It's not up to the ATF to make laws; congress is supposed to do that.
Also, "sensible" gun control is functionally no different from "sensible" abortion restrictions. If you want to fix gun violence, fix the problems that lead up to it. If you want to stop abortions, it's easier to teach factual sexual health and make sure that everyone has free access to birth control.
First - the place to shoot is the hard part for many people. Indoor ranges don't allow you to do the kind of practice that you would need to do in order to become proficient with an automatic firearm. Outdoor ranges are quite a drive for most people.
Second, and more important - the fact that people can learn doesn't mean a lot. Most people, including most gun owners, don't. A shockingly large percentage of gun owners don't practice regularly, or at all.
Hard pass on discussing anything with your denialist guns r gud mentality
Yeah, isn't is strange that someone doesn't want the state to have the monopoly on violence, and believes in civil rights? Weird, right?
From your article:
"Platkin said Glock is profiting by continuing to sell the adaptable version in U.S. markets, even as they make and sell handguns in Europe that cannot accommodate such a switch."
This is something I've having a really hard time finding a source on. Everything I can find says that that about half of the Glock pistols that are sold in the US are made in Austria. And, as I said, sales in Europe for pistols are very tightly controlled, meaning that very few pistols--relatively speaking--are getting into the hands of anyone other than cops and military, so I'm not sure that there's a strong motive for them to make the design alteration in the EU.
Aside from the assertion from New Jersey's AG, I just can't find a source for that. I'm not saying that it doesn't exist, and, if the AG is correct, then yes, Glock should change their design in the US. There's already precedent for this; open bolt semi-automatic firearms manufactured after 1986 are banned because they can--in general--be readily converted to full auto. However, given how many Glocks currently exist in the US, that would be an enormous legal mess that could possibly result in the National Firearms Act being declared unconstitutional.
"Also known as “auto switches,” the devices, which are already illegal in New Jersey and some other states, [...]"
They're illegal in EVERY state; it covered under federal law, specifically the National Firearms Act (1934) and Firearm Owners Protection Act (1986). Even if it was legal in New Jersey, it would still be a felony to possess or use one.
How many people actually go out to a range every single week and burn through a couple hundred rounds working on training drills though? I did shooting at distance today (100-550y with .223) and burned through about 140 rounds, and most ranges don't even have that kind of distance available. (Thank fuck the RSO had a spotting scope; I couldn't see my splash in the grass to see where my rounds were going when I didn't hit. He was able to see trace with his scope though.)
Do you have evidence to support that? Because AFAIK, the Glocks made both in the US and Austria have exactly the same design. OTOH, in most of Europe, it's very difficult to get the appropriate license for a handgun, so it's largely irrelevant.
Yes. Trump is not actually friendly to gun rights.
If he was, he'd be pushing to get the Hearing Protection Act (HR 404) and the Stop Harassing Owners of Rifles Today (HR 2395) out of committee and to the floor for a vote.
Biden wasn't friendly to gun rights either. I don't think most politicians are friendly to gun rights, since if they actually managed to expand them to what they should be, they wouldn't have any major issue remaining to campaign on.
But it doesn't.
An automatic firearm shoots multiple bullets each time you pull the trigger, until you release the trigger; the trigger does not reset.
With most semi-automatic guns, you have a light spring that resets the trigger once you release your finger. A forced reset trigger (FRT) forces the trigger to reset. The FRT pushes the trigger forward, even if you're trying to keep the trigger pulled back. If you keep tension on your finger, as soon as it's reset, you're pulling it again. So, legally, you are pulling the trigger multiple times, because the trigger is resetting each time a bullet is fired.
Based on the way that a machine gun is defined in the National Firearms Act of 1934, an FRT is not a machine gun. The ATF can't re-write the law to say what they want it to say; that requires an act on congress.
