Kerry lost the popular vote by 3.5 million votes. Had he been pro-gun from the start then he might have had upwards of 4 million extra votes at least. The Democratic party would do well to get off the anti-gun bandwagon and purge those politicians who have been anti-gun. Otherwise, it's going to continue to be a bad thorn in thier side.

I think that you're oversimplifying things a bit but we need to talk about this. I have no problems with responsible, law-abiding people owning guns. But:

Should we have no problem with the positions of the NRA?

Should we oppose waiting periods and background checks?

Should we allow the so-called "gun show" loophole?

What about semi-automatic weapons? The NRA argues something like other guns can be easily converted to semi-automatic so the ban of semi-automatics is pointless. What about this argument?

What proposals of the gun-control movement are dubious and why?

What about the NRA position against banning cop-killer bullets?

Who are the gun owners? How many are hunters, shooting range hobbyists, and owners of guns for personal protection? This kind of knowledge would help in knowing who we are dealing with.

We need to discuss these kinds of specifics before we can consider intelligent changes in the Democrats' positions on guns.

The NRA is no different from the ACLU. Do you have an issue with the ACLU? All of these groups have thier good points and bad points. Maybe we need to reign them in a little to keep them from going rabid, but that's something else entirely.



Heck no, and even most in the NRA have no issues with background checks. Some have had issues with excessive waiting periods (me included), but never with background checks. The only time I've seen background checks be an issue is when it's been pushed to have the background checks be kept by the government in order to keep lists of legal gun owners.



Definitely. Any gun sales... including at gun shows should be required to be done through an FFL dealer at a reasonable cost (say $25 - $30).



Guns can just as easily be made from scratch. So, what good does such a law do when people can make guns no matter what? A draconic law only impacts the law abiding citizenry and does no good. Guns can also be gotten illegally... including fully automatic weapons. If we can stop drugs from coming into the country we definitely can't stop guns either.



Most rabid anit-gun groups want total bans on guns.



That's a misnomer. Any high velocity rifle round from a bolt action hunting rifle can be classified as such and no vest will stop that round. True armor piercing rounds are already banned from civillian use. Although something to bear in mind. Armor piercing rounds do far less damage to the body than conventional rounds do.



Does it matter? What's more important is that we have laws that do the least good with the most ammount of harm. Disarming legal citizens does not do the least ammount of harm.



The only thing the Dems need to change is the backing of draconic gun bans. Bans don't work and only serve to put an unreasonable burden on the law abiding AND create new revenue traffic for criminal organizations.

Hi, Arneoker. Not sure if we met on the JK forum, but I hung out in the gun-related forums a lot. This is a topic of particular interest to me, since both my wife and I own a few guns each, and since we are both nonhunters our guns tend to be the ones that the prohibitionist groups don't like.


The NRA doesn't oppose background checks (nor do I), and indeed the current NCIS background check system you have to pass in order to buy a gun was passed with the support of the NRA. Waiting periods are pretty much a separate question, but in my personal opinion the intent behind waiting periods seems to be to increase the "hassle factor" for the law-abiding person trying to buy a firearm rather than any demonstrable crime reduction.


It's not as much of a loophole as some people think, but it is an issue that everyone can certainly sit down and talk about. Under current Federal law, anyone who wants to buy a gun from a dealer at a gun show must undergo an NCIS background check and fill out a BATFE Form 4473 as if they were buying the gun at a gun store.

The "gun show loophole" is actually the "private sale issue." Most states allow a gun owner to sell one or two guns to any other law-abiding resident of the state; some require a background check and some don't. My own state of North Carolina requires a background check for private sales of handguns, but not long guns.

Some private sales do occur at gun shows, since that's where gun owners and collectors tend to congregate. I have purchased one gun in a private sale at a gun show (a collectible 1952 Polish M44, a 5-shot bolt-action rifle), from a collector. (I'm not much of a collector myself, but my wife has a 1952 Tula SKS, which got me interested in the Mosin-Nagant as the SKS's predecessor.)


I'm not sure what you are referring to here. A semi-automatic firearm is one that fires once and only once when the trigger is pulled, and does not fire again until the trigger is released and pulled a second time. Most handguns are semi-automatic, as are most modern-style civilian carbines.

Fully automatic firearms (a.k.a. automatic weapons or machine guns) are already heavily restricted by the National Firearms Act of 1934.

Some gun prohibitionist groups have occasionally claimed that semi-automatic firearms are easily converted to automatic weapons, but any firearm deemed by the BATFE to be easily converted is automatically restricted by NFA '34 as if it were already full-auto, so this claim is false for any currently legal civilian firearm.


