Tell you what: go do something that violates the NFA, and use that argument.  Tell us how it plays out.

I have no intention of running afoul of the NFA.  Jefferson can tell you why: "Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."

As long as I have the stomach to peacefully endure the abuses and work within the system to make change, I will.  As long as I can reach out to those who disagree with me (like we are here), I will.  As long as there is hope of righting things via soap box and ballot box, I will continue to try.

The fact that I have not broken the NFA has no bearing on the Constitutionality of the NFA.  A small child will give his lunch money to a large bully, not because it is right, but because there is a threat of overwhelming force.  The most powerful nation on the planet would bring to bear as much force as it thought it needed to take away my freedom, my property, and possibly my life in the pursuit of enforcement of the NFA were I to disobey.  The unconstitutionality of Federal gun control is independent of my acquiescence.  In short: I respectfully decline your invitation.

Yes, and here comes some.   It would have come sooner but I was out in the yard pruning trees and dealing with that mess.  I, and probably all of us, appreciate the opportunity to discuss these issues here and in this format with someone we generally seem to disagree with.  If we are to prevail in the arena of ideas we need to practice the thought processes and the debate skills and even our demeanor while doing so.   

I appreciate your willingness to engage me/us in an exchange of ideas and provide the some of the counterpoint(s) we need to be able to address.  We've both been around here too long for me to question your sincerity but I must admit to some perplexity concerning how you arrived at your conclusion(s).      In the final analysis I want this to be a country we can both live with and preserve for our children.   

Thanks for sticking around through what may have been uncomfortable for you at times.   

Well, when you run across one of those "extremists" let me know.   

Probably, but not entirely*.  For instance, I'm not against the idea of relaxing the ban on silencers.

I thought reading comprehension was a core professional skill of academics?
There is no federal ban on silencers in the US, nor in Georgia where you reside* so I don't understand why you would mistakenly believe so.   
They require a federal transfer tax.  Tax.   Not license.   The department in the regulatory agency which handles said tax is just ludicrously understaffed, with approximately 6 people to review and approve all the transfers, resulting in delays in up to a year. 
That enough of a delay on a right to consider the right denied? 
If not then you should have no grounds for complaint if any of your other rights are "delayed" for the same length of time.   

But even the War on Drugs doesn't explain why you're safer from gun violence in 2017 Afghanistan & Iraq than you are 2017 United States.

You're not safer in Afghanistan & Iraq than you are in the US.
You're safer in Afghanistan & Iraq than you are in 65 or so of the 3242 counties in the US.



More accurately, safer in Afghanistan & Iraq than in a few particular neighborhoods in each of those 65 counties out of the 3242 counties in the US.....and you're involved with street drugs or gang activity. 

If you’re not involved with gangs or street drugs and stay out of the neighborhoods where those are common you’re way, way safer in the US than Afghanistan & Iraq.

*What I would personally like to see is a thorough auditing of what is working positively towards reducing gun violence, and what isn't working.

None of the gun laws on the books are going to help.
Nor are any of the gun laws proposed, no matter how outlandishly draconian.
Why?
Because we don't have a gun problem in the US.
We don't have a gun problem in those 65 or so counties.

You and the rest of the liberal crowd have been trying to treat a symptom, not the disease.

Those neighborhoods within those counties are the reservoirs of the disease, and the disease is Gangs. What we have in the US, predominantly in those 65 or so counties, concentrated in a few neighborhoods in each, is a gang problem.

To loop back around to SQLBullet, and his ordeal that kicked this all off: If the gun he had found and desired to purchase had been at the table of the FFL running background checks, instead of being a private sale, it still would have taken him an hour to get out of there.  The FFL screwed up by only having the one system there.  If he had found it at a shop on, say, Tax Return Day or around the Fourth of July, or any other day where sales generally run high, he'd've still run into a bottleneck. 

And it still would be an infringement.





*If you lived in a state where they were proscribed by law the error would be understandable.

LowKey - Sorry, mispoke re: silencers. My tenure on here has made me quite aware that they are legal, but require a tag.  I meant taking them off the NFA list.

Nice map.  See that spot in northwest Georgia, the dark red? Not the mild pink, bordering on Tennessee. Atlanta.  That's where I live and work.  I listen to the news, and am quite aware of what the statistics are around here,

To delve a little deeper into the NFA -

I would equate the tax tag and wait for a silencer to be far more chilling that filling out a 4473 and the (usually) short time a background check takes.

Crime rates, especially violent crime, appear to be most closely tied to income inequality.  Plot the GINI coefficient against crime by country and you see a strong correlation.

I don't think we need to open that can of worms in this thread... 

