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Durandal wrote:As far as home defense goes, do you really want an assault rifle? In close quarters, they're rather cumbersome. Wouldn't a pistol be a better weapon? Or a shotgun?

The ideal weapon for home defence is a sawed-off shotgun (easier to carry & use in close quarters) loaded with alternating rounds of birdshot or buckshot and slugs. At home defence distances where the target is 20-25' away at most, birdshot will cause massive surface wounds without over-penetrating and blowing holes through walls, but it won't reliably penetrate deap enough in humans to hit vital organs. It's prefered for cheaply-built condos and non-detached housing where you don't want stray pellets to hit your neighbours. For detached housing, buckshot is prefered, it reliably penetrates to vital organs and has a good one-shot stop rate. The slugs are there in case the bad guys are wearing body armour, if you shoot him with buckshot and he gets back up, he's got a slug waiting for him that'll blow nicely through his armour and put him down.

Pistols are underpowered according to most experts, it's easier to shoot for some people but you trade off a lot of stopping power and you have to aim them more carefully than shotguns. Due to their length, rifles are not recommended for home defence situations, it's too easy for them to get hung up or whatever and using them in tight quarters is a bitch.

Uhh..

Slugs aren't a good idea for urban home defense as I've personally fired 12ga slugs through boiler plate that stopped a .44 magnum cold. The risk of overpenetration and nailing your neighbor is just too great.

If he's wearing body armor, then shoot him in the head while he's trying to get back up.

Glocksman wrote:Slugs aren't a good idea for urban home defense as I've personally fired 12ga slugs through boiler plate that stopped a .44 magnum cold. The risk of overpenetration and nailing your neighbor is just too great.

If he's wearing body armor, then shoot him in the head while he's trying to get back up.

True enough. You'll have to adjust your ammo load depending on your home's construction & how far it is from other homes in the area. In most urban areas it would be best to go with a straight buckshot load, or a mix of birdshot & buckshot. My home has foot thick reinforced concrete walls so over-penetration is not an issue.

I have to agree that slugs are a horrible idea. My neighbor's idiot son was cleaning his shotgun once and forgot to unload it. The slug went through four or five walls (I don't remember the house layout exactly) from his room and into the kitchen, where it barely penetrated the wall and fell in the sink where she was washing dishes. I would not want to use one of those things inside a house.

That's why you have both. Then you slip your Wakizashi into the waste-band of your trousers incase things get a little too up-close.

You are officially cool now

My family... well suffice to say we use our second amendment rights. Mother has a concealed carry permit for her glock, and we have various bladed/blunt objects strategicly placed around the house(Baseball bat at the door, a swrd in the living room, and upstairs, I have a few bludeoning instruments) not that our neighborhood isnt safe(the worst we have around here are stoners who grow their own pot) but it is just that we dont want to take that chance.

Wakizashi? Bah. *Goes with my trusty European short sword for close-in work.*

Alyrium Denryle wrote:

That's why you have both. Then you slip your Wakizashi into the waste-band of your trousers incase things get a little too up-close.

You are officially cool now

Thank you. That means a lot.

My family... well suffice to say we use our second amendment rights. Mother has a concealed carry permit for her glock, and we have various bladed/blunt objects strategicly placed around the house(Baseball bat at the door, a swrd in the living room, and upstairs, I have a few bludeoning instruments) not that our neighborhood isnt safe(the worst we have around here are stoners who grow their own pot) but it is just that we dont want to take that chance.

Yeah, I know what you mean. You don't have to be paranoid to believe that it's better to be safe than sorry.

Rogue 9 wrote:Wakizashi? Bah. *Goes with my trusty European short sword for close-in work.*

You go ahead. The reason we don't use the katana is because we found out that things like couches can get in the way. Poor couch.

As for better swords, the wakizashi has the best combination of fast and sharp of any of our swords. And it's carbon steel. Full tang, I think.

That's why I don't use Justitia inside either.

A co-worker of mine just recieved his fully automatic Mac-11 this week.

He had to wait a long time for the paperwork to clear before he could get it.


He took his wife to an indoor range and she found out the hard way that shooting full auto ain't like it is on tv shows and the movies. With the stock against her shoulder he had her start with the gun pointed slightly down and after 4-5 shots it was already heading towards the ceiling.

One thing he mentioned. Absolutely no one at the range paid any special attention to him because he was shooting full auto. As he said, "got to love Arizona".

MKSheppard wrote:And in other news The Terminator signed in a .50 BMG rifle ban in Kalifornication.

But of course! Everyone knows that criminals will gladly spend $5000+ on weaponry they can't effectively use to hold up 711!

Imperial Overlord wrote:Not to mention they are hard to conceal under a trenchcoat.

Well in the case of .50cal BGM rifles, the things are a pain to carry with period. The M82A1 is 61 inches long and weighs 25 pounds 9 ounces. For comparison, an MG42 general-purpose machine gun weighs 3 ounces less, and is 13 inches shorter.

When asked to justify that particular rule (which is part of the Constitution), you can't just appeal to the Constitution.

Sorry, Mike, it doesn't work that way. The People don't have to justify ANYTHING... it's the government that has to justify taking it away.

And there's no justification for banning the .50 cal BMG round. How many murders or assaults have been committed with a weapon using this round?

