Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

Cuomo’s Ban Of Assault Weapons

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…is just as stupid and pointless as the federal ban was:

This bill is ostensibly a response to last month’s massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, where the shooter used a Bushmaster rifle that was legal under Connecticut’s “assault weapon” ban, which uses the same criteria as New York’s current law. Therefore the legislation Cuomo supports presumably will cover that particular model and configuration. But since the features disfavored by these laws have little or no functional significance in the hands of mass murderers, why should that be considered an accomplishment? “Of 769 homicides in New York State in 2011,” the Times notes, “only five were committed with rifles of any kind.” Even if one or more of those rifles would qualify as an “assault weapon” under Cuomo’s new definition, so what? Any “assault weapon” ban that is even arguably consistent with the Second Amendment will leave people like Adam Lanza with plenty of equally deadly alternatives.

Here is how Cuomo explains the need for new gun control laws: “I think what the nation is saying now after Connecticut, what people in New York are saying, is ‘do something, please.'” There’s no denying this is something.

“Something must be done! This is something. Therefore, it must be done!”

Leftist logic.

59 thoughts on “Cuomo’s Ban Of Assault Weapons”

  1. So if something — anything — must be done, why don’t they just ban plastic guns of larger than .66 caliber that have magazines of 100 rounds and larger?

    Or, heck, do what one gun control group did and call for the banning of the weapons from HALO.

  2. “Of 769 homicides in New York State in 2011,” the Times notes, “only five were committed with rifles of any kind.”

    And during the first 12 hours of Dec 14th, they repeatedly said that Adam Lanza had used two HAND GUNS. They repeatedly said that Lanza was dead in the school, by his own hand. But, beyond what they said, I, and millions of Americans, saw a LEO pop open the trunk of Lanza’s car, take out a rifle that looked like an M-16, he then proceeded to eject a large number of rounds from that rifle.

    So the question is, HOW [or why] did a dead guy, walk out to his car, put a loaded rifle in the trunk of his car, close the trunk, the go back inside and KILL himself in the school? Better still, WHEN did he put it in there? All the survivors say he shot and shot and shot, then a single shot, then no more shots.

    So when did the gun that did the killing ‘change’ from two pistols to a rifle? How did it get into the trunk? And if all those children were killed with a rifle, not the pistols, why were the pistols in the school and the rifle outside?

    But at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter, does it?

    The blood wasn’t dried in that school, before there were calls for a re-instatement of the Assault Weapons Ban. And calls for total gun bans. And calls for confiscating all weapons in the country, in the name of those, dear, dead, children.

    [enter talking head stifled sob here…]

    If the grand majority of murderers in the country are done with hand guns, and that’s what the numbers show, just like in NYC, then there’s only one thing at work. It’s because you NEVER let a crisis get away. It’s because you are a Left Wing control freak, who wants the little people disarmed.

    Well so did Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Idi Amin…and now so does Barack Hussein Obama. I’m the kind of guy who sees patterns, and I think I detect a pattern in here. Somewhere.

  3. This fall into “A Modest Proposal” land … but….

    Banning -men- from the state would work. And Cuomo and Bloomberg are leading by example.

  5. I think a reduction in the number of bullets in a cartridge would help.

    As for the “assault weapons” ban… in some countries it is forbidden to own weapons which look like military grade weapons like assault rifles simply because they make the police’s job harder. How can you do a proportionate response when you do not know which weapon the perp is using in the first place?

    3. Forgive me for being pedantic, but how does one get more than one bullet in a cartridge?

      You see this is part of the problem of having a debate: so many people don’t know a cartridge from a clip from a magazine!! They are commenting about something they know less than nothing about. All their information comes from Hollywood and Halo.

      Up here in Canada, AR15’s are restricted to target shooting at the range. Whereas I can hunt moose with a semi automatic in 50 cal BMG if I want. And it’s only because the AR15 looks so scary!

      My best to the USA in sorting through all this leftist garbage and perhaps coming up with some reasonable regs, I.e. training and certifying of gun owners. I’m not big on banning tools and certainly not on registering firearms. That only leads to confiscation. Believe me, we have been through that up here and we managed a huge political victory by getting rid of our registry records on long guns in 2012.

