What The Fuck, America?

NEW COMIC TUESDAYS AND FRIDAYS AND WHEN THE MOOD STRIKES

One of the "no can defend" crane kicks gun-lovers (hereafter to be referred to as ammosexuals) love to use is to call gun-control advocates gun-ignorant. If only we'd try shooting we'd know better. We don't know what we're talking about. We don't know the terminology. "Assault weapon, har har," ammosexuals say, and "Automatic weapons, LOL".

What doesn't cross their tiny fly-specked minds is that some of us have gone shooting plenty of times: I have the Rifle & Shotgun merit badge and my son earned the two separate badges as they exist today, and we've gone shooting with my father, who is a certified (and certifiable) gun nut (but we can talk about my family dynamics another time). I know the difference between semi-automatic and automatic and I know further that in general conversation the terms are used somewhat loosely and, really, "automatic" doesn't have the scientifically precise definition ammosexuals stridently claim it does. (I also know that it happens to be legal to own fully automatic rifles as long as they were manufactured before 1986 (among other things), a small detail a lot of people don't know, including ammosexuals.) Am I a firearms expert? Heck no. Am I completely ignorant? No.

What also doesn't make the short distance between ammosexual earholes is the fact that the Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act is brain-damaged precisely because the ammosexual contingent in Congress wouldn't allow anything more sensible to be passed. Certainly the law could've dispensed with the vague term "assault weapon" and simply banned, I don't know, all ammunition larger than a certain caliber and above a certain muzzle velocity. Or something. It could've been simple. The reason it wasn't is that it had to be carefully crafted around any number of existing firearms that couldn't be banned, for one reason or another (mostly popularity). So the resulting legislation looks like a deformed Frankensteinian monstrosity.

You'll also note that the law had a built-in expiration date on it for entirely the same reason and since it expired mass shootings have gone up by over 200 percent. Have sales of AR-15s gone up in that time? Presumably, but we don't know, because there are basically no public statistics on this.

I wonder why that is.

It's also worth noting here that in 2015 the BATF was considering banning one particular type of .223 ammo; ammosexuals turned it into yet another Obama is coming for our guns! conspiracy theory and the BATF backed off, claiming it was merely a "publishing error". So, yes, you read that right, not only can't we manage to ban assault weapons, we can't even ban one type of ammo used in them.

I wonder why that is.

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