Alright, since I'll need to go over this someday, I might as well start talking about gun politics, and my beliefs regarding said politics. Before I actually get my hands dirty in the subject, I want to say ahead of time that I am not a very political person, and prefer to keep my beliefs to myself for the most part. I'm posting on this because many people that I have seen online tend to fall in one of two schools of thinking regarding guns. One is the extreme belief in the second amendment, or the belief that no firearms (or almost none) should be restricted/regulated, and the other is the extreme belief that anyone who owns a firearm is a potential psychopath who is bent upon the utter destruction of me and everyone I've ever known or cared about. These two ideologies are more likely the loudest of the bunch rather than the only two, but it still bugs me, since both have some gaping holes in their logic. Enough disclaimers and such, let's get into the meat of the subject.
Regarding those who believe that guns are a problem in our society, (or more likely a more extreme variant of this) Whether firearms are restricted/banned or not, people will always find a way to kill other people. People can kill with baseball bats, knives, cars, and well, when it really comes down to it, just about anything. Granted, it is far easier to arrest a mass murderer armed with a bat than one armed with a gun, but banning guns won't necessarily even properly rid you of gun-related crime! It just guarantees a larger part of the black market economy to weapons. Don't get me wrong, I don't have a problem with restricting assault weapons, but what they intend to do, is not to restrict assault weapons, because assault weapons, defined as a selective-fire weapon (two to three firing modes, including semi-auto, burst fire, and automatic fire) are already restricted! What they really intend to do is restrict assault STYLE weapons, meaning that semi-auto weapons, such as the AR-15, or the SKS, both long standing affordable staples in the gun community, as well as calibers known for the "assault weapons" that chamber them. This means that, a dumb cop could stumble on a kid plinking with his dad's tactical 10/22 build, and decide that OMG THAT KID HAS AN M-16! and promptly arrest the kid and his dad. So I suppose, long story short, I don't mind assault weapons being banned, as long as they're actually assault weapons. Considering, I don't see much of a use for an automatic weapon in the hands of a civilian. Home defense? What the hell are you doing with that in your house? Oh yeah, breaking one of the fundamental rules of gun safety: "Don't fire unless you're sure of your target and everything behind it." Who's to say you won't kill your kid in the next room? What about your neighbor next door? Self defense? That's what concealed carrying and compact handguns are for. SHTF? Sure, just as long as you don't mind wasting your LIMITED AMMO. Not every one has bunkers filled to the brim with ammunition. Don't even get me started on people who bring selective fire weapons to a hunting trip.
My problem with the extreme second amendment thumpers is a little more abstract, so bear with me. When it comes right down to it, I don't have a problem with gun owners trying to protect their right to own weapons, it only becomes a problem when this passion for guns turns into a sort of obsession. Do you feel like your grandpa's sporterized Garand is in peril? Great, deal with it appropriately, spread the word, as long as it doesn't get in the way of your better judgement. In other words, don't vote against an elected official SOLELY based on his predicted gun policy. I really have a problem with people who inject too many politics into owning a gun. I'm tired of happily browsing a gun magazine, only to be interrupted by some guy reiterating for the thousandth time, that Barack Obama will take away all of our rights, or in the case of American Rifleman, skimming through half of the pages, all in hopes of finding a new weapon feature amongst all the politics and paranoia. There's another thing that bugs me, although it's less common. Some people, upon getting a new .380 Auto for home defense, become exceedingly paranoid, and begin to believe that someone out there is constantly after everything they own, and are patiently waiting to steal your kids, your wife, your family jewels, and even your toenail clippers, god forbid. A good percentage of the gun market caters to these people, constantly reassuring that their new gun will save you all from that creep who lives next door.
Now that that's over with, I'll talk about something a little funny and sad at the same time. I may have said this before, but I hate it when people use the word "clip" as a blanket statement for anything that happens to hold two or more rounds. A MAGAZINE is a box, drum, or tube, that feeds rounds into the chamber using a spring, where as a CLIP is simply a container for the rounds that is used to quickly fill an integrated magazine. That said, I'll get into the story. My grandpa told me last night, that he recently saw a heavily anti-gun slanted news program reference a "high capacity clip that is used to reload revolvers more quickly." Now technically, a speedloader DOES exist for some revolvers, but not in the sense that this newscaster was speaking. She seemed to be speaking of some sort of box or drum magazine that was modified to be used with a revolver that was able to hold far more rounds than that of the revolver vanilla. There are a number of problems with this implication, firstly, mechanically. If you were to make a magazine like that, it simply wouldn't work in any factory revolver, and thus you'd have to modify it so thoroughly, that not only would it be wiser to make a whole new gun built around this concept, but it'd just defeat the purpose of even having a revolver anymore. At that point, you might as well have an autoloader, and that's assuming you can even make such a thing possible, which you can't!
That's all for this time, go kill some time and spill some brass!
