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Comment by shpongled | Hacker News Reader

What are you even talking about? Ownership of automatic weapons in the US is extremely rare and highly regulated. There have been < 5 deaths in the US with automatic weapons since the NFA passed.

This comment is one reason why it's so hard to discuss firearm issues, one side is completely emotional and has no understanding of the facts or current laws.

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Aren’t you kind of making my point? Hardly anyone owns automatic weapons but there is still an uproar about “taking them”.

There is no uproar about government taking away automatic weapons, as producing new automatic weapons has been outlawed since the 70s. To purchase one, you have to live in a state where it is legal to own, find someone owning a pre-ban automatic rifle and who is willing to sell, do some ATF paperwork, pay some fees, wait some time, and then you can get it. However, given how rare those guns are, we are talking prices around $20k+ (mentioned elsewhere in the thread, I personally have no idea about the actual prices as I have never been interested enough to look into it).

The only uproar about “taking them” that I have heard in the past decade was about taking away guns in general.

> " we are talking prices around $20k+"

It really depends on the machine gun in question. Transferable Mac 10s are sufficiently common and lame that they're still under $10k. (That hardly invalidates your overall point, even 'cheap' transferable machine guns are still expensive.)

No. Any uproar is over attempting to ban semi-automatic weapons. The fact that you don't understand this fundamental difference should be a big hint that you shouldn't be arguing about it.

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