Supreme Court allows AR-15 ban in Maryland
Supreme Court allows AR-15 ban in Maryland
The Supreme Court turned away an appeal by a group of gun-rights advocates seeking to overturn Maryland's ban on AR-15 semi-automatic rifles under the Second Amendment.
The Supreme Court on Monday turned away an appeal by a group of gun rights advocates seeking to overturn Maryland's ban on assault-style rifles and high-capacity magazines under the Second Amendment.
The decision, a major win for gun safety advocates, leaves in place a ruling by the Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals which ruled that the state may constitutionally prohibit sale and possession of the weapons.
The state legislation, enacted in 2013 after the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting, specifically targets the AR-15 -- the most popular rifle in America with 20-30 million in circulation. They are legal in 41 of the 50 states.
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So this just bans that "style" of rifle? Someone can just go buy some other semi-automatic rifle that doesn't look as imposing or whatever but will still kill a person just as dead? I don't really get what this accomplishes other than inconveniencing people who already own one of the guns this prohibits.
Several northeast states passed kneejerk legislation of this type in the wake of Sandy Hook. Common sense gun legislation that provides a pathway to purchase for those without red flags without violating the privacy of owners would be nice, but neither Democrats or Republicans are capable of passing any such legislation. Republicans want no regulation at all while Democrats want to score points in a punitive culture war.
Gun advocates like to mock those who want to ban military-style guns, while other hunting rifles with the same capacities are still available, but that misses the point. If both guns were the same, why are nearly all mass shootings done with military-style weapons, and are NEVER done with standard hunting rifles?
Something that is never discussed is the psychological effects of military-style weapons, in both the shooter and the victim. In general, mass shooters are people who feel weak, abused, outcast. A scary black gun makes them feel powerful in a way that a standard hunting rifle doesn't. In addition, that military-style gun is scarier to their intended victims as well. It forces them to fear the shooter, something the shooter craves.
Military-style weapons may not have any more practical characteristics than a standard hunting rifle, but it's psychological effects are much stronger.
Most mass shootings are done with pistols though...
This is accurate, and before anyone else downvotes I challenge you to google that shit. Homicides in the USA involving rifles are only 3% at most of the total. About 80% of mass shootings involve the use of handguns, while only 20-30% involve rifles (some crossover due to multiple guns used in events).
Maybe it isn't discussed because ARs are also the most common rifle in the U.S., and for at least 10 years now, the cheapest non-22LR. It's hard to know how much of a role the psychological factors actually play when "easy to obtain" is a significant one of them.
"Easy to obtain" is also the part that is easy for legislation to address, while vaguely defined and hard to measure "psychological effects" requires significant effort just to understand, let alone implement the required social safety nets and induce cultural change to address the root causes.
The AR platform is high modifiable, has a nearly infinite number of configurations, can be customized to meet just about any need, and is easily the most widely available sem-automatic rifle on the market. This makes the barrier for entry (to being a mass shooter) much higher.
It really doesn't. AR-15s are everything you said, but just because you take this one specific model rifle it off the market doesn't mean there aren't thousands of lightweight semi automatic rifles that are cheap and just as capable to buy instead. They might not be the gun owner's version of LEGO, but they're just as available and just as lethal.
If someone wants to be a mass shooter they have unlimited options in the USA. AR-15s are just so common you see them more. Starting this decade about 1/4 of the firearms produced in the USA are AR-15s.
If 1/4 the cars sold in the USA were Corollas because they're cheap and easy to drive, would banning Corollas in Maryland reduce car wrecks? No, people would just drive Camrys or Civics or whatever and still drive like idiots.
I mostly agree with you (see my other comments in the thread). I was just explaining it from the perspective of the Maryland lawmakers. Although, you're not entirely correct. It appears that the law is a lot more broad than the title would lead you to believe
Read the law before you assume what it says.
https://mgaleg.maryland.gov/2013RS/bills/sb/sb0623f.pdf
It doesn’t take “one specific model” off the market, it redefines assault weapon in the text of the law to include any weapon with certain features.
Well, it defines assault weapons rather than redefines. As that wasn't previously any kind of classification of gun. Just a scare term that politicians liked to use similar to "super predator".
No, it redefines it. It repeals the old definition and enacts a new definition. That is redefining. Did you read it?