      There is a reason the NRA is so inflexible on gun laws: they instinctively understand that leftist fear of guns means that “reasonable” rules will never be enough! You can’t reach a reasonable compromise with a hoplophobe.

      1. “Forgive me for being pedantic, but how does one get more than one bullet in a cartridge?”

        To be pendantic, using a Colt ACR with duplex rounds. Basically two 5.56 bullets in a 5.56×45 cartridge, if I remember correctly.

        1. To be more pedantic, and in case anyone’s interested in small arms history: The US Army developed a number of prototype cartridges in the 1950’s with two or three bullets (lined-up serially) in a single cartridge case. The work was done as part of “Project Salvo,” an attempt to get a slightly dispersed pattern of bullets shot at a target with one trigger pull, increasing probability of a hit on a man-sized target at several hundred yards. Also look up SPIW for more info on the Army’s attempts to increase point-fire hit probability by the average infantryman. The three-round-burst capability in some M-16s is the current-day implementation of what Project Salvo tried to develop back in the 50’s.

          1. Points acknowledged!

            Of course, that’s not what Godzilla appeared to mean. My point remains that we should be listening to people who understand firearms, and their application to self defence.

            We have developed a victim lead industry up here in Canada where they purport to be experts on gun control because they were traumatized by being in a school when a mass shooting happened.

            Did any of you see the two news stories this week where in one case, a mother emptied all six revolver shots into a home invader (5 hits) to protect her kids, and he still drove away?? “Why does anyone need more than one shot?” – yeah, right. The other was where an AR-15 was used by a teenager to defend himself and his little sister?

          2. CarsonH,
            Yes, I got your points and fully agree with you. I did read about the mother who emptied the revolver she had in defense of herself and children. Did not read about the AR-15 incident you mentioned.

            BlueMoon

      2. Uh… Yeah you are correct I should have said clip instead of cartridge since a cartridge is the bullet, propellant, shell, and primer.

    4. Reduction in the number of bullets in a magazine has been tried here. It didn’t work (there might have been more high-capacity magazines after the ban than before. They’re easy to make and cheap and can’t be retroactively banned).

      I don’t really understand how what a weapon looks like makes the police’s job harder. Do the police get scared enough that they can’t shoot straight when they see a carrying handle on a rifle?

        2. Will,

          In what way does that appear to be untrue. It appears to me that magazine capacity had no discernable impact on the overall homicide trend. You are inferring something from the data that the study you cite does not support.

          1. I parroted bits from an article I had read earlier which said that the high-capacity magazine ban may have had the effect of increasing the number of high capacity magazines owned by the public. The article didn’t actually refute that, but did indicate that the number of high capacity magazines involved in gun crimes had gone down.

            I haven’t seen anything which indicates that the legality of high capacity magazines has any influence on the homicide rate.

    5. I believe that Godzilla may have been utilizing a facetious and obviously false argument as a method of satire, but I’m not 100% sure.

      After all, most police departments are saddled by the same mamby-pamby laws and judges and juries that would keep people from legally owning firearms inasmuch as police are strongly discouraged from responding with overwhelming force, even when the perpetrators are known to have high-powered weapons; they’re only allowed to use “proportionate response”, and get their badge taken if they use anything more than that to defend life and liberty.

      Then again, Godzilla could have been serious, too, who knows?

    6. As for the “assault weapons” ban… in some countries it is forbidden to own weapons which look like military grade weapons like assault rifles simply because they make the police’s job harder. How can you do a proportionate response when you do not know which weapon the perp is using in the first place?

      The proportionate response is shoot them dead. That is, treat it as the deadly weapon it appears to be. If it turns out later that it was a fancy water gun, then sucks to be them.

      1. Point, Set and Match to Mr. Hallowell.

        Shooting an attacker until the cease to breath is the ONLY system of 100% certainty of survival.. That’s why LEOs are taught to shoot at someone’s center mass, their chest basically, to stop a bad guy. Only cops in movies shit to wound a guy.

        And, just for the comment, even a FANCY water gun has the tell-tale bright orange ring on its barrel now, so LEO’s can tell it’s not real. There have been a couple of instances where people have painted toy guns to look real, and it cost them their lives.

