Communities around the U.S. have seen shootings carried out with weapons converted to fully automatic in recent years, fueled by a staggering increase in small pieces of metal or plastic made with a 3D printer or ordered online. Laws against machine guns date back to the bloody violence of Prohibition-era gangsters. But the proliferation of devices known by nicknames such as Glock switches, auto sears and chips has allowed people to transform legal semi-automatic weapons into even more dangerous guns, helping fuel gun violence, police and federal authorities said.
The (ATF) reported a 570% increase in the number of conversion devices collected by police departments between 2017 and 2021, the most recent data available.
The devices that can convert legal semi-automatic weapons can be made on a 3D printer in about 35 minutes or ordered from overseas online for less than $30. They’re also quick to install.
“It takes two or three seconds to put in some of these devices into a firearm to make that firearm into a machine gun instantly,” Dettelbach said.
gun thread, lemme hit you with some easy unsourced stats real quick.
About a third of all people who attempt suicide will never attempt it again, about a third will attempt it pretty repetitively, and about a third fall somewhere in the middle, where they engage in multiple attempts, but stop after the 5th or whatever. This is to say that suicide is mostly a spur of the moment decision and most people who attempt suicide aren’t completely committed to it as a course of action. It’s mostly a decision that’s made as a result of being kind of fed up and believing you have no other options in your life, it’s not a conscientious, committed kind of philosophical position, most of the time. I think there’s some sort of minor study about a bridge in, I wanna say canada, where they set up a net underneath one bridge, and another bridge about 20 minutes away didn’t have a net set up underneath it. Still, the suicides went down by about the amount you would expect to see, had you just eliminated all the suicides taking place on the bridge with the net. The people committing suicide weren’t willing to drive about 20 minutes to dive off of a different bridge, it was just something they sort of did in the moment.
So, that’s all a pretty good indication that limiting gun access to the suicidal would be a relatively helpful thing to do. The most counterargument I’ve heard against this is that, regardless of that, we should still have free access to guns, and they shouldn’t be regulated by the government, because our right to guns trumps everyone else’s right to not be successful in killing themselves. I don’t think I need to tell you that this is a kind of disgusting viewpoint.
I think we can also probably say that the same would be true of gun crime broadly. There are multiple factors going into gun crime, like housing prices, redlining, drug trafficking, mental illness, sure. One of these factors is also guns. Taking away any of these factors, including guns, not just lead to a reduction in gun crime, but would probably lead to a reduction in crime overall. A reduction in crime overall with no substitution in the form of increased knife violence or other forms of violence or crime.
It’s much harder to secure your illegally owned high value property, in drugs, if it is more expensive and harder to access a gun. If it’s more expensive, that eats into your profit margins. This alone would probably cut down on violent gun crime, and drug related violent crime more broadly.
I also feel like I’m taking crazy pills whenever people talk about how if you limited access to guns, people would just switch over to knives, and knives would be equally as effective. No they wouldn’t! You have to be extremely fit and trained properly to wield a knife effectively, and even then, two or three people can easily overwhelm you and jump on top of you. People can more easily outrun you. If you wanted to try and make the leap from one technology to the other, I would think people would compare guns more to IEDs, since there’s obviously more of a similarity there in terms of effectiveness, but obviously it’s much harder to secure your drugs with IEDs, or to rob someone with a pipe bomb.
The most compelling argument against gun regulations, and especially more extreme gun regulations, is that it’s really hard to get them passed, and especially at the federal level, which is what would really cut down on their trafficking. You also have a problem with law enforcement, since most law enforcement, and probably federal law enforcement, wouldn’t really be willing or effective in stripping americans of most of their guns. You’d probably see more success with something like limiting ammunition sales or gun manufacturing, but you’d obviously expect to get lobbied against pretty hard, and, at least if you were to limit gun manufacturing, you’d only expect to see results on that maybe 10+ years down the line, in decades, and, depending on how that was passed, you might just see it get repealed before you could see anything from it.
Of course, the caveat with all of that is that most americans are actually perfectly willing to conform to, and vote for, reasonable restrictions on guns. This includes universal background checks, mental health checks, wait periods, obviously limiting things like automatic capabilities and magazine size (though to what extent this limits unlawful use, I’m not quite sure). Probably at the farther end I’d guess americans might vote for requiring licensing from gun owners, and secure handling and transportation, like most european countries, which might limit unlawful use by limiting theft.
