Apparently while we were there my dad witnessed the car in front of him being robbed at gunpoint, but decided perhaps that was a one off, don't tell the family, perhaps it's fine... then the exact same thing happened the next night at nearly the same spot.
So that was the end of my potential US childhood.
Although to be fair, a lot of the crime is in areas the average HN user wouldn't be in. Most people are not worried about getting carjacked or mugged during their commute and have no reason to be. The US is a big place and problems that affect certain parts of it are usually not present throughout the whole country.
But it sure was exotic seeing American music coming and videos talking about murder and shooting like it's a cool thing.
It was also the inspiration for Heat’s shootout!
The North Hollywood robbers had illegally modified their weapons to enable full-auto fire. Since well before 1997, modifying guns like this has been a federal felony that gets you a ten-year prison sentence. That's a prohibition that predates the Assault Weapon Ban, which had nothing to do with full-auto weapons.
The AWB has since expired, and doing your own full-auto conversion will still get you ten years in the slammer. You can buy a full-auto weapon, but only after an extensive background check and approval of your local sheriff, if your state allows it, and only if the weapon was manufactured before 1986.
The movie Heat, of course, also had its robbers using full-auto. Incidentally, the movie came out before the North Hollywood robbery; many people have actually blamed the movie for inspiring the real robbers, one of whom owned a copy of the movie!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Hollywood_shootout
A Bushmaster XM-15 converted illegally to fire full auto with two 100-round Beta Magazines
A Heckler & Koch HK-91 semi automatic rifle with several 30-round magazines[38]
A Beretta 92FS Inox with several magazines
Three different civilian-model AK-47 style rifles converted illegally to fire full auto with several 75- to 100-round drum magazines, as well as 30-round box magazines.Unless MGs are treated differently than other NFA items in some way I'm unaware of, the new (2016) ATF rules no longer require CLEO (chief law enforcement officer) approval as part of the process, only notification.
Of course certain state laws still have a similar approval restriction in place to comply with state law, but local law enforcement can no longer hamstring the actual NFA process.
>The final rule affects the NFA regulations by:
>...
>...requiring that a copy of all applications to make or transfer a firearm, and the specified form for responsible persons (5320.23), be forwarded to the chief law enforcement officer (CLEO) of the locality in which the applicant/transferee or responsible person resides; and
>eliminating the requirement for certification signed by the CLEO.
https://www.atf.gov/rules-and-regulations/final-rule-41f-bac...
Example:
These are legal somehow in USA? Can you please trace how and prove it with links?
In 1986, they stopped accepting new registrations for automatic guns. So there's a fixed supply of legal automatic firearms that normal people can own.
Read more here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Firearms_Act#:~:tex....
Why do people want them? Is it just a hobby, or is there some utility I'm unware of?
Outside of the military they have no utility whatsoever.
Another nit pick: the approval is not some sort of interview or questionnaire as of why you need it. There is so-called ATF stamp (i.e. $200 for silencer) than you need to submit altogether with FBI fingerprints. These days mojority of ATF applications is registered thru "trust", instead of an individual. This creates all sorts of issues for LE in case they want to run extra background on you etc. So 90-something % of people chose $50 ATF "trust" that Sheriff cannot technically decline over the other option which is petition as individual and getting close to 100% chance of denial. The biggest hurdle is not some LE not liking your tattoo, its that ATF has a year long backlog. So you pay for your FA $25,000 today but its only delivered to your local licensed gun store, and they won't let you pick it up until ATF sends them document with green light. That take sup to 1.5 year these days. You can come and touch it and take few photos but they will not allow you to load it of course, or to take it out (including shooting range).
Finally, as OT mentions fixed supply, a so-called lower receiver of a fully automatic gun, a piece of metal not much bigger than a door handle (which does not even have any fancy engineering) is literally the most expensive piece of metal that you can buy on American soil. Some examples in extremely good shape go for $35,000 these days (check gunbroker dot com)
~~The Assault Weapons Ban only applied to new guns.~~ ATF policy change, not AWB. Existing guns were grandfathered in.
