milemaker13
Member
I got into a discussion about gun control with a friend online. This is a person I know IRL. He and his wife are anti gun. He owns a Dodge Charger R/T so I asked him why he felt he needed 300+ horsepower to go to work and didn't he honestly think that might relate to positions some take on magazine capacity. He replied that it certainly didn't, his car wasn't designed to kill like assault weapons are. The usual blah blah blah. I used the car analogy because many people (meaning non gun owners) can relate more to cars than to something with which they have no actual experience.
So I wrote this post and blogged it. Here's the blog post.
We need to do something about the overpowered cars on our roadways. There is no reason for having a car with over one hundred horsepower. Cars are lighter and need less power to achieve legal highway speeds, the VW bug of the 60's had a measly 40 horsepower and could easily travel on most any interstate highway, turnpike or parkway in the country.
One doesn't need an 840 horsepower Dodge Demon to go grocery shopping or to commute to work. Yet excessive speed is a direct factor in more than a quarter of all annual traffic fatalities. From the National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration. “Speeding endangers everyone on the road: In 2017, speeding killed 9,717 people, accounting for more than a quarter (26%) of all traffic fatalities that year.” Almost 10,000 people killed just because someone was going too fast.
There is no real reason for a car to have more than 4 cylinders. It wastes gas, contributes to pollution and makes it easy to accidentally go over the safe speed limit.
Racecar style automobiles are even worse, it's one thing to have the speedometer creep past the legal limit, but a car that looks like it belongs on a racetrack more than a city street is a direct challenge to some drivers to exceed the speed limit, perhaps even initiate a high speed chase when a law enforcement officer tries to pull them over, endangering everyone on the road. Racing stripes, spoilers and such do not make the car truly go faster, however they may make the driver feel they're in a racecar and no one can catch them.
Now that a chunk of people are up in arms about such potential legislation for which I seem to be advocating, I challenge everyone to stop and think, isn't this the same being said about guns and gun-control?
After the New Zealand shooting tragedy they are banning weapons based on looks. “In the interim, New Zealand Governor General Patsy Reddy has signed an order to reclassify some semi-automatic weapons as 'military-style'.“ This is just like what I was talking about above when I discussed vehicles being “racecar style”. They are talking the same language here, but in relation to guns.
My handy dandy internet dictionary defines style as “a distinctive appearance”. So we're talking about banning something because of looks. Not function, not capability, merely looks. Two guns, one with a wooden stock like Grandpa's deer rifle (Mini 14 in this case) and the other with a polymer stock, pistol grip, both with removable magazines and semi-automatically firing the same bullet, the former passes the assault rifle sniff test for some by virtue of not having a pistol grip extending down below the mechanism the latter doesn't and is therefore ban-able in many people's eyes. The presence or lack of a pistol grip doesn't affect in the least how deadly the weapon is, but the sinister black look of the second is scary looking. Back to car terms, it reminds me of the commercial for the short lived Dodge Magnum where a test panel thought the car was scary looking and the designers were all but high fiving saying that is what they were going for.
A semi-automatic firearm isn't a weapon of war as those are almost always fully automatic capable. One trigger pull can potentially empty the gun of fire-able ammunition when the weapon is fully automatic, semi auto only shoots one round per trigger pull no matter for however long the trigger is held down. Pretty sad that we're coming down to style points to ban things.
As for magazine capacity, there isn't much difference between an eighteen round magazine, two nine round magazines and three six round magazines, a second or two at most, yet, for some reason, many legislators are fixated on drawing a line at 10 round magazine capacity sort of intimating that a lower magazine capacity equipped weapon is less deadly. I urge anyone who has read this far to watch the youtube video whose link is attached to this post.
So many overreactions have produced so many over reaching laws in the past, let's not start passing ones that tread on the toes of constitutionally protected rights.
I'd like to use this same analogy on my coworker using his jeep wrangler. "Military style assault vehicle" with "high capacity suspension" and "high capacity 6 cyl engine". This vehicle truly was designed for war, not merely adapted from a civilian model(as I understand the ar-15s development).
