handguns would have done the EXACT same thing, maybe and probably even more damaging in that they are easier to handle, faster to aim and shoot, and more can be carried on ones person as well as more easily secreted into a place like a theater..
a ban of "assault weapons" is exactly my point
the definition of "assault weapon" is merely prohibiting the scary looking guns and does nothing to control any more than that!

You want to control damage and possible future Sandy Hooks, then call for a ban on all semiautomatics and not this simpleton cry for a ban on assault weapons.

now, when you call for that ban
...good luck!
as I said, just about every single hand gun is a semiautomatic nowadays. Now you are frankly calling for a ban on all hand guns and that just aint gonna happen is it?
But this is known and that is why the first step is desired, it's only one step and who can complain about this one step only, right?????

The Dorner case. http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/08/opinion/f ... le_sidebar

Here is a copy of the appellate opinion. http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case? ... 5&as_vis=1

Another example of a serial murderer. The question is did the LAPD get it wrong? Obviously, nothing that happened justified what he has done since, but what if he was telling the truth and his training officer kicked the suspect? Doesn't it seem inherently wrong when it is not clear that he was lying for the LAPD to discharge him for making false statements? The training officer says she did not kick the suspect, there were a few witnesses who say they did not see any kicks (but the ability of the witnesses to see the incident is not very clear, it doesn't seem like they saw the tasering, either) and both the suspect (who is mentally ill) and his father supported Dorner's testimony.

Like I said, I don't know whether Dorner lied or not. I find it unlikely that he just made it up and it happened to be corroborated by both the alleged victim and his father. It seems to me the appropriate outcome was to find that the evidence was inconclusive and neither Dorner or the training officer should have been punished. It is a bit scary how easy it is for a career to be ended because the other officer is found to be more credible. Of course, there are huge consequences to be being terminated for lying. Any career in law enforcement would be over.

If Dorner did not lie then one just imagine the anger engendered by his firing and then apparently his Naval career was terminated as well recently (which he blamed on his firing by LAPD and apparently triggered this shooting spree). Of course, we rightly condemn his actions, especially taking out completely innocent people. But, if Dorner was telling the truth and the training officer did kick the suspect, I wonder how each of use would react to having our career, our status, etc that we worked to obtain derailed through no fault of our own? I suspect that most people would not become violent, that there was an underlying pathology there in Dorner, but maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the layer of civilization is thinner than we might like to prefer to believe

I am VERY confident that I will not be shooting ANYONE unless they are in the commission of hurting me or one of my family.

You're a good guy, Brad.

What is your point, Freeman2? That Dorner deserves recognition and grace because he was fired?

I never said that. I just find it surprising that the LAPD would fire an officer based on such slim evidence, that the firing would be upheld by a superior court judge who was unsure about whether the suspect had been kicked or not, and an appellate court would cite as support for the decision that the testimony of a single witness (the training officer!) could support the finding.

Which is why I asked the question. What is your point re: gun control? Is it just piggy-backing on this forum?

I put it here because it was another example of multiple victim gun violence. I also think we have to contemplate what some one with Dorner's level of training could do if he set his mind at doing what was done in Aurora, New Town, etc. One of the things we have been talking about is the need for gun control because of the incredible carnage these weapons can do. And we have seen examples of that with essentially untrained people. What happens when someone who is trained with weapons goes on a shooting spree? Scary.

GMTom wrote:numbers to back up my last set of assertions?
..I'm looking at your chart!

the only "assertion" made was your guess that maybe the very slight and very recent uptick years after the ban ended was possibly due to the end of the ban that had been ended for several years. Yet how many murders are committed with assault rifles? Please point to that statistic being alarmingly high, again, hand gun crimes of all sorts are out of hand but the ban being requested is on assault rifles and thems not the problem.

Which chart? I posted a few, DF put one up recently, there could be others. Would it kill you to slow down a bit and be more specific.

how about you share this chart once again, it being so supportive of your position that the ban on assault weapons was so effective in reducing gun crimes. I went back and I see nothing to support that claim. I have seen only one chart on the internet that attempts to make this claim (I think the one you used) and that chart too is full of holes.