The 1986 law that bans handgun rounds constructed of materials that would allow them to penetrate level II or IIIA body armor was authored in part by the NRA, which supported its passage. The NRA caught a lot of flak for opposing an initial bill that simply banned any ammunition that can penetrate level II or IIIA armor, but the representative that authored that bill (Mario Biaggi, D-NY) simply didn't know that centerfire rifle ammunition, ANY centerfire rifle ammunition, will go through a handgun-resistant vest like it's not there--an honest mistake on his part. The NRA helped author compromise legislation that satisfied all sides, and President Reagan signed it into law. (The whole story of the 1986 law is here.)

Senator Edward Kennedy introduced a bill last session that essentially echoed Rep. Biaggi's first (flawed) bill from 1986, but he seemed confused about the whole issue and I'm not sure if he meant it to be as broad as it was.

"Armor piercing" ammunition for rifles is pretty much a moot point as any centerfire rifle will penetrate a level II or IIIA vest, and no rifle up through .30-06 will penetrate level IV (rifle-proof) armor, even using military-surplus tungsten-core ammunition. Even so, the most common centerfire rifle calibers (.223 Remington, 7.62x39, and .308 Winchester) do now fall under the 1986 construction-based standard per a 1994 BATF(E) administrative ruling, so that issue is pretty well covered.

I would have to say that the most dubious (and one of the farthest-reaching) of the prohibitionist proposals has to be the whole "assault weapon" issue, but that's a topic for an entire post in its own right. Suffice it to say that the now-defunct 1994 "assault weapons ban" banned the manufacture of all firearms holding over 10 rounds, with a few inconsequential exceptions, and banned all self-loading (semi-automatic) firearms having two or more of a list of mostly cosmetic features like what the stock is shaped like, or where the magazine attaches.


No one really has any solid numbers on how many gun owners there are in the U.S., but it's likely in the range of 65 to 80 million. There are 13 to 16 million licensed hunters, meaning only about 1 in 5 gun owners hunts. I have seen polls by gun organizations indicating that the primary reason Americans own guns is for defensive purposes, followed by target shooting (mostly informal), then hunting, then collecting, in that order. There is some overlap among categories, though, since a gun owned for defensive purposes (like my wife's 9mm) can also be used for recreational shooting or even formal competition like IDPA, some collectibles can be used for hunting, and so on.


Please visit my mega-post/mini-blog in this forum if you get a chance. It raises a number of points I've been thinking about for a while, and I'd like to get some feedback.

Thank you to those who answered my post. I know very little about this issue, I have never owned a gun and probably never will, but I think that it was obviously a problem in this election. My purpose was to try to start a discussion. I would hope that people from the "gun-control" side would come over with their own perspective. But I hope that the discussion here generates more light than heat (we already have enough of the reverse on this forum) and that people try to see the merit on the other side. It seems to me that there are those on both sides who exploit this issue to motivate their movements rather than try to discuss it rationally. (I know that's vague and I don't mean to make unfair accusations of anyone.)

For my part I will try to look in and learn from the discussion.

Semi-automatics were never banned. What was banned were guns that had two or more of the following features: folding stocks, bayonet lugs, grenade launchers and flash suppressors. Aslo banned were high capacity magazines manufactured after the ban went into effect. High capacity magazines manufactured prior to that were legal to purchase and own.

Now is the time for discussion and I am grateful to those who have contributed to this forum. I hope that there are members of the NRA who are willing to help find a way beyond the extremes. John Kerry's failure to neutralize the NRA was a big disappointment, and I don't think that it was entirely his fault. Lines of communication need to be opened among people who are willing to listen and consider new options.

What about allowing military weapons to be owned by individuals but kept in a secure location where they could be fired as a form of recreation?

benEzra...thanks for your post..for the life of me...I DON'T GET THE NRA...they just sound idiotic to me...

but I've saved your post to a word document and plan on reading it thoroughly. Cause honest to God...I just don't get the controversy...my dad voted for the little fascist (actually he was voting Republican) because of THIS ONE ISSUE...which seems NOT to be an issue to me.

I'll be back...*w*

it is my opinion that a home, with a security system to alert the authorities and the owner of the house and an owner who is armed with a firearm that will allow easy, acessible and quick defense of the safe in which the firearm is kept (ie the safe is in the same room as the owner sleeps in) than there is little real danger of the weapon(s) being stolen by anyone.

The NRA's positions don't often get quoted accurately in the media, which may be part of the problem. It's tempting to ascribe it to reporter anti-NRA bias, but I think it has more to do with the fact that many reporters and editors don't understand gun issues very well, and may also tend to trust anti-gun sources more than pro-gun sources.

