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Old 02-15-2017, 05:07 AM
Yournamehere Yournamehere is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Spartan198 View Post
Maybe we should also do away with speed limits, because if I want to fucking drive 110 through a school zone, I should be allowed to. I have no real need to do so because a 25 MPH limit doesn't actually stop me from getting to my destination, but, hey, if it can be done, we should all be allowed to do it, right?
This is hardly an analogous argument. Speeding is an restriction on using a piece of equipment to its potential for the sake of safety of operation in any given area with any given amount of traffic or pedestrians, not the barring of possession of said piece of equipment. You can own a Ferarri, but you're only permitted to do 15 when you're in a school zone during school hours, and 45 on the road normally, and you risk getting a ticket and eventually losing your rights to drive if you do not comply. The NFA and Hughes Amendment tell us that we can't own said Ferrari, or machine gun, because we are liable to speed all the time, or kill all the time, or perhaps fire machine guns close to other people with the potential to hurt or kill someone with a stray round, whatever you feel is the more analogous action. And just in a personal sense, I have been irritated by a lot of arbitrary speed limits from driving down here for my job or just for traveling at night. I can't count the number of times I've been on empty roads at night with 25MPH limits where I know that physically I can drive faster and still maintain safety for myself and the drivers that would be, but aren't around me, but I still do it because I presume that big brother Johnny Law is right behind a bush in his brand new Charger waiting to give me a ticket to get a little closer to his quota. That annoys me, and it should.

In any case, there's no proof or even logical indication that machine gun availability would change anything. I don't really think that if everyone who owned an AR-15 right now dropped a giggle switch in the thing at this very moment that there would be a monumental spike in crime and death. For one thing, people aren't that crazy, even if the anti gunners want us to think that way. And practically speaking, there isn't correlation in automatic fire being a key factor in determining the death toll in a mass shooting or shooting in general. If that were the case, then North Hollywood would have been a bloodbath and Virginia Tech would have not been the deadliest mass shooting in US history up until the Orlando Nightclub. There are a myriad of circumstances that play into any incident that result in the final casualty toll, from number of assailants, skills and tactics, to motivations and the response of other armed persons to the threat. Changing the weapons used doesn't always slide the scale one way or the other. At the end of the day, however, the regulation definitely, one hundred percent, impedes on the law abiding citizens ability to exercise a facet of their given freedom, when it doesn't necessarily, or perhaps even coincidentally, serve to provide any positive result in exchange for giving up said freedom, and that is not logically sound to me. Moreover, you can still own machine guns and suppressors and all that stuff, you just have to be rich, so in reality it's plutocratic and draconian at the same time, which even further devalues the prohibition of such items in the first place.

And again, just to reiterate, I'm not opposed to a degree of regulation, it just has to make sense, which Hughes and the NFA do not, at least in the sense that they restrict without reason or consistency within their own logic. They really are just arbitrary acts that prohibit or heavily restrict the acquisition of specific spooky items, but are just this side of being a full on ban to not be a black and white definite infringement. The problem, though, is that their requirements are so needlessly stringent and poorly enforced and enacted, even, that they do constitute an infringement, solely because they do definitely limit our freedom for no well conceived legitimate reason, and so they should not be a thing.
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