        1. I’ve also heard of bad guys painting an orange ring on the muzzle of a real weapon in an attempt to confuse police officers. If it causes the cops to hesitate, even if for only a second or two, then the bad guy has an advantage.

    7. Godzilla wrote:

      “I think a reduction in the number of bullets in a cartridge would help.”

      Do you now?

      Please explain how it would help. Why do you “think” that?

    8. If someone points a gun at you, it doesn’t matter even a little what kind of gun it is. I doubt there’s a police department or police officer in this country you’d get a different answer from.

    9. So Godzilla, how do you stop bad guys from getting easily home manufacturable metal boxes with springs in them?

      Of course, the answer is you cannot stop them.

      1. The same way you stop people from consuming home grown cannabis. When someone is caught with an illegal sized clip they are apprehended and fined.

        There are ways of making it harder to make your own clip if you want to. Just ask inkjet printer manufacturers about it. Seems a bit overblown and too much work for the trouble though.

  7. Another fine example of the corrosive doctrine of “Don’t just stand there, do something!” (Spoken in anguished tones, accompanied by hand-wringing, tears, etc.)

    @Karl: What you said.

    1. We should ban high capacity internet, cuz they have pr0n and the founding fathers never invisioned the internet that hurts chiiiiiiiildren. After all, it’s for the chiiiiiildrrren.

      /sarc

  8. I was speaking with a young lady last evening and she said she was all for a ban on high capacity clips…the number of rounds should be minimized, she said.

    What will that accomplish? I asked

    Well the shooter, she said, will have to get another gun.

    A head slapping moment to be sure. This fair lady was under the impression that there is no such thing as reloading with a fresh clip….that once an “assault gun” is out of ammo it’s useless. After I explained the situation to her, and that it takes less than 1 second to reload, she said, to her credit, she must now re-think her position.

    There’s a lot of that sort of mis-information/misunderstanding out there, and the MSM is purposefully doing nothing to clear it up.

    The other thing she said which I do think is quite right is that there is no one out there clearly and articulately saying these things to educate the populace. That Wayne La Pierre is so awful at speaking, leaves such a poor impression, is so….icky…that she just shuts him out. I mentioned Ms. Gratia Hupp and the CNN interview…never saw it.

    1. Ignorance about any subject – including firearms – is humanity’s natural state. As the humorist Will Rogers so aptly noted almost 100 years ago, “Everyone is ignorant only on different subjects.”

      Fortunately, ignorance can be cured if someone is willing to make the effort. A person can learn a lot in just a few hours on a range with a good instructor. You did the right thing by explaining to her that what she believed about reloading was wrong. Only the willfully ignorant (like Piers Morgan) refuses to learn.

      1. The problem, Larry, that she was trying to communicate with me that, as far as a lot of women are concerned, they only see what is put up on the screen and the lefty side has compassion and the conservative side has..

        icky Wayne LaPierre.

        So there’s no incentive to look further. Yes it’s all emotion based.

        And while this particular woman is very intelligent, she, like many women, respond to ick factor.

        1. She may be highly intelligent about some things but she’s obviously ignorant about firearms. There’s nothing wrong with that – everyone is born ignorant about firearms and the only cure for that is education like you attempted. Her comment about having to reevaluate her position on large capacity magazines shows that she’s capable of learning and that’s to be commended. Keep up the good work and perhaps you’ll reduce the level of firearms ignorance in the country, if only by a bit.

        2. Note how most television commercials are geared towards women. That’s because most men have abandoned television (except for sports and scifi).

          Most women on the other hand prefer to be spoonfed their info instead of searching for it on the internet. And when they do search on the internet, it is only on fashionable topics that the rest of the feminine herd is searching. That’s why celebrity gossip and pap are the largest search terms even though most Internet searchers are men.

    2. There was a poster on Larry Corriea’s guns post on MHI (read it if you haven’t already) who told Larry that, because Larry owned firearms and was proficient with them, his commentary could be dismissed as “biased”.

    3. Gregg,
      she wasn’t ‘rethinking’ her point.

      She was just beginning to think about this. That she thought a ‘gun’ became obsolete when it was ’empty’ shows, to me anyway, that she’d not even paid attention to movies or ‘cop shows’ where someone drops a magazine / clip, and puts another one in the gun. And I’ll go as far as saying that most firearms in TV and movies have a 15,000 round mag, but the GOOD GUYS invariably swap clips or magazines when they’re running low.

