manuals technical or otherwise as well as military literature in general and liberal slant is not something i'd ascribe to any of the writing. If I tried to put a political slant label on it, it'd almost certainly be conservative, but most of it wasn't politically slanted in anyway except for ways that make the military, its tools, and its mission look enviable.

The m1918a2 is the military designation for what is more commonly called the browning automatic rifle, or bar. Most definately a fully automatic firearm.

The government in WWI also bought enough kits, not sure if they were made by Browning that you would pull the bolt on the service rifle (bolt action) insert in place and it would fire some type of postal ammunition automatic fire. Only bought to test and never put to mass production. Think the shortcoming was the limeted ammunition it had the capacity for.

Do you know anymore details on this? I've never heard of this. Sounds like a weird skunkworks lets see if we can kind save money and not buy new guns when new guns would be cheaper to make work right anyway.

The BAR would be called a light machine gun these days.

This info is from " Book of rifles" stackpolepress( arm of the NRA) copyright 48, 60, 63. Page443. Ok, won't go through the learning curve to post the photo of the page as it is fairly short. U S RIFLE CALIBER .30. M1903 Mark I
This designation indicates the standard Model 1903 rifle as altered to accommodate the Pedersen Device.It is designed to permit removal of the regular bolt and instant replacement by a special bolt assymbly to convert the rifle into a blowback automatic weapon. The device shoots a .30 caliber straight taper rimless cartridge of pistol type.the bullet takes the rifling of the standard Model 1903 rifle. Very few of these devices are now in existance.

Wikipedia has a nice entry on the Pedersen device, but it states it iis-was just auto loading and not fully automatic. My bad. Sorry

https://firearmshistory.blogspot.com/2010/12/pistols-machine-pistols.html
In both scouts and NRA training I never heard "automatic pistol", and would of felt it was a weird way of saying a Machine Pistol due to automatic being shorthand for fully-auto or burst fire in particular.

I feel like part of this issue is a good chunk of gun culture explicitly liking the fact that it is hard to learn about guns in a thorough way; As well as trying and keep it that way because it makes them feel self righteous in there expertise. Unfortunately these are often the same people who try and quiz someone on obscure trivia to shut down conversations on guns immediately.

Automatic pistol was what they were called before machine pistols became a thing. At that time pistol implied a revolver. I'm not a doctor but I don't think poisonous should mean the same thing as venomous. Conflating automatic with machine gun (especially when I was only talking about rifles) is a like anti abortion people calling it murder. Framing the discussion with words is trying to define the discussion. So if you don't know what you are talking about at least read the link you provide.

The Browning Automatic Rifle entered service 100 years ago. That's a pretty longstanding precedent for calling a machine gun an automatic rifle. (But you're right that we shouldn't conflate the terms, because not all automatic rifles are machine guns; some of them are capable of fully-automatic firing but aren't designed for continuous firing the way machine guns are.)

It seems to me that if we're calling a rifle that keeps firing as long as you hold the trigger down an "automatic rifle" it only makes sense for consistency's sake to use the term "automatic" the same way when referring to pistols.

And really, as a pro-gun person, you should be in favor of that, because "semi-automatic" sounds less scary than "automatic".

The Bar was called an automatic because the military had belt feed machine guns at the time and didn't want them confused. The BAR name also covers the entire family of rifles and they built a non machine gun semi-auto versions. So all of this is to say that I don't like the term automatic rifle. There is little reason to use "fully automatic" when the word machine gun is what is meant. Semi-automatic or semi-auto is fine. Sub machine gun is a machine gun that uses pistol cartridge. Assault rifle means a select fire rifle with an intermediate cartridge. Battle Rifle is a full size rifle and that is regardless of what kind of action it uses.
Pistols use entirely different names because the development was different. We don't really say rifled barreled pistol even though that was a huge leap in accuracy but we didn't keep using smooth bore like we did with rifles (shotgun is a smooth bore rifle) we went from what we now call black powder pistols (they have problems with rifling to cap and ball revolvers and they have rifling because the . Then cartridge revolvers that we now commonly call revolvers. After that the French developed the first automatic pistols and we called ours the same thing. Machine pistols are significantly different the submachine guns on a technical level but have gotten closer to each other in function and use. The Kriss Vector is a prime example, I would classify it as submachine gun but it could easily be a machine pistol or in the semi-automatic a carbine but I wouldn't call it a pistol or an automatic.
So I guess I agree with you. I prefer calling an AR15 a semi-automatic but calling it an automatic doesn't mean it is a machine gun necessarily. And calling an AR15 sporting rifle Fully-Automatic isn't technically wrong while giving the impression that it is a machine gun. It doesn't help that an 11/64th inch pin on the receiver is the only outward visual difference from an AR15(configured to look like an M4) and an actual M4.
Sorry this is so rambling I wrote it at work over the course of a few hours while doing other things.