Guns have many interchangeable parts. The part of the gun that the government considers to be the "legal definition" is a part called the lower receiver. You can change almost anything about a gun as long as you keep the lower receiver and comply with any other laws.
So if you buy an old MAC-10 lower receiver that was manufactured before the new ATF policy, and add an adapter [1] that allows it to be combined with the non-lower parts from an AR-15, you can create a completely legal Frankenrifle with mostly new parts!
This isn't even the craziest thing you can do with gun loopholes in the USA. "Pistol braces" [2], originally made for war veterans with amputations to shoot small rifles, have pretty much obsoleted restrictions on short-barreled rifles. "Ghost guns" [3], i.e. lower receivers that have no serial number and do not appear in any database, are easily made by anyone with access to CNC tools (including a few hours rental for a few hundred bucks). 3D printed pistols are becoming a thing [4], although they are not very durable.
1: https://aandsconversions.com/2018/11/25/the-next-big-thing-f...
2: https://www.sb-tactical.com/product-category/brace/
3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_gun
4: https://www.reddit.com/r/guns/comments/jzik44/magdump_monday...
You are right, it was mostly a ban based on superficial features like the much feared bayonet mount. But there were two bans based on magazine capacity.
It did ban magazines with more than 10 round capacity. It also banned semi-automatic shotguns with more than 5 round fixed magazine or a detachable magazine when in combination with folding stock or pistol grip.
I have zero affiliation with this site, they just have a large, dynamic inventory so it makes for fun browsing for me.
0- https://www.impactguns.com/machine-guns/
1- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_II_weapons#Any_other_w...
https://oag.ca.gov/sites/all/files/agweb/pdfs/firearms/forms...
"De facto banned" for an ordinary citizen is an accurate way to describe it.
* You're a Hollywood armorer
* You develop or manufacture automatic firearms for government agencies
* You're a security contractor who has been provided automatic firearms as part of a federal contract
* You're a major museum displaying militaria
Be warned that they cost as much as a car.
Only semi-correct, they had full-auto AK47s and extended mags, all of which at the time could be purchased and legally owned with a special stamp by the ATF [0]. As a child a friend's father had one he would bring out on new years to only short lived amusement in the neighborhood as we all lived in a densely populated suburb near a major freeway.
But without them, yes, you couldn't just go to a store and buy one off the shelf.
0: https://legalbeagle.com/8731203-class-three-stamp-through-at...
Converting your own semi-auto to full auto is in now way legal then nor now.
Full auto guns are basically a rich man's toy and have been since well before new ones were outlawed in 1986. The practicality mostly isn't there for criminal use and they're real expensive to feed.
tl;dr - you don't "have to register" them, because by definition the ones that are legal are already registered. In '86 they stopped allowing new registrations for automatic weapons, but existing registered weapons were grandfathered in. US gun law considers the lower receiver to bear the "identity" of the weapon, so some pretty extensive modification can occur while it technically stays "the same gun" in a Ship of Theseus fashion.
The North Hollywood shootout was in 1997, Heat came out two years prior.
I always heard it was events in California (and Diane Feinstein being a key player) that created the ban, but I never heard a specific event in SoCal being the catalyst. Wikipedia cites a school shooting in Stockton in 1989 and an office shooting in San Francisco in 1993. Outside of the state, Wikipedia also cites a mass shooting in Killeen, TX.
> LA in the 80s was also Ground Zero for Gang warfare in the US
Might be true, but also: the 1980s was near the peak of violent crime certainly nation-wide, maybe worldwide. Lots written and studied on this topic. Theories about lead poisoning and all that. Probably multiple factors. But a lot of the discussion then was on urban crime. People thought that cities were dangerous. I'm glad that the last 20 years or so has largely seen a reversal of that.
Lately there has been a resurgence, especially in the political right, of the cities are dangerous mantra. It seems pretty odd to me.
Urban violence (such as in Chicago and Minneapolis) might have something to do with it.
[0] https://abc7chicago.com/chicago-police-homicides-murder-repo...
[1] https://www.startribune.com/staggering-surge-in-violent-carj...
Dubious.