In the Kerry/Edwards forum, there was a big discussion cocerning the renewal of the AWB which was many pages long in several threads. From what I read, there were a few posters who supported the extension and made well thought out posts but most of the people who supported the renewal of the ban didn't even have a basic understanding of guns, how they worked, what was banned and what was not.

Same thing did, and still is happening in a coupla coupla threads here.

Most of the AWB proponents and gun control advocates in general deal solely in emotion and won't even give you the courtesy of a direct response when you toss a couple irrefutable facts on the table. Methinks the anti-gun folks get easily confused by factual statements and would rather keep it simple by just dealing in feel good emotional rhetoric.

Hey , remember that the Rpubs got the Brady bill when someone shot at

Regan! People forget that! It was during a repuke admin

You want to win, advertise the Dems want to have the most liberal

policy and watch how fast the Repubs will try to take away that GUN

The Brady Bill (mandatory waiting period and optional background check) was passed in 1993, when Clinton was president. It was replaced by the NRA-backed NCIS instant background check system in the mid-1990's, which you must pass in order to be able to buy a gun from any gun dealer today.

There you go trying to take the emotional rhetoric and hyperbole out of the equation again. Methinks if, as Democrats, all we've got to deal with are the facts, and the facts don't always say what we want, then how will we ever be able to use this as an issue?

The so called "cop killer bullet" was actually a teflon coated .38 Special round to be used on barricaded and armed suspects. Some media type heard about them, and had a field day writing about how dangerous they would be in the wrong hands. What made them "cop killer" was the teflon coating on the bullet. It would punch its way through passive body armor (bullet proof vest), car doors and other hard objects without the need of a rifle or sniper. A patrol officer with a .357/.38 revolver could dispatch said barricaded suspect.

Well I must say, that in my 22 years in law enforcement, I never saw a single "cop killer bullet" in use by any police agency I dealt with in California. I did, however, see one when attending FBI SWAT training. In our weapons class, the Agent conducting the class showed us several rounds of the ammo. I don't recall the manufacture, but it wasn't one of the name brand companies (Winchester, Remington, Federal, etc.). The cases of those rounds shown us were of Winchester manufacture--meaning they were loaded using Winchester brass. The FBI used them on a limited basis, as their duty weapon was a 3-inch Model 13, Smith&Wesson revolver in .357 S&W Magnum (which also fires .38 Special). The agents carried Winchester .38 Special Lead Hollow-point Plus P ammo in their revolvers. The agent training us said his office had never used them, and as far as he knew--no one in the FBI had ever used them. Those rounds had very limited use--and posed a serious ricochet hazard.

No one could purchase them over-the-counter as the manufacture would only sell to bona fide, and legitimate cities on city letterhead stationery: With verifiable signatures of the Chief of Police and City Manager or Mayor.

So the "cop killer bullet" scare was nothing more than a fiction perpetrated on the people to SCARE them into thinking such things were available to the evildoers in our society! (Kind of like the SCARE tactics the current Administration likes to perpetrate on the people. No?)

i think it also applies to 5.7x28mm FMJ ammo, but i could be wrong (i know that stuff is LE only, sadly).

Actually, it was the pointed steel bullet, not the teflon coating, that gave it increased penetration ability. The teflon coating was merely to prevent steel-on-steel friction from wearing out the barrel of the police officer's gun.

Not all of them would penetrate Level II or IIIA Kevlar, either, due to the relatively low velocity and energy (though some might have, I don't know). The main barriers envisioned by the designers were, I think, sheet metal and glass (i.e., suspects in or behind cars).


There was a law passed in 1986 (with the support of the NRA) that restricted armor-piercing handgun rounds like these to military or law-enforcement only. Here's the story of the ban: The "Cop-Killer Bullet" Law (1986). It also covers the rifle calibers .223 Remington, 7.62x39mm, and .308 Winchester, which is why you'll never see Barnes X-bullet (solid copper) hunting ammunition in any of those calibers.

BTW, not all 5.7x28mm would necessarily be banned, just stuff that was more than a certain percentage of copper, steel, or some other hard metal. I think lead-core 5.7x28 would be legal.

lead is denser than steel, wouldnt that make it better for penetration (for instance, tungsten carbide replaced steel core as milspec AP)? Also, i dont think there is much of a market for civilian legal 5.7x28 as FN tries to keep five sevens out of civilian hands (although there are plenty available on gun broker and various other places).

As for gun legislation in 1986... well lets just say that i wont be joining the NRA in the near future... although i am considering going in for a GOA life membership.