Yeah, but the law you linked only says what it's modifying. Did the previous law define the term "assault weapon" in Maryland, too?
Yes. Specifically, assault pistol. This new definition adds assault long gun.
My reply wasn't in response to the law, but to the guy claiming that by removing AR-15s you increase the barrier to entry to mass shootings.
He was talking about the law, which does more than that. I don’t think anyone here is proposing banning one single model.
If that's true, then it would be reflected in statistics about states with AR15 and magazine bans. I wonder if that's really true or if it's just a matter of being used in attacks because it's the most common (just like the most common vehicles are probably involved in more crashes - it doesn't mean they are unusually dangerous compared to other cars, just that there's more of them).
ARs make up a significantly higher percentage of gun sales than they do in gun deaths or homicides.
It's just posturing, really. It's the kind of gun legislation that gets liberals excited, but probably won't actually change much in the long run
From the article in the original post:
Maryland has seen a decline in gun violence since the enactment of a series of laws aimed at curbing access to dangerous weapons.
series of laws
Yeah, and this is one of them. There are plenty of studies showing that gun control works. You don’t need to take my word for it. Here’s a Scientific American article about it:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-science-is-clear-gun-control-saves-lives1/
But is this specifically one of the ones that worked?
By that, what I mean is, was there a reduction seen in violence done specifically with assault rifles that used the banned features? Reductions in violence using (for example) pistols or shotguns don't count.
Are you asking because you want to know, or are you asking to sow doubt that clearly effective laws are effective?
How many assault weapons attacks occur in England every year? How does that compare to the US? Do you think that has anything to do with the fact that assault weapons are illegal in England?
(By the way, you can replace England with almost any other country in the world in that paragraph and it still works.)
Also, if you actually want to know, you should be petitioning your government to make it easier to study gun violence. Right now, it’s very hard to study gun violence, thanks to the lobbying efforts of the NRA.
Are you asking because you want to know,
Yes, I want to know. Defend your argument and cite your sources instead of trying to bullshit me with generalities and assumptions.
Trying pretend that just because some gun control laws are effective means that all of them are effective is a fallacy. If anything, your comment is way more likely to have been in bad faith than mine was.
I still don't see what prevents someone from just buying a different model.
Nothing. I didn't say it was an effective strategy, just what appears to be THE strategy at play
Clearly you are the one who fails to understand this law.
While it bans standard AR-15s, it specifically allows AR-15s with "heavy barrels" referred to in MD as HBARs. Also, the barrel can be easily switched out after purchase.
The law simply took a list of 81 specific models of semi-auto rifles and shotguns and moved them from being "regulated longguns" (which required the same hoops and registration as a handgun) and instead made them illegal to purchase. The law also bans any center-fire semi-auto rifles and shotguns with detachable magazines from having certain cosmetic features.
Those cosmetic features have basically no relevance to lethality and can be added after purchase.
So yes, under this law, people can simply purchase other models not listed that do the same thing.
Ah yes, cosmetic features like… a grenade launcher.
Grenade launchers are regulated as Destructive Devices under the NFA.
It doesn't ban the model. It bans a whole bunch of criteria that the model has, and many other guns do too. I'm not saying its impossible to skirt this one legally, but reading the law I'm not seeing a way to have a legal gun that is equally lethal.
So this just bans that “style” of rifle? Someone can just go buy some other semi-automatic rifle that doesn’t look as imposing or whatever but will still kill a person just as dead?
According the language of the actual law the answer is either "no" or "not really, no". The law calls out a couple dozen aspects of firearms that precludes most of the "style" concerns. The biggest one is a limit on magazines only containing a maximum 10 rounds. While, yes, 10 rounds can still do lots of damage, it requires more frequent reloading, more chances for error, greater amount of encumbrance of the shooter. Assuming a shooter was using a gun that complied with this law, it would allow more opportunities to intervene or for people to get away.
You'd think that if someone was about to slaughter as many people as possible they wouldn't really be to worried about a 10-round mag law.
By that logic, why should anything be illegal?
That doesn't follow logically at all unless you think a society with frequent mass murders is a foregone conclusion.
Well it doesn’t matter what you make illegal, because criminals will just get it anyway. That’s why every other country has the exact same gun death rate as the USA, even though guns are illegal in most of them, right?