SPOOFE wrote:

When asked to justify that particular rule (which is part of the Constitution), you can't just appeal to the Constitution.

Sorry, Mike, it doesn't work that way. The People don't have to justify ANYTHING... it's the government that has to justify taking it away.

That's not the argument he employed; he employed the argument that the Second Amendment is justified by the Second Amendment. This argument merits a different reply, ie- the government regulates anything which is intrinsically dangerous, and guns are at least as dangerous as cars.

And there's no justification for banning the .50 cal BMG round. How many murders or assaults have been committed with a weapon using this round?

How many murders or assaults have been committed with VX gas? Does that mean we shoudn't restrict people from possessing it?

Darth Wong wrote:

And there's no justification for banning the .50 cal BMG round. How many murders or assaults have been committed with a weapon using this round?

How many murders or assaults have been committed with VX gas? Does that mean we shoudn't restrict people from possessing it?

*Looks at Japan*

Some people have certainly tried... Although that was admittedly with Sarin. And there's also the fact that an accident could kill a fair sized town...

Darth Wong wrote: How many murders or assaults have been committed with VX gas? Does that mean we shoudn't restrict people from possessing it?

That's a flat out false comparison. No one commits murders or assualts with VX because it's so tightly regulated and because they'd run a high risk of killing themselves handelling it. .50 cal rounds and the guns that fire them on the other hand are just plain impractical for criminal work as is evidenced by the fact that if you want to you could go out and get one off the black market or, if you're one that lives in the right area, through legal channels (albiet it would take a while). Basically, no one commits murders and assualts with VX because they cant get it. No one but idiots commit murders and assualts with .50 cal weapons because a simple 9mm pistol will hold up a 7 11 much better, will cost a lot less (wether legit or black market) and won't fucking tell the entire neighborhood of your presence (+ it doesn't weigh 40 pounds and as such can be hidden so that when your walking away from/to said 7 11 you won't instantly be spotted as a gun toting criminal and will have an easier tiem escaping/getting to the target of your criminal activity.

Darth Wong wrote: How many murders or assaults have been committed with VX gas? Does that mean we shoudn't restrict people from possessing it?

VX nerve gas is a bit devoid of recreational usefulness you're a brain-damaged sadist, though I suppose it could be used for hunting and with a lot of money home and personal defence. It also has the potential to kill a vast number of people easily. But if you go around shooting down random civilians with a .50cal BGM rifle your not going to accomplish significantly more then you would with one of millions of .300-ish cal hunting and battle rifles around which are amply lethal of killing people, pierce personal body armor and are accurate to the maximum ranges most people can shoot. And in fact, the greater bulk and much greater sound of the weapon would be a great disadvantage in doing that. We don't significantly restrict people from possessing low-level potential chemical weapon like chorine gas, and you can make a fairly potent poison gas from common household cleaners. That kind of risk is just accepted as not worth doing anything about, and its the same story with these rifles. Unless you can prove that they represent a real threat to the US population that is without other counter, then there is no reason to have specific restrictions against them. Anyway, I'd personally be just fine with allowing ownership only with a Class III license, that's a just fine compromise. An outright ban though is bullshit.

Darth Wong wrote:How many murders or assaults have been committed with VX gas? Does that mean we shoudn't restrict people from possessing it?

Anyone watch The Daily Show last night?

"And 'cop-killers'? Jon, these bullets can kill so much more than that!"

darthdavid wrote:

Darth Wong wrote: How many murders or assaults have been committed with VX gas? Does that mean we shoudn't restrict people from possessing it?

That's a flat out false comparison.

Obviously, you don't understand how a logic rebuttal works. He posts the argument that since there are almost no killings with .50cal weapons on record, there is no reason to ban it. I refuted that logic by producing a situation in which the logic does not hold. The situation does not have to be precisely analogous in every way, only in the manner necessary to refute the logic of the particular argument that it was being used to refute.

The VX to .50 comparison still falls short because you're comparing an area effect weapon to a bullet. Different laws apply to area effect weapons and I can make a good case that the 2nd doesn't protect the ownership of them as the writings of the founders were concerned with the adequate provision of small arms to the militia. Whereas the .50 rifle is a militia type weapon. The Afgans made good use of theirs in during the Soviet invasion and the IRA used a couple to put the fear of God into some British troops.

A better comparison would be 20mm solid shot practice rounds to the .50BMG.

The reason the .50 is popular for big gun long range competition is that a half inch is the largest diameter the projectile can be without being classified as a 'destructive device' under the 1934 NFA with all of the attendant legal BS that comes with such ($200 tax, paperwork out the yazoo, etc). The sole exemption to the 1/2 inch rule are shotguns.

Of course, if the market justifies it, Barrett and others will come out with the .499 Californian or .498 Schwartzenegger.

Methinks people are (intentionally?) misunderstanding Mike's rebuttal. He's not claiming .50cal is comparable to VX. He's arguing that if you claim .50cal ought to be legal because it's rarely if ever used to commit a crime, then since it's also rarely if ever used to commit a crime so should be VX gas.
He's not arguing that .50cal ought to be illegal, he's just debunking one
of the arguments why it should be legal(Einy's, I think).
As a rebuttal to that particular argument his rebuttal works perfectly fine.
Assuming I understood what Mike was going for, of course.