"Who'd want cop-killer bullets?" — A Couple Tentative Answers to a Rhetorical Question

The 1A show on NPR on May Day 2018 was on "Big Guns," a title of a book by former U.S. Representative in Congress Steve Israel, with the subtitle for the 1A broadcast, "Fighting Firearms With Funny." There was a significant rhetorical question raised, one I'd like to answer. The question was something like, "Who'd want cop-killer bullets?" 

One answer to the question is, criminals sloppy enough to have to figure on getting into shoot-outs with police or pathological enough to really desire a shoot-out with police.

More significant, though, are those for whom the Second Amendment primarily protects "The Right of Revolution" and (mis)understand revolution as mostly partisan warfare against the military forces of the State. And who are the front line of those forces of the State? The police, who sometimes where protective gear that will resist passage of ordinary bullets. 

This reading of "The Right of Revolution" also explains why one would want not just military-style weapons but military-grade weapons, 'cause that's what the military and paramilitary forces of the State have. The position usually involves paranoid fantasies of vast conspiracies by ZOG (the Zionist Occupied Government) or more fashionable embodiments of The World-Wide Conspiracy — and/or anticipations of race war — but after granting the assumptions, there is a logic to it. It's just not a logic you'll like if, say, you're a police officer or have police in the parts of the family you like or depend on the police for protection or dislike cops but not enough to want to kill them or want to improve the current American Republic and not overthrow it or have ideas about revolutions that are based more in history than in video games.

In the US, we tend to talk too much about "senseless violence"; here and elsewhere, we need to analyze  the ways in which most acts of violence do make sense — but are unjustified and evil.

DOWN WITH THE NRA (BUT DEFEND THE AGE OF MAJORITY)

News story passed along on Twitter: 

"The NRA [National Rifle Association ...]

just sued Florida based on the astounding 

argument that 18 year olds have a constitutional

right to buy assault rifles."

On this issue, I'm kind of with the NRA, which is something that hasn't happened much since I quit high school ROTC and the rifle team (in the 1950s) and since the NRA was taken over by fanatics.

I'll get in the argument this far, with my standard comment on young adults but with a bit of a twist: As is frequent, a wide-spread problem in the US about which we must DO SOMETHING!! is shifted to the schools and to young people. Mass shootings are only a small proportion of US gun deaths; most mass shootings do not occur in schools; the great majority of shooters in mass shootings are White males between the ages of 20 and 49, not teens. 

Humans mature into our social roles at different speeds and in complex ways, some people living long lives but never making it to adulthood. "The age of majority," therefore — when one gets pretty much the full rights and responsibilities of adulthood — is always somewhat arbitrary. That is *not*, however, a good argument for adulthood by degrees, but for setting a minimally ambiguous age of majority, enforcing it, and, in a manner appropriate in a secular republic, ritualizing it with some brief ceremony/"rite of passage." 

Old enough to be conscripted to take up weapons in defense of the country, old enough to vote. Old enough to function as a sovereign citizen electing officials and voting on referendums, old enough to buy legal psychotropic drugs such as ethyl alcohol (street names: booze, "drink" ...). Old enough to buy booze, old enough to keep and bear legal firearms: which I'd have bolt or pump-action, single-shot, small caliber long-guns unless one has a really good reason for something more deadly — plus a background check, training, and a license that needs periodic renewal after testing at least as rigorous as for initial drivers' licenses.