23 thoughts on “We Need To Regulate Cars”

  1. I use it all the time. I tell lefties that clip limits are meaningless.

    But what is more meaningless is their professed care for the children.

    If we go by there logic, since hundreds if not thousands of children are maimed and killed *each* year by drunk drivers, then we must confiscate all cars.

    Doesn’t matter that law abiding, sober citizens use their cars in a responsible manner every day. We MUST DO SOMETHING to stop the slaughter.

    They don’t need their cars. They can sell out of the suburbs, move into the city near their jobs or move near a bus line. Only by taking away the cars can we keep the drunken louts from slaughtering the children.

    And of course they lefties think that’s going too far…..

    But the plain fact is that if they wanted to do something for the children, they’d be far more concerned about DUI.

    But their not. Because concern for the children is the last thing on their mind. It’s power.

    1. Earlier today I doodled out a concept for a magazine that uses a recoil operated feed pawl, open at both ends so you can stack them like upside-down styrofoam cups, with a simple ratchet so they stay locked together at any depth (so no matter how much ammunition was still in the magazine above), so that you can just keep adding more ammuntion by slapping another 10-round magazine into the previous one, up to some limit which would depend on the geometry. As you add another magazine, all the pawls in the previous one get pushed aside until the new ammunition bumps into the old ammunition, so as you nest more deeply you’re just taking some of the overlapped pawls out of service by having them held out of the way by the subsequent magazine’s outer frame.

      The feed pawl was used on Browning’s 40mm anti-aircraft guns (the pom-poms from WW-II), and you just keep shoving cartridges in. My enhancement is to keep the cartridges stored in their own feed pawl, which shoves down to nest in the previous feed pawl.

      Teck geeks: Obsoleting laws before the lawyers can even get them written.

      I still favor a horizontal magazine under the forestock, with a simple toggle singulator and a central tooth linked to the bolt that extracts the cartridge rearward and rotates it to face forwards. This is simple if the cartridges are feeding back between two facing C sections with the rear ends blocked off, so that the rim of a cartridge can’t fit inside the C section but the bullet can, which guarantees that pulling back on the center of the cartridge will snag the bullet end but pull the rim free, spinning the cartridge to face forwards for chambering no matter whether the cartridge had been facing to the left or the right when it was in the horizontal magazine along the forestock. Staggering the loading between left and right facing orientation eliminates the banana shape.

      I never doodled that one into a design for double-stacked ammunition, though.

      1. George-

        No need to doodle the design for the horizontal clip, unless it MUST be underneath instead of on top. FN Herstal already makes a horizontal-clip magazine that loads on the top of the P90. Google/wiki it, or just watch a few episodes of Stargate SG-1. 🙂

        1. One of my friends was an armorer and the store he was at sold the P-90’s. I told him he had to put an SG-1 mission patch next to it in the display case. 😀

          My horizontal feed idea is perhaps better than the P-90s, as the cartridge correctly rotates forward no matter which way it was facing in the magazine, and the idea was to place it within the forestock, which would probably have to be a bit wider (obviously at least a bullet length across), such as you see on many varmint rifles. Even with a single layer, you should be able to get 20 or 30 rounds stored that way, and yet still have the rifle look like a regular deer rifle. At one time the Army probably would’ve jumped all ove it because they could’ve had a high-capacity rifle that could still be carried against the shoulder like a 1903 or M-1 when marching.

      2. And if you bullpup the design with both mag and pistol grip on top, you can eliminate muzzle climb.

    2. Yes, belt fed avoids some of the issues, but I don’t think it necessarily avoids some of the legal things they might try. Earlier this evening we were discussing making a belt feed mechansim for an AR, which would have to be pretty odd because bullets have to be extracted rearward from conventional disintegrating link belts.

      I’ve always been a fan of rearward extraction anyway, and spent years trying to design a pistol that would use such a method, looking at rotating claws and all sorts of other bizarre ways till I hit on a trivially simple one.

      The magazine is positioned under the breech, so a chambered round is sitting directly above the top round in the magazine. The slide overlaps the side of the cartridge in the top of the magazine, and the inner side of the slide has a straight, vertical, spring-steel extractor that extends all the way from the top cartridge in the magazine to the cartridge in the breech, along which a cartridge will slide.

      Upon recoil, the slide moves back and pulls a cartridge from the magazine, dragging it along because the spring extractor has it snagged by the rim. There’s a small upward ramp behind the magazine, around the hammer mechanism, so the extracted cartridge heads back and upslope. It almost immediately has to go through a top-hinged trap door (a thin piece of steel) like it’s coming up from a basement hatch. As soon as the nose of the bullet clears the door, the door will snap closed again. Meanwhile the spent cartridge has cleared the breech and gets ejected out the side.

      The slide reaches its rearmost position and starts forward again, but now the trap door is closed, forming a feed ramp into the breech. As the cartridge is chambered, the lower section of the extractor springs back to latch onto the next cartridge in the top of the magazine, and the cycle can repeat.

      Since the breech is now almost at the very back of the gun, a conventional revolver hammer can be used and a firing pin isn’t actually necessary. The parts count look like it would be less than a Browning, and the barrel would be a few inches longer for the same size frame, improving accuracy, muzzle velocity, and reducing muzzle flash.