      If she’s looking at the ‘ick factor’, that might work in favor of the NRA and gun owners. Have you looked at Joe Biden, or seen the way he treats women? He looks like Trumps evil twin.

      1. Most of the “EVIL ASSAULT WEAPONS” crowd probably get their ideas about guns from movies where the bad guy shoots three hundred people with an AK47 before throwing it away because it’s empty.

        1. Quite true.

          they don’t realize that the gun is thrown away because:

          1) it’s empty and

          2) the character has no more clips for it

        2. I think they also get a lot of their ideas that assault weapons are fully automatic from movies and TV shows where every two-bit gangbanger has one. Without an expensive and somewhat difficult to obtain federal license, it has been illegal to own a fully automatic weapon in the US since 1934. So, if those gangbangers really do have them, they bought them illegally (imagine that, criminals not obeying the law!) and they were most likely smuggled in with the same difficulty as illegal drugs.

          I’d love to see some authoritative statistics on the number of criminal uses of fully automatic weapons in the US. Can anyone point me to them? I suspect the incidence is a lot lower than what Hollywood portrays.

      2. Der,

        I know this person really well. She is a thorough….uh….(ducks)….female. When she watches movies she totally tunes out the mechanics of the weapons the actors are using. LOTS of women (and some men) do this.

        When she said she has to re-think this she meant in light of the new info I had just given her. I believe her. Not sure what conclusions she’ll arrive at.

  9. CarsonH, January 10, 2013, 6:49 am

    My point remains that we should be listening to people who understand firearms, and their application to self defence.

    Comment of the year — and it’s only January 10.

  10. The update to the article, referencing Cuomo’s State of the State address, mentions that Cuomo seeks to ban ALL magazines with a capacity of more than 10 rounds, regardless of date of manufacturer. Only a mind completely disconnected from reality could come up with such a law.

    I wonder whether the “just compensation” part of the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment refers to market value before a law is passed, or after. I’d be curious to see how large the budget line item would be to buy back all 10+ round magazines in the entire state of New York. I also can’t help but think that the government would try to defray its own costs by re-selling those magazines out-of-state, even as it reports to the media that it’s actually melting them all down.

      1. Everyone who thinks that a government entity that bans magazines with a capacity greater than 10 would also willingly allow people to keep those magazines and trust the populace to have them converted, instead of confiscate them, please raise your hand.

        *looks around*

        Didn’t think so…

        1. The history of of gun regulation is that if given a choice between annoying as few current gun as possible owners and maximizing the number of dangerous weapons taken out of circulation, governments always choose the first.

          So yes, a government that actually wanted to ban as many magazines as possible holding more than ten rounds would not try to confiscate all of them. Instead it would make the process as painless as it could.

          1. What I meant to say:

            The history of of gun regulation is that if given a choice between annoying as few current gun owners as possible and maximizing the number of dangerous weapons taken out of circulation, governments always choose the first.

            So yes, a government that actually wanted to ban as many magazines as possible holding more than ten rounds would not try to confiscate all of them. Instead it would make the process as painless as it could.

          2. How would a change in clip laws have prevented what happened in Newtown? Would it even effect the small number of deaths by rifle?

          3. There would have been more opportunities to subdue the shooter as he reloaded, as happened with the Long Island Railroad, Thurston High School and Tucson shootings. And high capacity magazines aren’t just for rifles.

          4. So it wont do anything to prevent a Newtown or lower deaths by rifle.

            Hindering reloading would not have been a factor in Newtown. It could very well be a factor in defending your house from a home invasion with multiple assailants.

  11. No one hunts with an assault rifle.

    Some do.

    No one needs 10 bullets to kill a deer.

    That’s because deer are easier to hit than squirrels and easier to bring down than hogs.

    None of this really matters, because it is simple really. The 2nd Amendment doesn’t protect the people’s right to hunt. It protects free people by allowing them to arm themselves against a repressive government. The government doesn’t need assault weapons to police citizens, but they do have them.

    1. Also, deer are prey animals, human thugs are apex predators. 20-30 round magazines are pretty handy for defense against armed thugs but aren’t necessary for use against unarmed targets.

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