Nice map.  See that spot in northwest Georgia, the dark red? Not the mild pink, bordering on Tennessee. Atlanta.  That's where I live and work.  I listen to the news, and am quite aware of what the statistics are around here,

I knew where you lived, you've mentioned it before here.
Your awareness of the statistics doesn't change the reason for the murder rate being so high.

We’ve seen this sort of pattern before in this country starting during Prohibition. The first major attempts at gun control were ostensibly enacted in response to the rising wave of mob related violence presented to the public eye by the news media of the time. 

Trying to ban something that people want creates a black market, black markets comes to be dominated by criminal organizations who have the ability to smuggle and distribute said thing on a large scale, said criminal organization uses violence to develop and maintain their market share while also increasing corruption of public officials and employees, followed by said criminal organization deciding to diversify and expand into other criminal enterprises.
"The Mob" and what started out as a relatively small group of criminals pre- Prohabition grew into something that remained a major problem for well over 50 years and which still exists to some extent this very day.   
The War on Drugs has repeated the pattern, with the unsurprising spread of violence into other ancillary endeavors and criminal enterprises.   
And now you and others on the left are suggesting doing the same with firearms but  incrementally,  obviously in the belief that we won't catch on much like the apocryphal instructions for making frog soup*.   

 Those early gun control measures failed miserably at curbing the Maffia’s penchant for killing whenever it suited their business interest.  What it did succeed in doing was making criminals of otherwise law abiding citizens and through prohibitive and punitive levels of taxation effectively turn the complete exercise of a Constitutionally protected Right into a privilege.   Something the modern left is trying to do currently with our Right to Freedom of Speech, as protected by the 1st Amendment; by creating "Free Speech Zones" wherever they believe someone may voice opposition to their philosophies and goals in the public square, and through leftist controlled publicly funded institutions charging exorbitant "security fees" to conservative organizations and speakers when leftist speakers are not so charged.  So much for the Left being champions of the individual and freedom of speech.

You might want to take note of the fact that, corrupt as many of them may have been, the members of both the House and the Senate in the era of Prohibition recognized the requirement for an Amendment to the US Constitution if they wished to have authority to make the sale and consumption of alcohol illegal in the United States.  That without such an amendment that any laws passed to that end would be null and void from inception.

Just like every single gun control law.


While correlation does not automatically equal causation you may find it enlightening and perhaps suggestive to look at the most common denominators in the handful of high violence neighborhoods within the 65 or so counties, responsible for the majority of violent crime in the US.   

-Predominantly within Democrat congressional districts.
-Predominantly within cities run by Democrat Mayors or City Councils.
-Predominately in areas with high levels of illegal drug sales and other crime.
-Predominantly within jurisdictions having very strong “gun control” laws.
-Predominantly within areas with very low levels of legal firearms    ownership.

Again, while correlation does not equal causation, If I were a betting man I’d be placing my money on criminals and catastrophic levels of mismanagement of law enforcement and policing at the municipal level in those areas exacerbated by effectively stripping the law abiding residents of their ability to effectively defend themselves through a combination of onerous anti-gun laws and hostile and biased prosecution of those who use firearms in legitimate instances of self defense.   

Once again, the problem is in 1/50th of the nations’s counties having these anomalous levels of violence, and in fact the aggregated area is far smaller than that 1/50th implies as even within those counties the violence is predominantly withing a few square blocks of each, roughly an area the size of Rhode Island. 
For this the solution you advocate is infringing upon the rights of the law abiding everywhere else?   
That’s on par with advocating warrant-less searches without probable cause of every personal computer in the US to catch  cyber-criminals or warrant-less searches without probable cause of every single personal residence find to illegal opiates.   
Both would be effective, both would reduce crime, both would improve the safety of “society”.
And both would be un-Constitutional and grounds to follow the same course of action as the Founding Fathers for similar reason.



Reduce illegal drug trafficking, either by legalizing that poison and letting people exercise their right to make the choice to use it or not as they will, and if they commit crimes to support their drug habit or while under the influence treat them as any other criminal who committed those acts.  If they put themselves out of the gene pool then so be it. 

It’s been mentioned that with Rights go Responsibilities & Obligations.
The corollary to that is with choosing Liberty comes choosing Risk & Danger, referred to by Samuel Adams as, “the animating contest of freedom”. 
As to Safety, Public or otherwise, here is no “Safety”, just varying levels of risk.
“Safety” is a figment promised to small children by their mothers, exploiting the child’s ignorance of the world’s reality in order to make the children more biddable and obedient to the mother’s will.   


* As the tale goes, for those who have not heard it before-

If you drop a frog into a pot of hot water it will jump right out.

But if you put the frog in a pot of cold water and slowly raise the temperature of the water, over the course of many hours, the frog will keep swimming about obliviously until it's been cooked.

The left loves to make frog soup, otherwise known as incrementalism.