The is compounded by the fact that Rare Breed ran the idea by the ATF before they went into production, and they have/had a memorandum from the ATF saying that an FRT was not a machine gun, and not subject to the NFA. After they had approved it, and *after Rare Breed had produced and sold a few hundred/thousand, the ATF raided Rare Breed, and also showed up at customer's homes demanding items that the customers had legally purchased (e.g., unreasonable search and seizure, a 4A violation).
Machine guns have been illegal in the United States since 1986, a notion that even gun rights groups have come to accept.
This is... Not true. The Firearm Owners Protection Act--among other things--made it illegal to transfer automatic firearms manufactured after '86 (i.e., "post ban") to non-police/military people. Machine guns produced prior to '86 that were already in the hands of non-police/military people can still legally be own and bought/sold. A pre-ban select-fire AR-15 will run about $30k+ these days.
Secondly, there are a number of groups and people still actively fighting to overturn the NFA as being a violation of 1A. There was a case out of the 5th circuit (?) not that long ago that points out the circular logic of the gov't in re: machine guns. E.g., per Heller, guns in common use can't be banned, and machine guns aren't in common use, so they can be banned. But they aren't in common use because they were largely banned by the gov't. The gov't created the condition of them not being in common use by banning them, and then used the lack of common use--due to the ban--as justification for the legality of the ban.
Dude. They're my parents. Don't fucking gaslight me; I know what happened.
Yes, they hate Trump. But if it was just Trump, they'd still be voting Republican. But they're not. Seeing the hypocrisy of what Republicans said versus what they did, as embodied by Trump, was what allowed them to see the hypocrisy.
Also, quit fucking shitting on people that are trying to resist this latest authoritarian bullshit. You're preaching hopelessness and apathy.
It's more or less a textbook example of why the 'community standards' standard is bad, but it's still current case law. I sincerely wish that some large white-shoe law firm had take the case as part of their pro bono work, but, fuck me, that just never seems to happen.
Both Russia and the United States ended up getting their ass handed to them in the end. By rural Warlords in afghanistan.
Sure, but at what cost to the Afghanis? 176,000 Afghanis (some fighters, some non-compbatants) were killed during the US occupation. In contrast, the US saw 2,459 people lost. That's pretty brutally asymmetric. Same thing in Vietnam; yes, we lost 50,000 troops while we waged war against the people of Vietnam, but around 400,000 Vietnamese were killed. IMO, unless you want to maximize losses, resistance by the population is not the ideal way to go. An enemy that is willing to commit atrocities can certainly do far more harm, more quickly, than a non-military defense force can stop.
The Czar lost to the Bolsheviks.
...Who were, IIRC, recently pulled from combat in WWI. If I remember my history correctly--and I'm quite fuzzy on WWI--the war was very unpopular in Russia, and it was people deserting and mutinying from the army that gave the Bolsheviks the ability to win a revolution. If the tsar hadn't signed on to the war in the first place, it probably would have staved off the revolution for years, possibly long enough for Russia to turn into a constitutional monarchy. Or maybe not; the peasantry was really upset with the tsar for other things too.
The thing with balancing autonomy and consent is that it gets exponentially harder for every person you add to a group.
I'm very, very aware of that. Which is why I say that the whole thing is incredibly complicated, and involves a lot of tradeoffs. It takes a lot of people working together to make a stateless, classless society work well, but it only takes one or two people to fuck it all up. The whole thing is a version of the prisoner's dilemma; when everyone trusts everyone else (e.g., small societies), it works, but as soon as trust starts getting broken it tends to fall apart quickly.
Again, I don't know how to solve the problem; I'm not even sure that there is a single solution that perfectly preserive individual autonomy and liberty, while also ensuring that the needs of society as a whole are met.
...Unfortunately...
Wut?
No, silencers weren't regulated into the NFA by the ATF; congress put them in there, way back in '34. You can read the text of the act here. It's in the very first section:
It's right there in the text.
Aside from that, the ATF per se didn't even exist prior to '72; before that, it was part of the IRS, rather than an agency within the DoJ, and before the IRS, it was part of the Bureau of Internal Revenue.