I am older than many here. Child of the sixties, born early fifties. Read magazines and fictional n from the forties and fifties. Automatic, was used with pistol then to designate an auto loading pistol. In the twenties and thirties a fully automatic pistol was usually called a machine pistol. With modern low end fiction, it is supprising the number of authors that don't know the difference between a auto loading pistol and a revolver.

Was there something in the link you thought I skiped over? I forgot to give context but that's the blog my local scout group recommends for its leaders to review and was going to recommend you check out its articles on out of use actions, they are very interesting.

As for terms, I feel like seperating the term automatic to refer to mode of fire and being specific about the kind of action is better if you want a discriptive angle. Also I feel like framing this was is actually less scary to most people and is better for the anti-gun control out side of those modes of fire.

It is an incredibly cool blog. I'm going to lose a few hours to it for sure. I just don't like the term fully automatic because it can be technically correct to label a semi-auto rifle fully automatic and not mean a machine gun. Browning Automatic Rifle has semi-auto veriants. And an automatic pistol is semi-auto. If we call machine guns (M4) fully automatic and AR15s automatic then it easy to conflate the two. One has been effectively off the market for 85 years but is TV and movies and the other one is effectively the same as all hunting rifles that aren't bolt actions.
Thank you again for that blog.

I mean a fully automatic weapon, admittedly a bumpstock is a poor imitation of a fully automatic weapon but it is way to much firepower for sport or hunting and there is a need to make the technology less available to the public in general.

This is one of those things I said the gun culture had to bend on or someday face the "Australian" option. If the law about ownership of automatic weapons is too restrictive change the law. The more the gun culture resist small things like this the more pressure there will be on guns in general and the more it paints you a unreasonable reactionaries.

Here is an cute comic version of how some pro gun people feel like this is part of the slippery slope.

And here is a helpful chart for some of California's gun laws. This doesn't cover pistols or shotguns at all. It doesn't cover federal law. It is missing changes in interpretation the california DOJ has made in the last 6 months. Also there is an appendix of a list of about 40ish rifles that are banned by name. There are over 200 gun laws in California and the California DOJ has changed it's mind about what those laws mean. It isn't that hard to own a rifle in California but it is really easy to make your rifle a felony.

There are a bunch of laws regarding explosive devices, radiation, various poisons and other chemicals. And cars. And home building. Dangerous things are regulated.

A blanket - "all weapons of all kinds should be legal otherwise you're going to take them all away" is a silly and irresponsible position to take, which is what the comic above is advocating, outside of the hyperbole of things like the NFA being "half the cake".

Are fraud, assault, sexual harassment and other "violations of our precious first amendment!" also in your wheelbarrow here? And if that seems like a strawman, again you're advocating for machine guns to be legal for people to pick up at walmart.

"advocating for machine guns to be legal for people to pick up at walmart." Yes I am. And if you threaten to shoot someone or you do shoot at someone you go to jail.

I suppose the logic of caring more about the ability to shoot people versus creating a society where people don't get shot is the main difference that is unable to be overcome.

If a dude's just sitting there staring at half a cake from 1934 intending to eat it, I'd want to take it away for his own good too.

And who needs to eat a whole cake anyway? It isn't a perfect metaphor. Reminds me of the Jim Gaffigan bit about cakes. https://youtu.be/-o-u4IwXkbE

It isn't that hard to own a rifle in California but it is really easy to make your rifle a felony.

So don't modify it. I get it, all of this is an inconvenience and shooting is a lot of fun..but people are dying at an alarming rate. If you stubbornly oppose any restriction for public safety because it is inconvenient or because it cuts into your fun, you are asking for more drastic measures.

Nobody needs a bump stock...nobody. If chose these little hills to die on don't be surprised if all come crashing down and it is not only not hard, it is impossible to own a gun...anywhere.

I've built most of my guns. In California if you own an ar15 and what to continue to own it you have to make major modifications. And even then you can have the DOJ change it's mind and take your rifle. It has happened to a coworker of mine.
I'm not dieing on this hill. But little hills add up. Seems like a lot of people believe that giving up rights in the name of public safety is the way to go. I disagree. I'm also not ok with the way this was done. This is the current administration rewriting how the law works. Not the courts, not the legislature.

