#semi-automatic weapons

Excerpt from this Op-Ed from the New York Times:

Permissive gun laws and easy access to firearms make the United States a prime target for firearms-based terrorist attacks like the one in Buffalo. They subject the population to the constant threat of mass shootings like the one in Uvalde, where 19 children and two teachers were fatally shot. Whether that shooting ultimately meets the statutory definition of terrorism or not, it certainly has terrified people nationwide, raising fears yet again that children are at risk, even in their schools, from a violence abetted by the ready availability of semiautomatic weapons.

There is no question that the ready availability of guns in the United States challenges not only public safety but also national security. The United States must treat the easy access to semiautomatic weapons as the national security threat it is.

Foreign terrorist organizations have long urged their followers to take advantage of lax U.S. gun laws to plan attacks in the United States.

In 2017 an Islamic State propaganda video featured a reportedly American fighter, wearing fatigues and a holstered pistol, urging sympathizers in the United States to “take advantage of the fact that you can easily obtain a rifle or a pistol in America” and “spray” the infidels “with bullets.” A prominent American recruit in Al Qaeda urged potential recruits in a 2011 video to “go down to a gun show at a local convention center and come away with a fully automatic assault rifle without a background check and most likely without having to show an identification card. So what are you waiting for?” The people who killed 14 in San Bernardino, Calif., in 2015 and 49 in Orlando, Fla., in 2016 — and pledged allegiance to the Islamic State — committed their carnage using semiautomatic firearms.

As the recent attacks make clear, these types of military-style weapons are not used only by those who commit mass shootings in the name of foreign terrorist groups.

The person accused of the Buffalo shooting got out of his vehicle in front of the Tops supermarket looking as if he were entering a war zone. He wore body armor, tactical gear and a helmet, officials said, and carried a Bushmaster XM-15 semiautomatic rifle, modified to hold high-capacity magazines. He had a shotgun and a rifle in his car for backup.

But he didn’t need the backup weapons to quickly shoot four people in the parking lot, killing three of them. He didn’t need them to kill a security guard inside the store whose own firearm was no match for the body armor. Nor did he need them to shoot several other people inside the store. The semiautomatic assault-style rifle, reportedly purchased at a small gun store for less than $1,000, was all that was needed to commit the massacre.

Other attackers who espoused white-supremacist beliefs, like the man charged with killing 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018 and another accused of killing more than 20 people at a Walmart in El Paso in 2019, used semiautomatic firearms. So did the white-supremacist gunman who killed nine Black worshipers at a church in South Carolina in 2015.

Military-style weapons and gear are also the calling cards of extremist private militias in the United States, whose anti-government ideology and insurrectionist view of the Second Amendment have driven a rise in intimidation and coercion.

The police were nearby, responded immediately, and killed the gunman in under a minute after he opened fire.

In that time, less than one minute, he managed to kill nine people and wound twenty-seven.

New Post has been published on https://goo.gl/aKnPmV

LOS ANGELES | Largest maker of bump stocks will stop accepting orders

LOS ANGELES | April 18, 2018 (AP)(STL.News) — The largest manufacturer of bump stocks, which allow semi-automatic weapons to fire rapidly like automatic firearms, announced Wednesday that it will stop taking orders and shut down its website next month.

The announcement comes about a month after President Donald Trump said his administration would “ban” bump stocks, which he said “turn legal weapons into illegal machines.”

The devices became a focal point of the national gun control debate when they were used in October when a man carried out the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

About a dozen bump stocks were found among the weapons used by Stephen Paddock when he unleashed a hail of bullets from his high-rise Las Vegas hotel suite, killing 58 people and leaving more than 800 others injured.

Slide Fire Solutions, which is based in Moran, Texas, posted a message on its website saying the company will stop taking orders at midnight on May 20.

There was no immediate response to a request for comment sent through Slide Fire’s website and the company’s founder and CEO, Jeremiah Cottle, did not immediately respond to a LinkedIn message seeking comment.

The Brady Center for Gun Violence filed a lawsuit against Slide Fire after the Las Vegas mass shooting and alleged that the company “provided a product that turned a semi-automatic gun into the functional equivalent of a machine gun, thereby evading longstanding federal law.”

Mimi Carter, a spokeswoman for the Brady Center, did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment Wednesday.

The Justice Department said last month that it had started the process to amend federal firearms regulations to clarify that federal law defines bump stocks as machine guns.

That would reverse a 2010 decision by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives that found bump stocks did not amount to machine guns and could not be regulated unless Congress amended existing firearms law or passed a new one.

Some states have also sought their own restrictions. Last week, Vermont Gov. Phil Scott, a Republican, signed a package of bills that included a ban on bump stocks. A far-reaching school safety bill signed last month by Florida Gov. Rick Scott, also a Republican, included a bump stocks ban and was immediately met with a lawsuit by the National Rifle Association.

New Post has been published on https://goo.gl/aKnPmV

LOS ANGELES | Largest maker of bump stocks will stop accepting orders

LOS ANGELES | April 18, 2018 (AP)(STL.News) — The largest manufacturer of bump stocks, which allow semi-automatic weapons to fire rapidly like automatic firearms, announced Wednesday that it will stop taking orders and shut down its website next month.

The announcement comes about a month after President Donald Trump said his administration would “ban” bump stocks, which he said “turn legal weapons into illegal machines.”

The devices became a focal point of the national gun control debate when they were used in October when a man carried out the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

About a dozen bump stocks were found among the weapons used by Stephen Paddock when he unleashed a hail of bullets from his high-rise Las Vegas hotel suite, killing 58 people and leaving more than 800 others injured.

Slide Fire Solutions, which is based in Moran, Texas, posted a message on its website saying the company will stop taking orders at midnight on May 20.