I think also lots of gun owners are straight delulu when it comes to how effective their gun might be. They come up with lots of little hypotheticals and heuristics to try and train for, but in a gunfight, it is usually the person who shoots first who wins, the person who has the element of surprise. If you’re getting robbed at gunpoint, you’ve already lost. You almost have to wield your gun like a lunatic, brandishing it at people for intimidation, in order for it to be an effective form of self-defense (this is illegal in most places). There’s also the idea that open carry can prevent crime, but that it might also mark you as an easier, higher priority target, so I’m kind of skeptical of it. Maybe it’s better for home invasions or something, but that’s not a particularly high likelihood anyways, and you have problems with wall penetration and such. Most home robbers are going to want to hit your place when you’re not in it anyways.
I’m a gun owner who carries a firearm. I think different people and areas have different needs.
There are no children in my household, fist off. If there were I wouldn’t have guns and ammo in the same house. It’s just not safe. If a child comes to my house, the ammo goes to the car.
But I live over 30 minutes from the nearest police station. We have firearms for defense from predators, invasive animals (e.g. hogs), etc… Yeah, they could be used against people, but that’s not really something we’re worried about. We don’t even lock our doors.
That being said, I do carry in town. I also have a spare set of clothing, full set of mechanics tools, a fire extinguisher, first aid kit, and an AED in the van. I like to be prepared wherever I go, and other than the AED all of those tools have come in handy in an emergency.
I don’t like going into details about the time I had to pull my gun because I hate how right-wing nut jobs seem to celebrate the fact that I needed one as justification for all the other hateful things they do. Suffice to say I was being assaulted and the gun ended the situation without me having to shoot the assailant.
Yeah - I don’t carry the toolbox or fire exringuisher my body, but a handgun is almost never necessary in a few minutes. And of course if someone breaks into my van and steals my impact wrench it’s annoying. If they steal a gun that’s much more serious.
I think we have some major work to do to cut back on violence, and some gun reforms are part of the answer. The things that I think would have a lot of impact on gun crime with minimal impact on lawful gun ownership are improving NICS and opening it up for civilian use. Right now if I want to sell a gun to a friend or relative I can’t run a check to see if they’re legally allowed to own one. This would also be the first step towards universal background checks.
But background checks aren’t enough. There need to be record-keeping laws for individual sales that are no different than those from a dealer. The idea is kill straw purchases while improving traceability, which is the biggest issue we have with the current system.
What we have now is half of a brilliant compromise. A federal gun registry is a red line that gun owners will not cross. It’s the most important necessary precursor to mass firearm confiscation, and it’s a hard no. The fight over that is why it took so damn long to get background checks in the first place.
But we want to be able to trace guns used in crimes, so we require manufacturers and dealers to track the sales. If a gun is used in a crime, law enforcement can get a warrant and go to the manufacturer who can look it up and point them to the distributor who can point them to the retailer who can point them to the buyer. It’s a system that allows any specific gun to be tracked, while preventing the government from having a registry.
The problem is that record ends at the first sale. The buyer can sell, trade, or gift that gun without a background check and without keeping a record. It’s the major way that guns illegal in a given state get there.
It also eliminates the “gun show loophole” which is a very misleading name, since it’s actually just a “private sale loophole.” Licensed dealers are still required to do a background check and 4473 for gun show sales.
Waiting periods don’t do much. Someone wanting to commit suicide can rent a gun at the range more easily, and it happens more than you think. The federal waiting period from the 80s was simply a placeholder until NICS got up and running that gave more time for background checks.
One issue that needs resolving is NICS needs to finish background checks. There are 3 standard results when running a background check: Approve, Deny, and Delay. Approve and Deny are self-explanatory. Delays occur when there’s a partial match. Since NICS just uses 3 items (name, date of birth, and state of birth) for the check partial matches can occur, especially if the buyer has a common name - it’s especially common with Hispanic last names since there’s a lot of Raul Hernandezes out there.
When there’s a delay, the gun can be sold without a response in 3 days, though more and more stores are instituting a policy that it needs an approval before the sale. This is because most Denys are initially a Delay, and sometimes (rarely) it takes a week.
But the rub is half the time NICS simply doesn’t follow up on a Delay, or they do it in 6 weeks. Any firearm transaction must be finished within 30 days of the initial background check, so if they take 6 weeks a new background check has to be started. I had a friend named David Jones who couldn’t purchase a gun from lots of dealers because NICS always took longer than 30 days to respond.
And finally the biggest issue with NICS - Identity Verification. NICS needs to be able to verify that a person exists. Right now a fake or mispelled name (whether the misspelling is in the database or on the 4473) will work 100% of the time since all it checks against is a blacklist. A $50 fake ID shouldn’t allow someone to buy a gun.