Certainly, behavior is driven by perception of danger, but whether perception of danger generally tracks with actual danger or not is…less certain.
I know for child abduction and child assaults by those outside of the family that has historically not been the case; and perceived danger has increased as media focus increased despite decreasing actual danger, for several decades in a row.
I don’t see why similar (or opposite, if media focussed shifted away while actual danger increased) trends would occur with other forms of danger.
It wasn't presented as a counterexample, it was presented as grounds for doubting the mechanism for the effect you describe.
Increased danger -> increased perceived danger -> behavior which attempts to mitigate danger is a nice theory, but it relies on deltas in perceived danger corresponding to deltas in actual danger.
If deltas in perceived danger that manifestly do drive behavior are driven by processes that are independent of actual danger, your argument no longer makes sense.
In discussions about New York there is a popular myth that policing caused the crime rate drop, and I think that is what the podcast was challenging. Not necessarily that there wasn't a drop at all. There was across the entire country. Not for the reasons some police departments would like to believe.
Police at that point were mostly using 9mm pistols, .38 caliber revolvers, and 12 gauge shotguns, none of which were capable of penetrating the body armor. More heavily armed police such as SWAT were using MP5s, which shot 9mm as well.
The robbery lead to the distribution of higher velocity firearms like the M16 among the LAPD, and a similar incident in Miami lead to the adoption of the 10mm pistol cartridge by thy FBI.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150702091610/http://www.police...
Alta California was first colonized in 1769, not long before a bunch of British colonies on the other side of the continent that had been settled for quite a while broke off to form the USA; Baja was colonized from 1683. Neither predates British colonization of North America, and the colonization of Alta California only barely predates US independence.
Sir Francis Drake declared English sovereignty over the area of SF bay in 1579 and named it New Albion (New Britain, from Albion, the old Greek name for Britain).
Arrived in? Sure, mostly sailing around the coast and transitory land expeditions. So did the British in North America, on both coasts.
But as for establishing any kind of durable colonies (e.g., “California” as more than a name on a map), that came later, and well after British colonies like Virginia were established, especially in the case of Alta California.
The idea that California was some kind of established European colony earlier than British colonization of North America is what I was taking issue with.
the original post said
> pre-dates the existence of the US and British colonialism
Which is honestly not false, settlements in California formed about one century before the US independence.
Anyway, there were people living in what we call California today long before the Spanish arrived there...
> In a decade or two it may look like and feel as it did when I was a kid in the 90s and I may be tempted to go back.
I'm curious what you mean by this. What would change for you to be tempted to go back and what do the people that are leaving since COVID have to do with it?
A bank robbery every hour?
And I thought my nostalgia for the leaded gasoline and burning asbestos tram breaks smells was odd.
More like a reminder that primitive tendencies can revert Society back to its violent mean really quickly and that in turn instilled a need to want to preserve what we have and build resilient communities to that end as we all felt vulnerable to that ever-present danger.
The fact that no one speaks to their neighbors now is a stark contrast to my childhood in the late 80s and 90s where every kid on the block was a part of the after school 'clique' in one way or another and we looked out for each other so we helped one another in times of need with no real hesitation. It was common to have parents drop off the neighbors kids at different school in exchange for a place to hang out after school and place at the dinner table that night while the parents worked OT etc... This was rotational and we often were at each others homes on different days of the week.
Bi-monthly neihborhood bbqs/potlucks were typical things and were way less tense then some mandated HOA sanctioned community watch meeting where people just snitch on each other and was more a casual event to eat and build bonds share a dish from your families native land with our local neighbors. Many of those people had to leave as things got more and more expensive as time went on and it was a somber experience even to this day.
Then, to me, it abruptly went completely away in the 2000s when ignoring your community completely became normal, and I'm guilty of this, too; I no longer wanted to be a part of the new crowds or integrate into the new ones and sought refuge Online instead as those crowds that were made up of 'less interesting people from somewhere else' so unless we had specific and obvious interests aligned I never bothered, and even then it would be short lived as they were built on very fickle forms of self-interest.
And this persisted until I left CA for the first time.