There was no immediate response to a request for comment sent through Slide Fire’s website and the company’s founder and CEO, Jeremiah Cottle, did not immediately respond to a LinkedIn message seeking comment.

The Brady Center for Gun Violence filed a lawsuit against Slide Fire after the Las Vegas mass shooting and alleged that the company “provided a product that turned a semi-automatic gun into the functional equivalent of a machine gun, thereby evading longstanding federal law.”

Mimi Carter, a spokeswoman for the Brady Center, did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment Wednesday.

The Justice Department said last month that it had started the process to amend federal firearms regulations to clarify that federal law defines bump stocks as machine guns.

That would reverse a 2010 decision by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives that found bump stocks did not amount to machine guns and could not be regulated unless Congress amended existing firearms law or passed a new one.

Some states have also sought their own restrictions. Last week, Vermont Gov. Phil Scott, a Republican, signed a package of bills that included a ban on bump stocks. A far-reaching school safety bill signed last month by Florida Gov. Rick Scott, also a Republican, included a bump stocks ban and was immediately met with a lawsuit by the National Rifle Association.

New Post has been published on https://goo.gl/aKnPmV

LOS ANGELES | Largest maker of bump stocks will stop accepting orders

LOS ANGELES | April 18, 2018 (AP)(STL.News) — The largest manufacturer of bump stocks, which allow semi-automatic weapons to fire rapidly like automatic firearms, announced Wednesday that it will stop taking orders and shut down its website next month.

The announcement comes about a month after President Donald Trump said his administration would “ban” bump stocks, which he said “turn legal weapons into illegal machines.”

The devices became a focal point of the national gun control debate when they were used in October when a man carried out the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

About a dozen bump stocks were found among the weapons used by Stephen Paddock when he unleashed a hail of bullets from his high-rise Las Vegas hotel suite, killing 58 people and leaving more than 800 others injured.

Slide Fire Solutions, which is based in Moran, Texas, posted a message on its website saying the company will stop taking orders at midnight on May 20.

There was no immediate response to a request for comment sent through Slide Fire’s website and the company’s founder and CEO, Jeremiah Cottle, did not immediately respond to a LinkedIn message seeking comment.

The Brady Center for Gun Violence filed a lawsuit against Slide Fire after the Las Vegas mass shooting and alleged that the company “provided a product that turned a semi-automatic gun into the functional equivalent of a machine gun, thereby evading longstanding federal law.”

Mimi Carter, a spokeswoman for the Brady Center, did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment Wednesday.

The Justice Department said last month that it had started the process to amend federal firearms regulations to clarify that federal law defines bump stocks as machine guns.

That would reverse a 2010 decision by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives that found bump stocks did not amount to machine guns and could not be regulated unless Congress amended existing firearms law or passed a new one.

Some states have also sought their own restrictions. Last week, Vermont Gov. Phil Scott, a Republican, signed a package of bills that included a ban on bump stocks. A far-reaching school safety bill signed last month by Florida Gov. Rick Scott, also a Republican, included a bump stocks ban and was immediately met with a lawsuit by the National Rifle Association.

I saw THIS post a while ago, and thought it was a poor analogy, as cake doesn’t kill people, or even give people the ability to kill people. And then I was called out about my statement of it being a bad analogy, so allow me to offer a better analogy for those who need one: Imagine a neighborhood. Guy #1 has a bunch of different types of pets: Some guard dogs of various breeds and sizes (revolvers, shot guns, bolt-action rifles)  and some elephants (semi-automatic handguns and rifles). He tells his neighbors they can use them to protect themselves, and they do gladly. But after a while, people notice that these animals are causing a lot of injuries and deaths in the neighborhood, and demand something be done to protect them. And so the neighborhood association tells Guy #1 that he can keep his animals, but he needs to make sure they are contained. So Guy #1 builds a fence and tells his neighbors they need to keep the dogs and elephants they got fenced in too. But the animals were still getting out, and the people in the neighborhood were still getting injured and killed in large numbers. Demanding action once more, they have the neighborhood association go back to Guy #1. This time, they tell him that he needs to be doing background checks on the people he gives elephants and guard dogs away to, to make sure they only go to good, rule-abiding people who will use them correctly. So Guy #1 starts checking out the people he lets have animals, and starts offering optional training courses on how to use the animals, and care for them. But Guy #1 can’t be everywhere and control everything. Someone who was good during the background check goes through a lot of trauma suddenly, and in a fit of anger sets his animals loose. Another had always had some issues, and frequently forgot to latch his gate and keep it in good repair. Issue after issue, and Guy #1 still insisted that he and others ha a right to these animals. And so, they compromise and Guy #1 and his neighbors agree to not have so many animals.  But still, there is trouble. While the fences work for the guard dogs mostly, the elephants trample right over them, and there are still large numbers of people still being hurt. One of Guy #1′s neighbors had a kid, who took his families elephant to school, and killed a number of children and teachers before it was stopped.  Guy #1 is approached again, but now he is angry. In his mind, he has given and given and they keep blaming him and trying to take his animals away but he wants to feel safe, and to go hunting, and to have his animals compete, and he has a right to that!! And the neighborhood association understands, and they compromise again~ he can keep the guard dogs, but the elephants have to go. “But people are killed by snakes(knives)! You don’t ban snakes!” he argues. But they stand firm- elephant(semi-auto guns) kill more at a time, and aren’t needed. People are in danger from them, and they shouldn’t be owned by civilians. They need to keep schools and the neighborhood safe. “Well, why don’t we just give teachers elephants!” he cries. And the people of the neighborhood are beginning to wonder at the sanity of even allowing him to keep the dogs, yet remain adamant- the elephants have to go, because while his guard dogs can attack and hurt one person at a time, the elephants can trample multiple people, and are harder to control.