      The downside is that the gun has to be manually cycled after replacing an empty magazine, because if the slide goes back without a cartridge in the magazine, it’s missed the opportunity to feed one into the breech. I don’t think semi-automatic shooters would like that little quirk one bit. The only way around it is a kludge where the mechanism has to be gas operated, and the piston drives a heavy spring with a latch mechanism which can store all the energy needed to cycle the slide with the slide still locked on a spent cartridge, so that when a fresh magazine is inserted the slide-lock is released, allowing an entire cycle to complete, from closed breech back to closed breech. But then, even if you don’t have a cartridge in the chamber, just in the magazine, if the indirect-drive spring had been unknowingly left energized, the gun could accidentally load itself.

      A few years ago I wondered if a similar method could take about four or five inches off the length of the receiver on my Browning Belt Fed, which I’ve never bothered to use as anything more than a pile of elegant mechanisms to try and improve on. Using super-magnets to make a semi-auto-only trigger mechanism was one idea, vastly simplifying the existing designs for a trigger and sear that were not in any way made to go semi-auto in this universe or the next.

      Anyway, earlier this evening my mechanical engineering friends with a building full of CNC machines decided we should pursue last night’s idea for the stackable 10-round extend-o-mag, just to see if such a mechanism could work or there are mechanical snags that render it impossible.

      1. Sounds like the H&K G11 assault rifle. It uses a rotating bolt that some people say is built like a clock with springs and sprockets inside of it. It’s also novel that the ammo it uses sits in a 100-rd horizontal clip above the barrel. The ammo itself has not casing at all. The propellant has been pressed into a firm material that can hold the round. Since all the propellant is burned up when you fire the round there is not need to eject a casing.

  2. He’s missing the “accidental conversion” thing.

    That is: If someone breaks your muffler clean off and that transformed a regular car into a HPV -> you’re still liable. (Simply removing the muffler entirely on some cars improves performance.) And guilty. And can’t even present that in court as a defense.

  3. Reminds me of stuff I see going around Facebook among my Progressive friends.

    They want to mandate “training” for gun owners, or – new today – “drug tests for gun buyers”.

    I don’t respond, since it’s pointless, but I do want to ask … “What problem do you think you’re solving?”

    The people committing either mass shootings or the daily gang crime murders aren’t doing so because “they never got safety training” or “they were smoking crack or shooting smack or smoked a joint”*.

    (* Oh, they often were high as part of it, especially the gangs – but it didn’t make them do it … and the gang members don’t buy from gun dealers, and very rarely from individual non-black-market sellers.

    So, they’re not really in the set who’d ever get stopped by such a regime.

    And somehow “safety” never means “test for being a drunk”, as you’d think it would if you looked at actual ND reports, where alcohol is the most common excuse…

    I don’t support such a thing as not letting people who drink buy a gun, but if I wanted to stop “unsafe substance users” from doing so, they’d be the ones to start with, by the numbers, if it was All About Safety.

    But it isn’t. If it was, they’d start with the outcomes and find ways to address them, not trot out unrelated remedies to non-problems.)

  4. So you are supposed to be able to drive without a license, cars are to stop having ignition keys, minors can drive, etc.

    1. Given the lack of a Constitutional right to be allowed to operate a vehicle, and given the number of deaths caused by automobiles every year compared to gun deaths, I doubt that anyone would ever suggest that unlicensed drivers would ever be a good thing.

      You’d also never be able to convince Big Brother not to use the privilege of driving as a proxy for mandatory identification, but that’s a completely different rights issue.

    2. Google and others are working on cars that drive themselves. Should those ever make it to market (and I’d hate to be their product liability insurance company), then why couldn’t kids and people without a license be able to use them?

      Any my car has no ignition key already. After driving it for almost 3 years, I have to remember to use a key when driving other cars. It’s like Scotty with the computer in “Star Trek 4: The One with the Whales,” how quaint.

      1. The laws permitting self-driving cars I’ve heard of so far still require a licensed driver in the vehicle. That may change after they build a track record.

    3. My car doesn’t have an ignition key. The age in which a person can legally drive a car is a state issue, as well the licensing of drivers (which is also not an issue prohibited by the US Constitution).

    4. Driver’s licenses are based on proficiency tests. Gun permits are frequently based on a political decision by local law enforcement.

      Driver’s licenses aren’t generally required off public roadways.

      Driver’s licenses in one state of the US are valid nation wide. Not so for gun related permits.

      There is an active political movement that would use gun registrations to facilitate confiscation if they could. No such movement of concern for cars.

  5. Of course the key question here is why did state governments feel the need to regulate automobiles in the first place when the horses they replaced were never regulated and when mishandled could be just as deadly in an accident?

    And why did folks need driver’s licenses when no one needed a license to ride a horse?

    Hint – both practices originated in Europe…

  6. Hey…don’t give them any ideas…these are the guys who would reach into your shower and adjust the water temperature for you, and who soon will have black boxes in every new car, cameras on every lamppost, they already tap your email and phone freely, and are capable of monitoring every website you visit, will soon have your medical record in digital form…
    Don’t think for a moment they don’t want to regulate you into Smarte Carts instead of full size cars, SUV’s and Pickups…

    This argument would only fire them up to do exactly what you say would be ludicrous.

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