Speakeasy forum: Interesting tidbits about the history of gun control

the rich

the old "saturday night specials" were designed to be easily concealed and cheap.

Every see one of those 4 shot 22 pistols? almost concealable just in your hand. Years ago I knew at least two store owners who walked around with one in there pocket almost all the time. Accuracy at more than a few feet was not good, the barrel lenght was only about twice the lenght of the ammo. The ones I'm referring to were probably 3 to 4 inches long, it "broke" like an old single shot or double barrel shotgun. There were 4 holes bored in a square rod for a barrel. You loaded 4 shells in and snapped it shut.I'm not sure how the firing pin reached each, since there was no revolving cylinder. I never saw one actually fired. Not only small enough to carry and concealed, but light enough to carry in a pocket without dragging your pants sideways.

I had police 38 special an older relative gave me as a young teenager, firing pin was broke, it wouldnt fire even if I had ammo. Revolver with 5 chamber cylinder. Memory from that young and from the pespective back then is suspect, but I recall it being heavier than those little 22 I described but it was a several years later I really saw the super small 22 pistols.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fweng_AU8wc

A search on 4 shoot derringer brings up a lot of examples.

was by many of the leaders at the time thought to mean property owners only, which happen to be all white, European descent males.

Servants, slave or poor trash, weren't to be trusted with guns or leadership. Heck, if you believe the legend of Robin Hood, the banning of weapons happened before America was discovered. Peasants weren't to have bows, hunting was for the gentry only, etc.

The ideals were good in 1770's, but the trappings of the time can't be forgotten either. Changes have occured, for good and bad, but I'd rather it be as it has developed that it to have stayed frozen as it was then.

were that they were just as likely to injure the shooter as the shootee (if there's such a word). Well...so what!

the clicker on a ball point pen. Each pull rotated the cylinder 90 degrees. The firing pin on the cylinder edge matched the rim fire 22s just fine.

That old Saturday Night Special ban was multi-dimensional. It went after guns on several levels and for several different government, and anti-gun zealot, so-called justifications:

1 - It was claimed that they were used in most street crimes.

2 - The two largest manufacturers of Saturday Night Specials were Davis Industries and Lorcin Industries, both California based companies that liberal politicians in California wanted out of business.

3 - The pistols and revolvers did seem to have a high rate of failure. They were often made from poorly constructed pot metals and manufactured under pitifully engineered design plans.

There was also some concern that the pistols were about to become the Liberator pistols of the day - mocking the cheaply built mass produced single shot 45 ACP pistols Allies distributed to the European underground in WWII. The idea was to use the single shot pistols to kill Nazis, and in doing so you would take the Nazi weapon from the dead solider and kill another, then another, then another and so on. There was a claim in the sixties that the Saturday Night Specials were being used to rob and steal better weapons from an unsuspecting public.

New laws and penalites in response to events like Oklahoma bombing for people using "weapons of mass destruction".

Next thing I see is local. A man arrested and a shotgun less than the legal minimum length was found in his possession. Evening news lead he was arrested and charged with possession of a weapon of mass destruction.

I dislike such a disparage use of laws from what they were intended by any.

it was the application of a law passed in response to huge bombings to a sawed off shotgun.

It was just the DA piling every charge he could on to either get more jail time or give a better bargaining position. I understand the desire, hell there are some arrested for minor crimes that based on their past repeat and repeat offenses should just be given life and forget about it.

But it is an example of how things are twisted to be used, while technically correct the use is one I bet no one envision when proposing or passing the law.

That same sawed off shotgun was charged as possession of an illegal firearm and possesstion of a weapon of mass destruction.

It's kind of like the law here now you have to get a tax stamp for each illegal drug sale you make. That's just an end around run to change the sentence length for drug sellling. No one really has a problem with it because they want the drug dealers locked up for longer times. But it's a bit dishonest, they can't get the consenus to change the legal sentence, so they add new illegalities with their own sentencing to the same act.

by another amendment only legally.

And I really don't see it happening in my lifetime if ever.

Given how old I feel some mornings (justified or not) maybe I should say in the next generations lifetime.

ten amendments" because the small-t tories of NY wouldn't accept the Constitution with them. I'm not sure which of them were especially objectionable to them. Interesting possibility: 'conservatives were for gun control/infringing from the start' ... except that was not an issue then AFAIK. Must have been something other than that.
Related to the racial aspect of the thread is that one of the original articles of USC permitted the slave trade in the new country until 1800-something. That article was like Mission Impossible: self-destructed on that date, so you won't often see it in public school texts. But, if we thought slaves were crammed in those holds before the Constitution passed ...
Good thread BTW. Not much vitriol.

Buncha wimps!

with the White bosses- they generated fear of blacks to give the impression that they [bosses] were siding with their color. The poll tax of course hit both colors at the poverty level.

We've got a lot of problems. We need to do better in a lot of ways, even if there is a huge disagreement on what is wrong and what should be done. But we're still better off than most, and we're not as wrong as many inside and outside want to label us.

The racial problems in the US get news all the time, in fact sometimes some discussion IMO makes it worse rather than better by rehashing things that have been faced and should be left behind. But no country doesn't have a group that overtly or subtlely is discriminated against. Very few other countries have the numbers of different cultures we do or allow them.

But I still agree with the old commercial that made some comment about problems with our government, then rolled a long list of all the worse forms. How did it go? democracy is a terrible form of government, until you consider the alternatives, or some phrase along those lines.

If the kings of "divine right" had also always kept and enforce in their nobles the responsibility of "Noblesse oblige" and had actually believed as was claimed they were responsible to protect their subjects, most would have been pretty good societies probably.

But the old saw power corrupts seems much more accurate than noblesse oblige, be it monarchy, dictatorship, or democracy.

<div>Some
interesting comments here. BTW the infamous poll tax kept the poor from voting:
Blacks and "poor white trash". Kept the controllers
in control. No vote, no gun, no literacy ... And racism was 'beneficial'
because it kept uneducated whites thinking that Boss Whomever was their savior.</div><div>As to the comments about the WASP
founding fathers [no mothers need apply]: The historian Charles Beard would
have been fired from Harvard except for tenure, when he wrote <i>An Economic Interpretation of the
Constitution</i>, which documented that very assertion.</div><div>Roger: "banning of weapons happened before America was discovered".
Indeed.
(1 Samuel 13:19-22) . . .Now there was not a smith to be found in all
the land of Israel, because the Philistines had said: "That the Hebrews may not
make a sword or a spear." And all the Israelites would go down to the
Philistines to get each one his plowshare or his mattock or his ax or his
sickle sharpened. And the price for sharpening proved to be a pim for the
plowshares and for the mattocks and for the three-toothed instruments and for
the axes and for fixing fast the oxgoad. And it happened on the day of
battle that not a sword or a spear was found in the hand of any of the people
that were with Saul and Jonathan; but there could be found one belonging to
Saul and to Jonathan his son.

'When slings are
outlawed only Phillstines will have slingshots!'</div><div>Or, He is making wars to
cease to the extremity of the earth. The bow he breaks apart and does cut the
spear in pieces; The wagons he burns in the fire. "Give in, YOU people, and
know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in
the earth." Jehovah of armies is with us; The God of Jacob is a secure height
for us.
</div>