So are my swords. Yet they probably never will kill anyone despite the years of training I’ve devoted to them.
Not to dismiss your point about the “charm” campaign being ineffective and pointless. But of all my military firearms which qualify with your statement, I’ve only got a few handguns which are regularly carried for personal defense and a few long arms which serve a defensive role out of all the guns I own.
The rest are owned for purposes of recreational shooting and / or collecting despite the purposes they may have originally been designed for or their retained capacity for that application.
Grew up speaking a lot of German at home as the son of first generation Americans. “Stormin” was a college nickname that has stuck. Merely a delightful coincidence, albeit one that makes me smile.
My car wasn’t really designed to kill people but from what I understand cars can be efficient killers. So would the drunk driver or the car be the cause of the fatal accident.
On any given weekday, you could floor it through a crowd standing at a busy city intersection and kill probably 20 people faster than any firearm ever could.
Completely beside the point, but it’s a thought that came to mind.
There’s a comedian who recently commented on this very topic… angry guy, east coast, Irish, can’t remember his name. Anyone know what I’m talking about?
Yes, but your car was designed as a vehicle, not a tool for killing. Just about anything can be used as a weapon, even a No. 2 pencil (through the eye socket), but it wasn’t built for such a purpose.
Just like antis make a push against handguns, claiming that “they’re only designed for killing people”. Yes, this G19 is designed for such a purpose. Get over it.
I tend to agree with the people who embrace the lethal functions of their guns.
For one, you could never come up with a name that would please people who don’t want you to have an AR. They’re not idiots…they’re anti-gun. They don’t give a damn what you call it. It’s got a shoulder thing that goes up. They want to take it away.
For another, even if you could somehow convince them that ARs and 1911s were designed to massage overexerted bunnies at Mother Teresa’s petting zoo, you’re still getting sucked into the black hole of “nobody needs anything to kill anybody else”. How do you justify filling your CQB Elite with 230 grain HST? Are you seriously going to try to take the position that HST was just designed to disrupt the maximum amount of gelatin in the 12-16 inch range, and everything else it does is coincidental and irrelevant to your needs?
I buy weapons. I buy weapons I know full well are designed to kill people. I hope to never have to hurt or kill anyone with them but I want the ability to shut someone down pronto if they present a credible, lethal threat to me or my family. Do I want a killing machine? Damn right I do. The killing itself is irrelevant but I want immediate cessation of the threat and practically speaking, that means using equipment that kills efficiently. That’s why I shoot Glocks, 1911s, ARs and VZs. Not Hammerlis, not Anschutzes. Not guns meant for paper. Not even guns meant for deer. Guns designed for the military to shoot people and make them die.
I’m sorry that that’s such an ugly reality and I assure everyone that I would very much prefer to live in a world in which there was never a need for any of this gear. But I don’t live in that world. I live in this one, and so does my family, and I want access to assault rifles and other weapons in order to make sure that if anyone tries to force us out of this world and into the next ahead of schedule, I can stop that from happening in the shortest amount of time possible.
Sort of, but not precisely. A head axe, guillotine, electric chair, and gas chamber are made for killing humans and exactly no other purpose other than making humans dead.
A modern rifle is designed for what Mikhail Kalashnikov designed his for: enabling its user to have the ability to survive and prevail when faced with conflict with multiple other humans who are trying to make its user dead. It’s not necessarily for people on the blasting end to die as for the one on the wooden or plastic end to live. Kalashnikov, and probably Schmeisser as well, saw piles and piles of his buddies dead because they were in a situation they didn’t wanna be in but life put them in the middle of bad historical events. Before he came up with his rifle, if another country didn’t like yours, or someone got elected who shouldn’t or born to a ruling family with the inclination to not like you or your religion or your language or skin color, you were either summarily shot or hanged on the spot or sent off to stand in a line with a rifle that only preserved your life if and only if you had lots of other buddies and other other side had fewer than you did, and even the latter only guaranteed a lifespan somewhere between a few days and maybe a few minutes. If you lived anywhere else other than North America after 1900 and ANY number of any bad combinations of things happened, your life was basically worth nothing and you had nothing to say about it. The modern rifle changed that somewhat. Authorities and criminals still committed mass murder, sure, and even occasionally using them, but the common man CAN have a vastly greater than historical average chance of surviving and fighting back. That is what a modern rifle is. It is not a guillotine.
War is a bad historical event. Floods, famines, and riots are bad historical events. I own the intermediate powered gas operated rifles I own because I know that my lifespan may fall in one of those bad historical event times. My wife, myself, and our future family will not want to be dead in a ditch or driven off our property into poverty, starvation, and despair for lack of sufficient ability to tell the offending forces HELL NO in sufficiently strong measure as to make them reverse course and cease to put forth that threat.
The “charm offensive” that we have been trying to use against antis doesn’t really matter. Sporting or not, they want them gone.
The only way to make them stop is to make their effort gone.
The problem with the “assault rifle” terminology is that for years those in the industry recognized that in order to be a true assault rifle it must have the ability to fire in burst or full auto. At least that is how I was taught. The terminology was hijacked by politicians who needed a way to paralyze the masses in fear.
A civilian AR, AK, FAL, etc… in my mind is first and foremost a semi-auto rifle. That doesn’t mean it can’t be used to shoot people. At the end of the day it is nothing more than a civilian counterpart to a military weapon.