Also, this is not even a gun.

It has been disappointing to see how much energy firearm safety advocates have put into this peripheral issue. It evinces a lack of understanding of gun culture. I suppose it can go into the "every little bit" category, but it feeds the "slippery slope" fallacy when real reform is presented.

It’s not a fallacy to say, on the basis of evidence, that a particular outcome is the predictable result of taking steps in the advocated direction. In other words, when we can show that in multiple examples, gun controls have moved to the point of making legal gun ownership and carry so tricky as to be akin to impossible, we can’t logically dismiss the "slippery slope" as a fallacy. Multiple politicions have said that they want an outright ban. That is the point of incremental changes. Also there is shifting baselines. And this ban on bump stocks comes from Don Cheetos administration.

Multiple politicions have said that they want an outright ban.^{[citation needed]}

Gun owners and non-gun owners alike want stricter gun control. The idea that there is some cabal of pols who want to take away all guns simply serves to push gun owners into the racist, opportunist arms of the NRA whose only interest is in gun manufacturing and fear, and not in our society as a whole.

Also, the fact that Don Cheeto's administration supports this is a sign of how meaningless it is.

I'll agree with all of that except the meaninglessness of this. It will still have to go through courts but I think it will stick. After it has settled the next thing will be binary triggers and so on.

As someone who lives in California, perhaps the most gun regulated state and still owns a couple dozen firearms... What are you talking about? Go to a store and buy a gun, wait a few days and pick it up.

Banning a technical loop hole to a hundred year old law isn't a slippery slope.

I also live in California and do own some guns. I can't buy some of the guns I want because it isn't legal. This isn't a loop hole they are closing. They had previously said that they were legal and have decided that the law means something else. So thousands of people now have to destroy their own property or be a felon. And this wasn't done by Congress. This was a reinterpretation of the law by the attorney general. Imagine if they did this for any other right? This isn't meaningless because it is a terrifying precedent.

Modifying your firearms to be fully automatic has always been easy and very illegal. A commercial product that does this should so obviously be restricted it's absurd that this conversation is happening. The narrative that the NRA has been pumping out for the last couple of decades of "any regulation is an attack on us" vs their previous stance of "sensible regulations are great" is creating "debates" like this. Shooting full auto is fun but sorry those weapons are highly regulated and creating your own is a felony and has been for a century. This is not done attack on your rights. Rights are regulated all the time. And selling a quick fix make your rifle a machine gun for three easy payments of 19.99 falls into that category. If you want to circumvent the law with a belt loop or whatever, sure go for it. And if you are caught, you should be charged with a felony. Because guns are intrinsically simple devices regulations on them can be easily circumvented just like it's easy to build a bomb but that doesn't mean we should not have sane regulations to limit accessiblity of especially destructive devices.

It used to be legal to buy cocaine and Dynamite. Just because something used to be legal doesn't mean we can't make it illegal.

Bump stocks have exactly two practical purposes: they are an amusing toy for the gun range, and a device for modifying a weapon to make it better at indiscriminately killing large numbers of people. You are saying your desire to own a toy is worth enabling mass murderers.

I think indiscriminately killing large numbers of people and mass murder should be illegal.

EDIT: This was supposed to be in reply to this comment. oops

A bump stock only makes it easier to bump fire automatic rifle. You can bump shoot any auto rifle, even pistols if you know how. I remember doing that accidentally once on a Jennings .22 pistol. I didn't have a full grip on it when I fired the first round and emptied the mag in a second.

shhhh, watch it or the anti-gun lobby is going to try and ban belt loops.

Which is why we should strongly regulate all semiautomatic weapons for civilian use. It is trivially easy to convert or mimic automatic fire with them.

Slippery Slope man, Get a life bin that knife.

Yeah, a slippery slope to catching up with every other civilized nation. Gun control saves lives. Your desire to play an action hero is literally killing people.

Banning all cars would save 10 times as many. The numbers are going down. In the same period gun deaths (not murder rate nor violent crime) in Australia has seen a similar decline. Not a huge difference. Violent crime has declined slower in Australia. In the UK the murder rate using guns has gone down and a roughly corresponding amount of knife murders have taken their place. It's almost like someone who is murdering someone else doesn't care how they do it. Rifles are rarely used for violent crime. So I reject your idea that my right to own a gun is killing people. Just like Making abortion available makes people slutty.