Lets see that chart again, I'm sure it shows no correlation since the statistics back that up.
The ban resulted in several low years of "mass shootings" along with one of the largest right in the middle. After the ban we had a rise again but we also saw one of the lowest right in the middle as well. When you post this chart please be sure to show where assault weapons were used (the chart I see makes no differentiation). On the chart I am looking at they use only the numbers for large scale mass shootings, the FBI considers 4 or more but not this chart, if you use the 4+ statistic then the difference goes out the window. You also fail to indicate the effects of a bad economy and war having an effect on the numbers. Please do show a chart that shows us the light!

freeman2 wrote:Well,. Brad, I was starting to worry about DF but it appears that police officers' life expectancy is a good deal higher than age 59. CALPERS, the retirement fund for public employees in California, says that its records show that public safety officers retire at age 55 and live to be 81. Here is an article discussing the various studies, they don't agree, but it is reasonable to conclude that police officers face some reduction in life expectancy but not a 14 year reduction. http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2011/oct/1 ... y/?print=1

I can't believe y'all are arguing this again.

I'll make it easy. Let's say CALPERS has no skin in the game (a false assumption). Who do you suppose is more likely to suffer work-related, debilitating injuries: a cop, a fireman, a clerk, an accountant, or a lawyer?

Who is more likely to still be able to do their job at age 65: a cop, a fireman, a clerk, an accountant, or a lawyer?

It's not that difficult to sort out.

freeman2 wrote:I never said that. I just find it surprising that the LAPD would fire an officer based on such slim evidence, that the firing would be upheld by a superior court judge who was unsure about whether the suspect had been kicked or not, and an appellate court would cite as support for the decision that the testimony of a single witness (the training officer!) could support the finding.

If you knew how hard it was to get someone fired, you would not go down this road.

The fact that he did what he did subsequent to his firing is evidence he should never have been hired at all.

One of the really interesting things about the history of gun control, was that was often a racist policy. Used primarily to ensure southerners were able to maintain power over slaves and later freedmen. Then things changed in the 60s. Link to fascinating article below:

The eighth-grade students gathering on the west lawn of the state capitol in Sacramento were planning to lunch on fried chicken with California’s new governor, Ronald Reagan, and then tour the granite building constructed a century earlier to resemble the nation’s Capitol. But the festivities were interrupted by the arrival of 30 young black men and women carrying .357 Magnums, 12-gauge shotguns, and .45-caliber pistols.

The 24 men and six women climbed the capitol steps, and one man, Bobby Seale, began to read from a prepared statement. “The American people in general and the black people in particular,” he announced, must take careful note of the racist California legislature aimed at keeping the black people disarmed and powerless Black people have begged, prayed, petitioned, demonstrated, and everything else to get the racist power structure of America to right the wrongs which have historically been perpetuated against black people The time has come for black people to arm themselves against this terror before it is too late.
Seale then turned to the others. “All right, brothers, come on. We’re going inside.” He opened the door, and the radicals walked straight into the state’s most important government building, loaded guns in hand. No metal detectors stood in their way. It was May 2, 1967, and the Black Panthers’ invasion of the California statehouse launched the modern gun-rights movement.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc ... /308608/1/

GMTom wrote:how about you share this chart once again, it being so supportive of your position that the ban on assault weapons was so effective in reducing gun crimes. I went back and I see nothing to support that claim. I have seen only one chart on the internet that attempts to make this claim (I think the one you used) and that chart too is full of holes.

I really don't know what you are on about. I suspect you don't either. If you know what chart it is, can't you link to the post it's in? Or tell us what one you are on about?

I used some charts to show the relationship between gun ownership and gun death, using data from the 50 US states. You claimed there was no correlation, even though I was able to show you the trend line.

However, the question you are asking me to deal with is not simply about general gun ownership, but about the effect of the assault weapons ban over time

Lets see that chart again, I'm sure it shows no correlation since the statistics back that up.
The ban resulted in several low years of "mass shootings" along with one of the largest right in the middle.

What chart? If it's on the thread, tell us which post it's in.

In your quest to see 'charts', perhaps this may help. It's quite simple. It shows that if a mass shooter uses an assault weapon, they shoot more people, and they kill more people. It's not exactly surprising, but surely it does help to explain why banning assault weapons makes mass killings less of a problem (while not eliminating them): http://www.businessinsider.com/assault- ... art-2013-2

This link has no graphs, but it does explain some of the effects of the ban in effect from 1994-2004: http://www.salon.com/2012/12/26/banning ... ons_works/

The single formal assessment of the ban, as required by Congress in passing the law, was conducted by criminologists Christopher Koper, Jeffrey Roth and others at the University of Pennsylvania (Koper is now at George Mason). The National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the Department of Justice, paid for the evaluation, which was first conducted in 1999 and updated in 2004, and looked at everything from homicide rates to gun prices.

