Originally Posted By: Reddy45
Originally Posted By: Duffman77
Originally Posted By: Reddy45
It's like you're so confident that democracy will always be stable,
You know the best indicator of future performance is past performance. Its amazing that the 2nd amendment can be so right and everything else about government can be so wrong.
Originally Posted By: Reddy45
As a law abiding gun owner, I'm tired of being told that I'm somehow a greater danger to society than those who willingly and repeatedly break the law.
I to get tired of battling the same old strawman. I don’t speak for others in this thread and they don’t speak for me. Show me please where I said you or anyone else here was a danger to society?
Originally Posted By: Reddy45
I ask that you please reassess who the enemy is when it comes to this discussion.
Again please show me the quotation, mine or others in this thread.
Originally Posted By: Reddy45
But on the same notion, you cast doubt on your law abiding peers and not on the criminals?
Again show me.
I primarily drive at the point you made in your original post in this thread:
Quote:
2) There needs to be a law on magazine capacity, I'd put it at 5 for a semi-auto. These killings are going to happen anyway but I think the body count could be lower if the shooters were slowed down more.
It applies so specifically to the Sandy Hook shooting, and in a retroactive manner, that it penalizes law abiding gun owners.
Why does it penalize law abiding gun owners?
If you enact a ban on high capacity magazines, the good guys comply. By definition, law abiding citizens will abide by the passage of the law.
However, the criminals by definition don't follow laws. They do possess high capacity magazines, and will use them to commit crimes.
Suddenly you shifted the advantage in favor of criminals.
If a criminal invades my home, and we both get in a shootout with AR15s, I'm stuck with a 5 round magazine when the other guy has a 30 round magazine. He has 6x as many chances to shoot me while I scramble around in the dark trying to locate another magazine.
Myself, as a rational gun owner interested in self defense and a fighting chance against tyranny, wants the best and most advantageous firearm or weapon I can get. If the criminals have knives, I want a gun. If they have guns, I want bigger guns, and it goes on and on. At this current time, I feel like I have a fighting chance against a home invader because I can use 20 or 30 round magazines. I can tell you from experience that having only 5 rounds puts me at a SERIOUS disadvantage if I can't fight back accurately or quickly enough. I am a fairly skilled marksman who regularly competes, so it isn't my lack of skill that requires more than a 5 round magazine.
However, about a year ago I was awoken at 3:30 AM on a Friday morning because a meth-head who lived a block over was attempting to break into my home via the front door and then the side gate to my backyard. What awoke me was him being high and thinking my house was his, and his constant ringing of the doorbell and banging on the wall. For the first minute or two after I woke up, I felt like I was in sleep paralysis. I was extremely tired, it was extremely difficult to gain the strength to get up from bed, and I was fumbling to regain the motor skills to grab my shotgun. All the while, my heart was racing, I began to panic, and I had to act quickly to ensure that I made the best choice that was available. I think ANYONE in that same situation would have endured a similar paralyzing fear. The guy eventually gave up at the front door and ripped down my side gate (along with a buried wood fence post) before going into my backyard, trying again at the back door, and then hopping into my neighbors backyard by climbing on some trash cans I had by the fence. Local PD arrived about 5 minutes after this along with a spotlight chopper and eventually found the guy hiding in the corner of my neighbor's backyard. Keep in mind that WHILE this was happening, I had NO idea he was some doped up meth head. I took the situation to be an attempted home invasion and I was ready to shoot on first sight the minute he broke into my home. (If you don't believe me, I'll gladly scan the police reports and send them to a mod here who can confirm my story. I also have video evidence from a security cam system I had installed a few months prior.)
Having been in that situation, I refuse to acknowledge the mere thought that I need to be "less armed" for the good of the children or society.
So, going back to the points you refuted, they all stem from what I just typed out. I understand you were just suggesting a 5 round limit on magazines as part of a productive discussion, but you cannot come close to even imagining how much anxiety and fear your body generates in that kind of scenario. If I could have sat behind a belt fed MG, I would have gladly done so, but that isn't an option for me, so I'll take the next best thing I can get. I am as sad as anyone else about those who died at Sandy Hook, but I firmly believe the net effect of gun legislation is NEGATIVE for law abiding citizens. It upsets me more that those who propose new rules and laws are often people with VERY LIMITED exposure to firearms.
I didn't mean to target you in this discussion, but this is a very heated topic for me, and it becomes even hotter when I have to recall that incident.
This is what I tried to address earlier in the thread. If you've never been woken by sudden life-threatening danger and had to defend yourself or others, you have no idea what it's like.
You know how groggy and confused you are when your baby first wakes you up at 4am? Imagine that being gunfire, or the sound of someone breaking into your home.
Nerves of steel in a firefight, sure. Been there, done that, and I was still terrified. Nerves of steel at 4am while you're still in your underwear? You're not nearly as accurate as you would think, and the last thing you want to do is run through 5 rounds and not know where you next magazine is or fumble with a reload. This is all worst case scenario stuff, of course. I know I'm probably not going to face 5 or more attackers with AK-47s in my home. It's probably going to be one or two morons that will run when they hear me charge my weapon. But you never know, and the old saying goes, "if you fail to plan, you plan to fail." Better safe than sorry.
If you take the legal acquisition of high-capacity magazines or assault weapons away from law-abiding citizens, you shift the power away from the law abiding citizens and towards the criminals, who will acquire them anyway.
Edit: I wanted to add that the police should never be your primary means of defending your home. You should be the keeper of your family's safety.
