By ART CHANCE
The Left is in full song for gun control and especially “assault weapons” bans, even though the best definition for an assault weapon they can come up with is “ugly black gun.”
I thought of attaching a picture of myself holding my cute little “Apache Black” Remington Nylon 66 or my Ruger Mini-14, but I decided that pictures of oneself holding a gun on the internet probably aren’t safe in today’s world.
But to the point. The Nylon 66 has a shiny black plastic stock, thus the nylon, and it’s decorated with. a Southwest Indian-looking motif, and a shiny chrome barrel and mechanism. It’s cute.
The Mini-14 is blued steel and wood. It isn’t glossy and has no fancy checkering or engraving. It has an ominous magazine attached to it. That is the thing those who don’t know about firearms call a clip. You can get a Mini-14 magazine that holds from the three-round original to the common 10- or 20-round magazines to the insane 100-round drum magazines.
Some facts: That cute little Nylon 66 has a 17-round magazine and is semi-automatic; one pull of the trigger, one round from the weapon. The Nylon 66’s tube magazine is harder and slower to change than the snap-in magazines of the Ruger, but if you want to, you could have additional magazines. The Nylon 66 fires a .22 caliber round and there are truly lethal versions of that round. At the distances involved in most mass shootings (Las Vegas being a strange exception we may never know the truth about), the .22 long rifle cartridge in the Nylon 66 is every bit as lethal as the .223 that the Mini-14 feeds.
The Mini-14 looks like a small version of the U.S. battle rifle, the M-14. The M-14 was, in fact, the post WWII U.S, Battle Rifle; .308 caliber and select fire including full automatic fire. The U.S. sought a replacement because the .308 ammunition was very heavy and caused supply difficulties, and the recoil of the .308 round in automatic fire mode caused many a soldier to lose control of the weapon.
Afghanistan and Iraq veterans joke about the “Haji 360,” which was what happened when an untrained man lost control of an AK-47, less powerful than a M-14, and spun around killing or wounding his comrades.
The U.S. answer in the early 1960s was the AR-15. AR doesn’t stand for assault rifle but rather for Armalite Rifle, for the company that designed and initially produced it. It used the much physically smaller and lighter .223 round. A .223 is like the .22 that you might have shot squirrels or birds when you were a kid, but with a souped-up engine; it has a lot more powder behind it. The .223 has a muzzle velocity, the speed at which the bullet leaves the barrel, at 2,500 to over 3,000 feet per second.
I have one, and it is the hardest to fire accurately of any weapon I own. The round leaves the barrel supersonically and has a nasty crack, especially if you have a flash suppressor; it is really hard not to flinch. Obviously the Dayton shooter who used an AR-15 knew this. That is why he was wearing hearing protection.
A .22 Long Rifle has a muzzle velocity of 1200 or so to close to 2000, but at the distances common in mass shootings that is a distinction without a difference. If you’re hit in a vital area with either, you die. If you’re hit in a less vital area and don’t get quick medical attention, you die but more slowly.
Sociopathic young males choose the AR-15 because of its macho image. Mafia hit-men choose the .22 pistol with a sub-sonic round because it is quiet.
The real issue here is not the abundance of guns in the U.S. but the abundance of sociopathic young males.
I grew up with boys who by today’s standards would be considered wild animals, and we all had guns. Hell, we had fights with BB guns. Despite what our mothers told us, nobody ever got an eye put out, but we got some pretty good welts.
There are a lot more sociopathic young males in the US today than there were in my time. Teachers don’t have paddles and fathers don’t use belts on them.
Almost all the mass shooters in the past couple of decades have been males under 30. It is a safe bet that they have never been directed, corrected, or disciplined in their life. They had no idea that there might be consequences for killing a few dozen people.
Art Chance is a retired Director of Labor Relations for the State of Alaska, formerly of Juneau and now living in Anchorage. He is the author of the book, “Red on Blue, Establishing a Republican Governance,” available at Amazon.
Amen or should I say Athey.
Art, Thanks for pointing out some things that I hope the less educated will now understand. I tire of hearing “assault rifle” and am super sick of every white young sick male that does this being instantly labeled racist, homophobic, blah, blah, blah. The first thing they are is sick in the head. What is the definition of racism anymore? If the store is out of broccoli someone cries racism. It’s out of control!
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Kids that have no family core, ignored, and otherwise left to their own devices-maybe locked in their rooms doing????? all night?…with no one caring…no one checking…no consequences either positive or negative ever when they do “caught”, leads to a life of what? When a kid feels that you don’t care, then they don’t care.
