This is exactly parent post's point. Something must be done, even if it is going to have little or no discernible effect on the problem.
Banning assault weapons won't stop the next lunatic from committing a mass shooting because:
A. You can easily kill dozens of people with handguns like the VT shooter did.
B. Millions of assault weapons are already in circulation. Trying to confiscate those weapons would likely cause violence.
Not to say that an assault weapons ban would not prevent some would-be shooters from getting a more powerful firearm, but it won't reduce the incidence of these shootings and you're still going to have a lot of people dead or injured if a shooter is forced to use a handgun.
And that's assuming that mass shootings are the most important problem to be solved in terms of gun violence. Mass shootings still make up something like 1 or 2 percent of all gun homicides in the US. If we really care about people being killed by gun violence, we would focus our efforts on the vast majority of gun crime that is committed by people with prior violent felony convictions with illegal firearms. We would also take serious steps towards ending the drug war and all of the violence associated with the black market for drugs.
Spending a ton of effort and political capital on getting a law passed that has very little effect on reducing gun homicides is silly. Because when a new AWB inevitably doesn't solve the problem, it's going to be all but impossible to pass another gun control law. If Hillary Clinton wins and forces through a new assault weapons ban she will have a tough time getting re-elected and Democrats will certainly lose Congress. Why not spend that political capital on something that will actually make a measurable difference.
Politicians aren't looking out for us, they are just trying to prop themselves up.
Is it ammo type? (ie 5.56 or .308 - but these are also common hunting calibers). Is it magazine capacity? - this can be cheated around super easily, especially if you prepare something nefarious. Full automats aren't sold anyway. Is it shape of the weapon? Now we left the land of facts and walking in the emotional wonderland. We can do better.
It's like some voices here in Switzerland stating military home-held guns should be banned because some people commit suicide with them. Yeah, let's forget the core suicidal issue and remove the tool, that will surely stop them, right?
Guns don't kill people (and don't get sentenced for that), people pull triggers and kill other people. But that's much harder to fix, so let's find some easy scapegoat, right?
'Assault weapon' is a term with no military definition, but which might have a legal definition, depending on jurisdiction. In my home state, there's no such thing as an 'assault weapon,' because we have no statute defining such a thing.
Select-fire rifles are almost impossible to come by due to the '86 ban, but intermediate cartridges and detachable box magazines are common.
An earnest legislator might try saying that an assault weapon is one that's fed by a detachable box magazine and chambered in an intermediate cartridge. Then one of their constituents will see me at the range with my FAL, which is fed from a detachable box magazine, but chambered for a full-power cartridge. Why isn't that rifle - which based on its appearance is clearly the same sort of beast as an AR or AK - banned?
So the definition expands, based on cosmetic features, or naming specific models. Both of those solutions leave loopholes by their very nature; bans on pistol grips and barrel shrouds and folding stocks and bayonet lugs are solved by manufacturing functionally-identical rifles missing those features.
So perhaps we say that any rifle fed from a detachable box magazine is an assault weapon. Then the manufacturer makes a rifle with a fixed magazine, loaded with stripper clips. So we say that any rifle with a magazine capacity greater than some arbitrary number is an assault weapon - and I'll sell you a 'magazine repair kit' to increase that capacity.
Finally, the legislator says "all autoloading rifles are assault weapons," and then the Australians buy pump-action ARs instead: https://enoughgun.com/forum/download/file.php?id=1251
I don't favor legislation restricting the purchase of firearms, but I certainly see how frustrating it must be for those who do. They earnestly want to eliminate this one evil totem of violence while leaving your grandpa in possession of his deer rifle (well, most of 'em), and we always dress up things that are allowed back into those same totems.
The line must be set at some point, and of course people are going to tip toe around it, but that's not the point. And don't go Switzerland, if everybody in the US had proper training in how to use and (more important) store their weapons, and the government had an exhaustive control of every shell... Well, it would be different.
Neither do folks with 'assault weapons.' More people are killed with knives than with all long guns; approximately as many are killed with fists & feet[1]. 'Assault weapons' bans are just feel-good measures.
Oh, and shells are artillery ammunition …
[1] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
Has this ever happened in the history of any 1st world country? The closest we've ever come is the Orlando shooting at 49, but... the events with the highest body counts are vehicular mass murder or bombs, not guns (9/11, Nice France, Oklahoma bombing, etc.)
I'm not saying we shouldn't ban certain guns, but I don't think people realize that if someone is hellbent on killing, they'll use a hatchet or a machete if they can't get a gun. We'll have fewer deaths, but much, much nastier ones.