Again, its probably all survivor bias, and I knew way too many kids in the neighborhood or not far away who died due to gang violence (the shootings at the counter strike internet cafes were particular bad in my area [0]) so I"m not trying to glamorize that aspect. Its just that much like in places with incredibly cold and snowy winters you learn to appreciate one another and their roles in your Life, and since SoCal has perfect weather nearly all year around this was the closest thing that made us see past our superficial differences, and somehow latently knowing it could all go away in a flash gave a stark reminder of how valuable and integral that is to one's quality of Life. You hear this a lot amonst the Korean survivors of the LA riots when the Police abandoned them and left them to fend for themselves, that really hit hard for me and was what made me look past my previously held prejudice of foul smelling kimchi and started eating, cooking and enjoying their cuisine.
> And I thought my nostalgia for the leaded gasoline and burning asbestos tram breaks smells was odd.
I'm a big proponent of EV in a large part because I recall how light headed and nauseating I'd felt riding in the tailgate of a 70s pick up truck on the way to the local to in-n-out or to AM/PM as well as seeing images of the smog of LA would creep in on bad days and the poor air quality all year round was most of my Life as a kid. I don't desire for any of that, despite a large part of my career being tied to the Auto Industry I'm glad we're seeing EV taking over as I remember how orange and brown the sky looked back then.
0: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/jan/02/usa.duncancamp...
Or, you know, not live in perpetual fear of society breaking down, which is something afforded to us by thousands of years of progress and innumerable sacrifices.
The whole thing hinges on the definition of Strong/Hard/Weak/Good and how you define them.
For example who is stronger, a turn the other cheek reverend or an eye for an eye preacher?
Mainly because you won't be there when it happens when it happens, but would you feel the same if you felt earthquakes, nuclear effluence spikes, droughts or landslides from the few times it rained, plus all the aforementioned calamity? It's a visceral feeling that you carry with you for the rest of your Life, and it manifests in different ways depending on the person one of the most prevalent being depression and anxiety as I've seen far too many succumb to alcholism, drug abuse and SSRIs just to cope with the antipathy and eventually apathy towards World around them.
That's what I (and many more like me endured in that period in CA) saw and lived while I lived there until my early 20s, so we adapted (as I'm multi-generational) and I personally sought to apply my skill-set to what I felt had the best chance of ensuring we as a Species transitioned to a sustainable system that spanned: Renewable and sustainable Ag, Farm to table seasonal cuisine, Energy (solar), EV, Currency/Monetary system (Bitcoin) and then I got stupidly ambitious and almost made it to SpaceX this year.
Again, you can take your placid (in my view monotonous and short sighted) and insular existence but the truth is I always wanted to live my young adult Life this way and I have inspired more to pick up where I left off. I wanted what I went through to be for something in order to be a part of something that helps us transition out of this horrid system that has devastated our ecosystem and now looking back on it all I know I did something right.
However, if you go through proper channels it’s amazing what you’re allowed to own. In some states you can not only own a tank (that’s the easy part - you can even import one if the guns are disabled) but could also have it stay equipped with its standard issue .50cal gun! You won’t be allowed to drive it on public roads though. They are also cost prohibitive.
Hell, you can buy fighter jet if you’d like. But it has to be demilitarized which although still fun to fly would sort of limit your ability to maintain air superiority against a properly provisioned force.
This was around the time of the LA riots in the 90s, too... which in my mind all happened at the same time as I recall being a kid sat in front of the TV not far from it all and being shocked at the level of wanton destruction.
California was always a wild place since its inception and before it was ever a part of the US--many who live here don't even realize that California (both alta and baja) pre-dates the existence of the US and British colonialism by a significant margin.
LA in the 80s was also Ground Zero for Gang warfare in the US, so us multi-generationals lived through that and adapted and we are am entirely different breed to the transplants and the rest of the US as fires and earthquakes were also taking place alongside those events, as those didn't stop either.
And while I personally have no desire to live in CA anytime soon, except the occasional visit, I'm glad so many decided to leave since COVID. In a decade or two it may look like and feel as it did when I was a kid in the 90s and I may be tempted to go back.