>Banning all cars would save 10 times as many.

Like 150M people also are using a car every day.

It's not the amount, it's the per capita. Gun homicides in places where there are less restrictive gun controls have a much higher rate than places with more restrictive gun controls per capita.

Though I also can't wait for driverless cars to get rid of manually driven cars as well.

Also,
>In the UK the murder rate using guns has gone down and a roughly corresponding amount of knife murders have taken their place.

Isn't true? I don't see that sort of correlation in the data.

https://researchbriefings.parliament.uk/ResearchBriefing/Summary/SN04304#fullreport

You can look at the stats pretty easily and see that isn't a talking point.

Of course there is less Gun homicides where there are less guns. But the numbers on your link show that violent crime is at it highest rate in decades. But I would imagine that if we had a prohibition on alcohol we would have very few drunk driving deaths. That is meaningless taken out of context.

https://www.quora.com/If-gun-control-legislation-doesnt-work-why-is-gun-crime-so-low-in-other-developed-nations-with-these-laws

Bump stocks are for idiots and murderers.

Only cowards carry a knife.

Real men carry nunchucks.

Real nuns carry manchucks.

Real Chuck Norrises carry nunselves.

I would love for someone who is knowledgeable about firearm law, AND has an operational knowledge of bump stocks, to explain to me the (non-emotional or political) rationale used to make this decision. Unfortunately, that person doesn't exist, and there was no sensible rationale used. The DOJ used numerous contradictions and misrepresentations to make changes to written law without having to go through the legislative process.

I'm not a lawyer, but here is what I know about bump stock history. There has been a ban on machine guns for a long time. The wording of the law says a machine gun is a gun or parts to convert a gun that can fire multiple shots with a single function of the trigger. Then Adkins Accelerator came along. It allows everything but the stock move back in the stock from the recoil. When the rest of the rifle moves back forward the trigger is again depressed by the finger and it fires again. Effectively making your trigger finger the auto sear. The ATF originally said "ok that isn't a single function of the trigger so I guess you are good." Then they looked at it and said "it looks like a duck and acts like a duck, that is a machine gun". After court battles were done it was upheld. Lightening link and some others bumped the trigger forward but if you kept your pressed it would engage it again and again. Those never made it to market. The bump stock doesn't move the rest of the rifle forward. You push forward on the rifle with your off hand and pull the trigger with your other hand. So because you are pulling the trigger with one hand and then resetting the rifle with the other the ATF said "that is two actions, you haven't made a machine gun just a system to shoot really fast". Then the shooter in Vegas used one and Don Cheeto tweeted "Obama Administration legalized bump stocks. BAD IDEA. As I promised, today the Department of Justice will issue the rule banning BUMP STOCKS with a mandated comment period." And now the Attorney General says "it doesn't matter what the ATF said, it is a single action of the trigger, you have to distory your bump stock because it is an illegal machine gun". I expect there will be a few months of courts going around and then Congress will write a poorly worded law to ban anything like them. In 10 years the poorly worded law will be used to push for a ban on all semi-auto rifles and close that "loophole ".

I should have prefaced this by saying that I am extremely familiar with the entire situation.. Likely as much as anyone.

You're mostly correct. Akins accelerator had a spring, so once you pulled the trigger the spring would keep pushing the trigger into your finger. Bump stocks were determined to be legal numerous times because the shooter has to keep pushing the trigger into your finger i.e. shooter input rather than mechanical. Also, plenty of lightning links were definitely made and sold; once the determination was changed, owners could register them like any other NFA item.

All that said, after reading the entire 157 page rule change, it their reasoning still makes zero sense. They say that they only have the authority to regulate the stock because it's not a firearm, then say that it's a firearm and therefore banned (retroactivity) by the NFA. Their entire argument that using a bump stock you pull the trigger once and it starts and automatic sequence that needs "no further input from the shooter" is 100% wrong; the trigger is pulled for each round fired, and the shooter has to push the rifle forward for each trigger pull. Those are just two of the many things that are very wrong with their determination.

They know this because they give a detailed description of multiple ways of how to bump fire without a stock, and say they're good to go. It will absolutely have an affect on all firearm upgrades, and definitely be used to regulate all semi-auto firearms down the line.

I don't think they really think it does qualify as a machine gun. I think the came from Don Cheeto.

The dumb thing is useless besides goofing around at some home range anyway.