Sorry what? No most other countries do not have gun death rates close to the US. The US also spans the crown. And that is not even saying anything about the amount of massacres in US schools compared to the rest of the world.
Yeah, I was being sarcastic to show how ridiculous that logic is.
I'm not saying don't try to stop mass murders. I'm saying do it in a way that makes fucking sense. This part bans make no fucking sense, especially when they don't grandfather in for existing owners. I wish we would put all the effort spent on supporting these piecemeal measures into pressuring legislators to provide access to a good education and medical / mental health services for everyone as I'm convinced lack of those things are the source of the violence, but all this stupid system can do is take from people and it bothers me to see people jump on that train so willingly when it happens.
Especially at a time where government agencies are committing acts of escalating terror against the population, like we're seeing with ICE. It's just so tone deaf.
You must be right since every other country who’s already solved this problem solved it in the way you’re saying doesn’t work.
You’ll never convince me that guns aren’t the problem, because places that don’t have guns don’t have the problem. The evidence is thoroughly and definitively not on your side.
There are literally dozens of countries that allow private ownership of semi-auto long guns with a permit (Canada is one of them - I see your home instance is .ca), many of them don't even require a stated reason. The legal difference in the US is that one of our founding documents specifies access as a right. Access to guns is not why we're a violent county. We're a violent country because we're a genocidal settler-colonialist racial slaver society with no health care and piss-poor education. If all of our guns were to poof vanish tonight we'd just have more euro-style mass knifings in our schools and department stores. This shit is like water pressure, you can put your thumb on the hose with piecemeal measures but it's going to burst out somewhere else so long as it's still flowing.
Europe doesn't even have a lot of stabbings either, you see that more in other continents outside Europe/NA. In Europe people just use a car to drive into society ....
Ok, let’s try it and see if you’re right.
The second amendment has four clauses, each separated with commas. The way I interpret it (the way it was originally interpreted for over 200 years) is that it guarantees states the right to maintain well regulated militias of its citizens, and that the federal government can’t take away the firearms of those militias.
It’s only relatively recently (2008) that we’ve reinterpreted the amendment to basically forget about the first two clauses and the third command. That’s why the NRA only has the second half adorning their office buildings.
The text:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
How I interpret it:
- A well regulated Militia
- being necessary to the security of a free State
- the right of the people to keep and bear Arms
- shall not be infringed.
How republicans interpret it:
The right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.
- A well regulated Militia
Counterpoint is that these wouldn't just be readily available everywhere if they were illegal.
You’d think that if someone was about to slaughter as many people as possible they wouldn’t really be to worried about a 10-round mag law.
You're missing the point of these laws entirely. No one is saying that passing a law like this is going to remove every possible avenue for someone to get the most destructive gun on the planet and do the most damage possible.
What these laws are intended to do is make it less likely someone will have access to the most destructive gun on the planet. If someone plans multiple years ahead, they can go to the far ends of the Earth to get the most destructive gun possible. However, if they got pissed off at their boss that morning and decide to commit this kind of crime they'll only have wants available to that morning. If they were a legal gun owner when the day started, that means they'll only have 10 round magazines at most. Even if they drive to the local store nearby, they'd only be able to buy more 10 round magazines.
Lets even say that higher capacity magazines are available in the next state over. That may mean hours of planning and travel just to get to the other state to get the high capacity magazines, then all the time it takes to get back home to commit their crime. That's a lot of time for someone to consider what they're doing, the impact it will have on others, and even their own lives.
Will some still do it with all of that planning and bother needed? Yes. Will everyone? Doubtful.
It takes 5 minutes to change a 10 round magazine into a high capacity one
It takes 5 minutes to change a 10 round magazine into a high capacity one
Any magazine that can be changed in 5 minutes to hold more than 10 rounds likely doesn't count as a legal magazine even with only 10 round capacity at that time of sale.
Here's an example from the text California law with a piece on the 10 round magazine limits and exceptions:
"With limited exceptions, California law prohibits any person from manufacturing, importing into the state, keeping for sale, offering or exposing for sale, giving, lending, buying, or receiving a large capacity magazine.1 (A “large capacity magazine” is defined as any ammunition feeding device with the capacity to accept more than ten rounds, with exceptions for any .22 caliber tube ammunition feeding device, any feeding device that has been permanently altered so that it cannot accommodate more than ten rounds, or any tubular magazine that is contained in a lever-action firearm).2" source
That seems like an awfully fringe and roundabout improvement for a law that ruins the fun for everyone else. But I guess this is the flip side of the same leadership that's engineered a society in which so many people decide to be mass murderers in the first place.