How do you quantify "nastier"? I couldn't really say.
Meanwhile, I can quantify "fewer deaths". And I'd try to achieve that first.
Dying, however, is an altogether different thing.
Stochastically speaking, a hatchet/machete is simply less efficient (which is good in this case).
The "nastiness" of the effort may also prevent some from going forward with their assault in the first place...
Making it more difficult to commit suicide reduces the incidence of suicide. People who experience suicidal impulses but recover without having had the opportunity to attempt suicide (or who recover from a failed suicide attempt) are likely to seek help with either preventing the impulse returning or addressing the underlying issue that made them vulnerable.
http://www.factcheck.org/2013/02/did-the-1994-assault-weapon...
> Other studies, he said, have suggested attacks with semiautomatic guns – particularly those having large magazines – “result in more shots fired, persons hit and wounds inflicted than do attacks with other guns and magazines.” Another study of handgun attacks in Jersey City during the 1990s, he said, “estimated that incidents involving more than 10 shots fired accounted for between 4 and 5 percent of the total gunshot victims in the sample.”
> Koper, Jan. 14: So, using that as a very tentative guide, that’s high enough to suggest that eliminating or greatly reducing crimes with these magazines could produce a small reduction in shootings, likely something less than 5 percent. Now we should note that effects of this magnitude could be hard to ever measure in any very definitive way, but they nonetheless could have nontrivial, notable benefits for society. Consider, for example, at our current level of our gun violence, achieving a 1 percent reduction in fatal and non-fatal criminal shootings would prevent approximately 650 shootings annually … And, of course having these sorts of guns, and particularly magazines, less accessible to offenders could make it more difficult for them to commit the sorts of mass shootings that we’ve seen in recent years.”
It doesn't quite work that way. There is a reasonably consistent trend among studies that somewhere between 3% and 5% fewer gun deaths occur if magazines are smaller than 10 rounds. That is also more than the margin of error for such studies.
Similarly, even a 2% reduction saves ~1,300 people a year.
So pretending its a mere scapegoat is...stretching quite a bit. Now you can argue a thousand or two thousand people dying is an acceptable cost to maintaining the status quo but that isn't the argument you tried to make.
Smaller magazines provide a margin of safety of several seconds which you might actually be able to get clear and accuracy is frequently low, so that first shot after reloading is likely to miss.
Magazine capacity reductions are easy to circumvent (a $30 stamp set can put a "pre-ban" date on your magazines) and most of the people doing mag dumps are either not subject to those laws (cops) or have no intention of following them in the first place (criminals).
http://listverse.com/2013/07/15/10-criminals-caught-thanks-t...
The other problem is someone dressed and equipped like a fully armed infantryman showing up in a mall...gets noticed. You can't stealthily carry a ton of cartridges AND have them easily accessible. You'll have to put them in a backpack or the like, changing the equation.
Yes, if they play things perfectly, you will lose every time. The reality is, most of these guys are pretty average and make numerous mistakes. The guys who play it out perfectly never get caught regardless of the law. That isn't an argument we should make murder legal.
I'm not going to respond further.
Comprehensive, mandatory background checks? Of course.
"This gun looks scary and is therefore dangerous?" Nonsense.
A purely cosmetic change would be requiring all guns to be panted orange.
PS: Most people don't have tools or mechanical know how, making 'simple' changes difficult.
Simply not true. People fought the AWB because it was largely cosmetic (not entirely). Even those in support of the bill have said many of the banned items were cosmetic.
> Soon after its passage in 1994, the gun industry made a mockery of the federal assault weapons ban, manufacturing 'post-ban' assault weapons with only slight, cosmetic differences from their banned counterparts.
From the Violence Policy Center, a pro-gun control group.
If a manufacturer can make strictly cosmetic changes to a weapon and have it be compliant, it's kind of hard to argue there was "meaningful change." That's not a loophole, that's banning a cosmetic feature and a manufacturer getting rid of that cosmetic feature.
"Well shit dillon, they don't sell the Hi-Point-9 because it's banned, can I borrow an extra $50 so I can buy the carbine?"
People intending to commit violence (on any scale) will find a way.
Its the same problem as we have with a lot of laws in the US. It sounds like a good idea, but ultimately addresses the wrong problem.
Creating a department that has full authority to regulate a matter is the best way to get in effective laws. But then the laws get too effective and lobbyists have to then push to have their power reduced.
Not with that attitude you can't!
>I do not see how banning assault weapons is a "crap" solution.
Sometimes you can't address a problem with an easy band-aid, and pushing as hard as you can on the difficult part of the problem is the only effective option.