The Acceptable Cost of the Right to Bear Arms

A bit late to the party, but since I respect you in things programming I should point out:

The author is dreadfully ignorant. He calls AR-15 pattern rifles "a style of assault rifle preferred by special forces teams around the world" which is not true except in the broadest of senses because this particular design is the least reliable of any fielded (direct impingement vs. piston; besides us on Canada uses it by choice for obvious reasons, every other user gets them donated).

In calling it "a special forces weapon" he's trying to imply its use as rare, when the military version was adopted by the US a half century ago. Since the '60s, everyone who goes through Army basic training learns how to shoot one, and we've been able to buy semi-automatic versions since the '60s I think, certainly since the '70s. There are well more than 4 million copies of this particular design in US civilian hands to date.

The more general style of assault rifles with intermediate power cartridges, which which the AR-15/M16 are but one example started with the Nazi "StG 44 (Sturmgewehr 44, literally "storm (or assault) rifle (model of 19)44")" (Wikipedia), includes the AK-47 and its descendants, and practically every modern army issues something like it. The British Army switched to one in 1994, before that they used a select-fire (semi- and full-auto) "battle rifle" with a normal, traditional more powerful cartridge.

I don't know if he realizes it, but he's comparing US murders and suicides with U.K. murders with a gun (and ignoring population sizes); this also ignores the minor detail that we're fundamentally different peoples. In our case a more lethally violent one, the US specified in method but not a gun murder rate is almost the total U.K. murder rate (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4935644).

On the other hand, in the last century which just happens to coincide with the U.K. gun banning, violent crimes have skyrocketed to the point that outside of murder it's more violent than the US (!). According to historian Joyce Lee Malcolm in about 90 years the nation reversed a steady trend since the 13th Century of decreasing interpersonal violence.

Anyway, for some obscure reason, I'm not interested in advice from people this ignorant, who are also generations removed from even being able to use guns in self-defense (how long depends on which metric you use, there's the early de jure bans through registration, the courts in the '50s and then Parliament in '67 outlawing using effective means in self-defense, to the total ban on handguns in '97).