I have always wondered how much GINI coefficient, population density, and having a less risk averse population all play together to cause increased violent crime.

It has always baffled me why well established procedures to study populations in biology are not applied to the study of humans.

I never found it much of a stretch to assume there is some self sorting behavior for the humans found in the modern US. It seems pretty clear any individual that made the trip was likely less risk averse than the population from which it came.

I think having less risk aversion, even if only slightly, would explain many of the odd things about the US compared to other areas.

I used the military to get my education and did just fine.  And by education, I don’t mean a degree, I mean something that is actually useful in life. Something that trained me to make a good living and provide for my family. Everybody able bodied person had exactly the same opportunities that I did.

I do not mean this to be flippant.

I do not understand what these words have to do with income inequality.  You present them on in a context that appears to be intended to refute something, but I am not clear what you are refuting (correlation or the implied causation or something else) or how your anecdote is meant to refute either one.

Can you elaborate on what I missed?

Perhaps my reply wasn’t clear. I was interrupted half a dozen time while writing my reply. And perhaps I misunderstood what Booksmart was referencing when he mentioned income inequality.
I took it that he was implying that “people of color” or people of a certain region, or of a different gender make less money than others. I think that thinking is incorrect.  Based on my military experience, and my current career,   a job pays X amount. Race and gender are irrelevant.
And if someone say he/she didn’t have the same opportunities I/you did, well I think that too is BS. (We’ve had that discussion before)

I may have missed something along the way while skimming through the tread.

My mention of income equality doesn't have anything to do with race - it has everything to do with the wage gap, as corporate wages haven't been keeping up with corporate profits for about 40 years now.  Also, *I* didn't mention income equality first, SQLBullet did.  What I believe we are both meaning here is simply the Haves vs. the Have Nots.

I have always wondered how much GINI coefficient, population density, and having a less risk averse population all play together to cause increased violent crime.

Are you implying inner city kids are less risk averse than rural kids?  Search youtube for "hold my beer" and tell me that again. lol

Wanting to manipulate the data to support your position?

No, I was going to check things like mortality and casualty rates against types of firearms used in mass shootings, but thanks for assuming.

Two things:

1) I don't think the CPRC is as unbiased as you think it is... call it a hunch... I want to play around with their Excel sheets for a day or two - there're some stats I want to explore.

Is there an organization studying this issue that doesn't have a bias?   I'd like to know because I've never seen a real, live unicorn before.

No matter how strong a bias (if any) they might have, the number of murders committed in each county is a fairly simple and straightforward metric. 
Unless you're like the U.K. and don't count it as a homicide for statistical prposes until you've caught and convicted someone for the crime. 

2) Proposing one set of gun laws for urban environments and another set of laws for rural and suburban populations would solely punish the urban populations.

Where have I suggested such a thing?   
My suggestion has been to:
1- Pursue gangs engaged in criminal activity.
2- Remove the profitability of selling drugs on the black market, either through enforcement of current laws or by legalization and making them so cheap that their cost per pound is on par with any other agricultural product (and in this case not to mollycoddle people who do stupid things because they're using...Darwin's Law applies).

Even if one were to suggest such unfair laws based on geography; while it would be unfair it would only be punishing those in the 2% of counties with the highest murder rates.    You and the rest of the left would punish EVERYONE.
Rather like mandating that everyone must eat porridge because less than % @ of the population cannot chew steak.*
In any case, both would be un-Constitutional.
 

*Apologies to R.A.H.

No apologies necessary.  He's dead and those of us who've read him recognize where the quote(s) came from.      

Can someone please tell me what a person's income has to do with their morality? 

 

Two things:

1) I don't think the CPRC is as unbiased as you think it is... call it a hunch... I want to play around with their Excel sheets for a day or two - there're some stats I want to explore.

2) Just an observation, regarding the map: Those dark red counties, displaying gun murders in the US? For a very large chunk of the US population, that *is* the reality of the US.  Due to the aforementioned income inequality, getting out to the 'burbs for a safer reality simply isn't an option.  Proposing one set of gun laws for urban environments and another set of laws for rural and suburban populations would solely punish the urban populations. Fun conundrum: the NFA does that, too, to an extent. Whee.

http://ecpmlangues.u-strasbg.fr/civilization/geography/US-census-maps-demographics.html

Giving booksmart a statistical basis for an argument is liking giving a monkey a football.   

And, for the record, two sets of laws ( or more, but who's counting .  .  .  ) and selective, creative enforcement of same is exactly how we ended up in this discussion in the first place, no?   

If we look at item number two from the above quoted post, if the dark red areas referenced were Covid-19 outbreaks we would do exactly what was necessary to contain it and eradicate it.  Because people's lives depend on it.  Right?