by John Galt » Mon Mar 26, 2018 10:59 am
i saw an interesting proposal the other day but now i can't find it. it started off with the very clear observation that there are 5% on one side who want to confiscate guns and 5% on the other that want no regulation on anything and 300 million americans are stuck in the middle of a culture war that goes nowhere
the heart of it was compromise on both sides, with a background check system where you logged in on the internet, got a code that was good for a week that is associated with your ID. then you took it to anywhere you wanted to buy a weapon and they had to log in, put in the code, checked to see if it was valid. they'd also check to see if it was you associated with that code. they'd sell you a weapon if it all checked out
in addition there would be a way for family members and people living with people to ask to have weapons taken away from a person and have special court orders regarding it, and went into some detail
also bump stocks are banned
on the other side of the compromise, suppressors and sawed off shotguns would be removed from the same level of restrictions as grenade launchers. in some places in the world suppressors are mandatory to use as they bring a gun shot down to only a bit louder than a jackhammer, but possibly save the ear from permanent damage. in places like norway, which has only a little less gun ownership rates than america (not guns, we have way more guns, i'm talking about the number of people that own guns) it's considered rude to hunt without one. same with sweden. you don't even really hear the shot when you are hunting without a suppressor but i mean, it happened. it was loud. it was really loud. and it can really damage your hearing. exposure to sounds louder than 140 dB can damage your hearing, and hunting rifles are like 165dB+. as logrithmic scale, a 30db sound is 1000 times louder than near complete silence. suppressors reduce gun shots by about 30 dB -- right around what ear plugs can do, maybe a bit more -- so you're down to just under immediate damage to your hearing, but still higher than the sound of a jet engine right next to you. and as for the sawed off shotgun part, it was a quirk of the legislation that it got in. originally they were trying to ban handguns and they put in stuff to address the concept of someone cutting down long guns and claiming it wasn't a handgun. the handgun stuff failed, but they neglected to clean up the other stuff. the difference between a 15" shotgun and a 16" shotgun is 10 years in jail, and that's ridiculous
Americans learn only from catastrophe and not from experience. -- Theodore Roosevelt
My life has become a single, ongoing revelation that I haven’t been cynical enough.