A few key findings emerged. Overall, banned guns and magazines were used in up to a quarter of gun crimes before the ban. Assault pistols were more common than assault rifles in crimes. Large-capacity magazines, which were also prohibited, may be a bigger problem than assault weapons. While just 2 to 8 percent of gun crimes were committed with assault weapons, large-capacity magazines were used in 14 to 26 percent of of firearm crimes. About 20 percent of privately owned guns were fitted with the magazines.

But even though assault weapons were responsible for a fraction of the total number of gun deaths overall, the weapons and other guns equipped with large-capacity magazines “tend to account for a higher share of guns used in murders of police and mass public shootings,” the study found.

If you included 'large-capacity magazines' for semi-automatic weapons in a definition of 'assault weapon' (after all, we are not bound to use the old definition you are deriding, do we?), then there would be a clear indication of potential benefit.

An October 2012 study from Johns Hopkins, which looked at newer data than Koper’s, concluded that that “easy access to firearms with large-capacity magazines facilitates higher casualties in mass shootings.”

So, according to the official study, was the ban effective in stopping killings? The short answer is yes, though it’s a bit unclear because of the massive loopholes in the law. “Following implementation of the ban, the share of gun crimes involving AWs [assault weapons] declined by 17 percent to 72 percent across the localities examined for this study (Baltimore, Miami, Milwaukee, Boston, St. Louis, and Anchorage),” the Koper study concluded.

Data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) also shows a significant drop in assault weapon usage in gun crimes. In the five-year period before the enactment of the ban, the weapons constituted almost 5 percent of the guns traced by the Bureau (the ATF is responsible for tracking guns used in crimes), while they accounted for just 1.61 percent of gun traces after the ban went into effect — a drop of 66 percent. The effect accelerated over time, as the guns presumably became harder to find.

Even the weak 1994-04 ban had an effect. Those kinds of guns were used a lot less as a proportion of gun crime (and, as we know, gun death fell sharply from 1994-2001).

On spree shootings, this guy - http://voices.yahoo.com/could-assault-w ... 45406.html - worked out the different rates of spree shootings in years with the ban and years without:

Of course, the Assault Weapons Ban was only law for 10 years, while we had more years (39) without an Assault Weapons Ban. So I calculated a ratio of spree shootings to years of the study. For two spree shootings during the Assault Weapons Ban, there were 10 years: shootings-to-years = 20 percent. For the non-Assault Weapons Ban years (39), there were 14 spree shootings: shootings-to-years = 35.8 percent.

The rate of such shootings doubles for years without the ban. But you claim it had no effect

This link is text only, so no graphs for you, and it's from early on in the ban, but has some interesting conclusions: https://www.ncjrs.gov/txtfiles1/173405.txt

--Criminal use of the banned guns declined, at least temporarily, after the
law went into effect, which suggests that the legal stock of preban assault
weapons was, at least for the short term, largely in the hands of collectors
and dealers.

--Evidence suggests that the ban may have contributed to a reduction in
the gun murder rate and murders of police officers by criminals armed
with assault weapons.

--The ban has failed to reduce the average number of victims per gun
murder incident or multiple gunshot wound victims.

Well, fewer dead cops is clearly not the effect you are looking for.

If you are looking at a graph on here, that I have posted, and it vexes you, rather than jjust repeating "your chart" and telling me to post it again, try making it clearer which one it is. That way I can respond. Until then you are just being confusing.

Tom,
You can bring the issue of what gun is killing the most up all day and night. That is not the issue. The issue is the Constitution. Until the Supreme Court changes the Second Amendment (which it supported in DC v Heller) the issue is moot.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller

The Court also added dicta regarding the private ownership of machine guns. In doing so, it suggested the elevation of the "in common use at the time" prong of the Miller decision, which by itself protects handguns, over the first prong (protecting arms that "have some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia"), which may not by itself protect machine guns: "It may be objected that if weapons that are most useful in military service – M16 rifles and the like – may be banned, then the Second Amendment right is completely detached from the prefatory clause. But as we have said, the conception of the militia at the time of the Second Amendment’s ratification was the body of all citizens capable of military service, who would bring the sorts of lawful weapons that they possessed at home."[46]

Page 55 of the ruling issued (above) says that a machine gun owned for personal use should not be disallowed.

Until the Constitution is amended, all you can do is bellyache about what type of gun killed what person. Let the left try to change the Constitution. If it is the "will of the people" then it should be no problem.