That seems like an awfully fringe and roundabout improvement for a law that ruins the fun for everyone else.
Ruining the fun? That seems to be an incredibly weak argument for gun proliferation. I can see an argument for strong 2nd Amendment proponents as the Constitution grants rights and freedoms, and restrictions on those granted in the Constitution could be a pathway to a bad place. However, I can also see an argument that the evolution of firearms has outpaced our society's safe use of modern firearms and that the freedom of victims of gun violence are also having their even stronger Constitutional rights restricted and spirit of our nation with the Declaration's "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness". In this conversation I'm not advocating a position either way, but I can see the valid arguments on both sides.
In neither one of those is "ruining" the fun" even a fraction of a thought to consider. You do you though.
Have a good night.
Ruining the fun? That seems to be an incredibly weak argument for gun proliferation.
Why, you have an issue with fun? You have an issue with a society where everyone can pursue their hobbies to the fullest extent, and find enjoyment in them? Do you not think it's possible to provide responsible restrictions on firearms in a way that doesn't prevent one from going out into the woods on a weekend with friends to merely enjoy nerding out on the intersection of machining and marksmanship? More importantly, do you not find it justified to argue for rights from the goal of having a good time? Fun isn't covered in the constitution per se but I think this falls under the old "If I can't dance, I don't want to be a part of your revolution".
Then do paintball.
Guns, particularly handguns and AR-15s are specifically designed to kill humans. Do you really need someone to walk you through why that's different than sewing or riding bikes?
If you're not even capable of understanding why your need to have instruments of death in order to have "fun" isn't more important than other peoples' lives and safety, then you have no place in modern society and should remove yourself and go live in the woods or something.
Guns... are specifically dedigned to kill people
Damn, dude! Better not learn about HEMA or fencing. Shit may give you an aneurism.
You didn't even quote me correctly.
Have you ever driven a car?
Shame on you if you have. Some of those have been designed and used to kill people.
How dare you. Go live in the woods!
If you honestly don't know the difference between a car and a gun and what their purposes are, then I don't know what to tell you.
Honestly I believe you're smart enough to understand, so either you're being disingenuous, or you're just refusing to allow yourself to go there because you've centered your entire personality around instruments of death.
Cars are designed to kill people? Consumer vehicles? Lol right... Do better.
for a law that ruins the fun for everyone else
Yeah, firearms have been the top cause of death of children in the US for years, but wouldn't want to ruin the fun for you.
And before that it was cars, Detroit just had better lobbyists and didn't use them to shelter Russian intelligence assets. Cars continue to get larger, faster, heavier, and with higher raised bumpers because fuck pedestrians.
There have been several mass shootings which were stopped when the shooter stopped to reload, and a bystander was able to intervene at that moment. Limiting the capacity saves lives.
I agree with you, which is why I think that element of the law is effective.
Pretty much!
Illegal:
Perfectly Legal:
"But, but, you can't shoot a lever action as fast as a semi-auto!"
Maybe both should be banned. Personally I don't like having so many people armed with weapons that allow them to easily kill people.
If you don’t see the difference between a trained professional plinking with a lever action .22 and a 20 year old mowing down 20 kids and 6 adults with a semi-auto assault rifle, you’re hopeless.
A 20 year old firing indiscriminately is a 20 year old firing indiscriminately. There's no effective difference.
Let me put it this way, which gun would you rather have in a gunfight?
Mass shootings are rarely gunfights.
What do you think happens when the cops show up? (If the cops have the balls to walk through the door and try to save the kids, that is.)
Your parenthetical kind of says it all...
I mean, yeah. The cops are scared of assault rifles, not hunting rifles.
It accomplishes fewer people dying.
Maryland has seen a decline in gun violence since the enactment of a series of laws aimed at curbing access to dangerous weapons.
And no, it doesn’t just ban a “style” of rifle. The law does ban specific models, but also defines what makes a gun an assault weapon. If a gun has the features outlined in the law, it’s considered an assault weapon, regardless of the style.
You can read the text of the law here: