Sigh.
Lawmakers and other officials said that the president could use a public event as soon as Wednesday to signal his intention to engage in the biggest Congressional fight over guns in nearly two decades, focusing on the heightened background checks and including efforts to ban assault weapons and their high-capacity clips. But given the difficulty of pushing new rules through a bitterly divided Congress, Mr. Obama will also promise to act on his own to reduce gun violence wherever possible.
The word the Times‘ scribes are looking for, even though they don’t realize it, is not clip. It’s magazine. Banning “high-capacity clips” is among the 19 things that Obama is reportedly considering to do about guns. None of them would have stopped the Newtown killer. Keeping killers in prison for life — actual life, not phony life sentences — would have saved the firefighters murdered in Webster, NY. But that idea isn’t even on Obama’s radar. He’s consistent about going after law-abiding citizens rather than habitual lawbreakers.
Anyway, back to Obama’s and the media’s ignorance on the subject of guns.
Here’s the definition of a clip. That Wiki definition must have been written by a firearm owner who is tired of seeing the media and politicians get this wrong:
The term clip is commonly (incorrectly) used to describe a firearm magazine, especially in newspapers, movies, and on television. Because of this usage, the Merriam-Webster dictionary now defines a clip as “a device to hold cartridges for charging the magazines of some rifles; also :a magazine from which ammunition is fed into the chamber of a firearm”. However, this usage is technically incorrect. In the correct usage, a clip is used to feed a magazine or revolving cylinder, while a magazine or a belt is used to load cartridges into the chamber of a firearm. In essence, the clip stores the rounds of ammunition before being inserted into the magazine, which houses the clip inside for use by the firearm. Most weapons that use clips, such as the M1 Garand as seen above, utilize the clip by loading it directly into the firearm.[1]
If we’re to have a mature, intelligent conversation about firearms, it would help if the side that favors bans would learn to accurately describe what it is that it wants to ban.
I have a modest additional suggestion. Liberals who seek to ban guns should do two things. First, they should go through the process of actually buying a gun in a retail setting. Second, they should go to a range and fire one of those super skeery semiautomatic handguns. From the first thing, they would learn that we already do have a pretty good background check system, which does ask about wanted felon status and mental health issues among other things. From the second, they would see that gun ranges emphasize safety, will not tolerate any unsafe behavior, and that learning to fire a gun accurately is actually a pretty fun thing to do.
Why is Obama wanting to ban HD movie clips? Is this, finally, an attack on Hollywood?
Magazines? Clips? I don’t really have to be informed to speak on a subject do I? Guns are icky. BTW the most recent Relativism Directive places my ignorant opinion on equal footing with your rational argument. We elected our President like this, twice. Now we are going to bulldoze all of this constitutional nonsense. Sorry, we won! Na Na, na,na,na……
pretty sure this is sarcasm, but since you are obviously not very good at writing sarcasm, can’t say positively…however, you hit the nail on the head…far too many people with ignorant opinions should not be getting involved in the conversation, until they have a miniscule grasp of the facts.
We can do even better. Pretty hard to go to a shooting range in New York State but handgun education is legal (until they ban that in response, after all by their logic who needs to even know how a machine gun works).
Teach-ins should be mobilized and if anyone wants to be a counter-protestor they should at least have the courtesy of showing they have the intellectual ability to pass the written test at the end of the teach-in.
Not sarcasm, troll parody.
FWIW.
The Wiki definition is partially correct. In the Marines we did used to, and may still, have our M16 ammo issued to us loaded into 10 round “stripper clips” which were then used to load the 30/28 round magazines 10 rounds at a time without destroying your thumb loading each round individually.
But yes, I agree. These uninformed people who are totally unfamiliar with firearms trying to make rules for them is like a 20 year old virgin catholic priest trying to regulate sex.
Politicians do things for political reasons. They want to be seen as “doing something” because a good percentage of the public is outraged and wants something done about these massacres. The “something done” is symbolic and doesn’t address the real issue. But it does give a win for a constituency — heck, let’s call it a tribe.
The VA Tech massacre was completed entirely with pistols. So were other massacres. So will future massacres. Great Britain bans virtually all pistols — if we want to stop massacres, we need to go that far, or at least ban all semi-automatic weapons. Australia has extensive licensing requirements, complete with renewals, and a long list of banned weapons. Switzerland has ammo regulations. Are we willing to do that? Because that’s what it actually takes.
And can we do that?
My point: If we’re not willing to go that far, we’re not having a serious conversation. And if we’re not having a serious conversation, why bother — unless it’s to grandstand to a crowd?
My own opinion is simple: You can’t have my weapons and I don’t want to take yours, unless you’re doing something totally irresponsible.
What we should do is media-centered: When the killer is introduced to the public, the first picture should be his suicided corpse. I know that when I saw the pictures of the Columbine killers dead in the library, Harris with the top of his head blown off, it took some of the anger and frustration away. And the picture didn’t glamorize evil, which, realistically, is the problem here.
Another option, while brutally primitive, is to publicly display the suicided corpse and refuse its burial, cremation, and ban any honors of it. Let the crows pick it clean. That might de-glamorize it for some of these creeps.
I don’t see any legal authority that allows the President to regulate the size of a firearm’s magazine. There is no such language in the NFA so any attempt to ban normal capacity magazines would not hold up in court.
Come on, you know the Big “O” just needs to throw out buzz words, in any random fashion, so the MSM can keep up the guns = icky campaign.
He could call for the total ban on “high-automatic semi-capacity kooties”, and he’d be hailed as a courageous statesman.