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Just mom threatening to tell dad when I was mouthing off was enough to scare me into submission-after she gave me a good smacking too. I was not often a repeat offender.
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My brothers used to take their guns to school and put them in their lockers so they could go hunting when classes were out. No one batted an eye when a student came in with their rifle and put it in their locker.
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Of course that was a different time. Think about what has changed. Think about what we allow now.
As the author correctly states it is easy to modify an AR and easy to shoot a lot of rounds quickly. It is also difficult to regulate an AR. Far easier to limit magazines of any weapon to 5 rounds for civilian use. This regulation would be easy to enforce and meets the Second Amendment.
I didn’t say it is easy to modify an AR. It is easy to modify them cosmetically and there are all sorts of “tacticool” accessories available for them. As I said, you can get magazines for them in all sizes up to the drums with 100 rounds are more, but drums are generally thought unreliable, and moreso in the larger capacities. Bump stocks are no longer legally available, but they remain easy to make.
Mechanical modifications beyond tuning and polish pretty much require gunsmith and machinist skills. You’d have to have serious skills to increase the rate of fire.
It doesn’t help than so many parents use a pill bottle, with what amounts to small doses of methamphetamine, to keep their children zonked out (controlled). When these children grow up and stop taking these pills, with what amounts to small doses of methamphetamine, cold turkey their brains do not know what to do or how to think. Add to that the realism in video games today, specifically first person shooter games, and the results are unfortunately not too surprising.
I’m pretty sure that if I and most of my male classmates were suddenly to be 12 or so again and be placed in a modern classroom they would immediately render us comatose with Ritalin or some other drug. So much easier to label boys ADD/ADHD and drug them than to provide discipline and structure.
Amen.
I don’t think that the degree of mental instability that is within these people can be beat out of them with belts or paddles. it goes beyond hard discipline, in my opinion. the same logic applies to the anti-gun proponents- making guns less available or harder to get is a mere speed bump (and by no means insurmountable) in someone’s plans to incur mass damage on a group of innocent people (if they’re gonna do it, it will be by any means necessary). ultimately- and in both cases- that’s just ignoring the root of the problem. it seems to me that many “parents” today would just as soon toss a label on their kids (autistic, adhd, etc.) and dope ’em up to the gills rather than seek “alternative methods (like dealing with it yourself as a parent, what a concept).” if that doesn’t work, seek professional help, but only after you’ve exhausted all of your options at home. the former approach- doping kids up- coupled with things like social media (powerful mediums that provide unstable people with forums that are free of accountability, responsibility, etc.) and our country’s glorification of violence (turn on your tv, see for yourself)- will only exacerbate the problems these types of people deal with. so with mass shootings becoming a weekly occurrence, that then begs the question as to why and/or how there are so many more sociopathic individuals in society today compared to say 30-50yrs ago? or is that even the case? there may in fact be more people out there that suffer from serious mental illnesses today than there were 30 or 50yrs ago, who knows. however, the fact of the matter is that “crazy” people have roamed this earth since day 1. but it’s only been in the last 20 or 30 yrs that these types of people have been provided with the “tools” that more or less accommodate their conditions, allow them to further disassociate themselves from reality, and provide the avenues to ignore these issues. the whole anti-bullying campaign (one such avenue) is certainly not helping either- you’re doing a great disservice to your kid(s) if you don’t allow them to deal with reality. sure, there are many cases where kids just can’t deal with bullies on their own, e.g. folks who are mentally challenged, handicapped, etc. and for those people, support may be required. problem is, everybody else who is wholly capable of dealing with it (but may have a bit of difficulty doin so at first) now has a safety net, or safe-haven to run to. which only perpetuates the problem, in my opinion.
We talk about gun’s and how they work all day long but it won’t change anything in the mind of a liberals brain the left wants to take them away so they have complete control of our lives how to eat sleep be educated who and how to pray to because most of them have no real belief in G-D they see themselves as G-D and want us to bow down to them for everything we get my personal feeling is they will have my weapon when I fire my last round and I’m dead because as a Jewish man in this world today I’m a serious target for hate as I’ve been targeted before and understand why I own a weapon for the protection of life and my dad as an officer taught me how to use it properly, don’t let the name fool you I’m Irish and Ashkenazi I’m not afraid to die for my beliefs and freedom G-D bless the U.S.A and Israel
Dang rights you’re hated Sir! They hate me too. You’re also openly hated by a US Congresswoman and the rest of the “progressive” congress since they don’t condemn her. They are the party of tolerance don’t ya know? They disgust me. Hypocrisy. And they all have armed security….hmmmm.
We used to have BB gun fights. Good times. Maybe that’s what the guy was thinking at Dave Rose Park.
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