Jophiel wrote:
gbaji wrote:
I'd argue that using the phrase "assault weapon" is designed to pivot away form the actual problem of people getting murdered and to the unrelated goal of banning firearms for ideological and political reasons.
You could, but then people would just think that your mind is inhabited by strange boogeymen.
So you think that focusing on bans of weapons responsible for like 2% of all firearm murders by deliberately applying a misleading label to those weapons to make it seem to the uninformed masses (or say most of the media) like they're fully automatic military weapons spraying bullets around with abandon on our streets is actually a good way to address the problem of "people getting murdered"? Lol! That's some serious delusion you've got going on there.
For the 10 years that the assault weapon ban was in place, you know what statistical impact it had on gun homicides? Um.... Zero. Any reduction in the number of banned weapons being used to kill people was offset by an increase in other non-banned weapons used to kill people. The problem of "people getting murdered" wasn't affected in any way at all. Which is precisely what any sane person should expect. While mass or spree shootings get tons of national media attention, the reality is that they represent a very small percentage of total gun murders (I'm even excluding suicides here, which make up about half of all gun deaths in the US), and are the only sort of gun murders likely to be impacted at all by any form of AW ban we've seen proposed (or that could even possibly pass 2nd amendment muster). And, as the Virgina Tech shooting shows (the largest body count mass shooting in US history in case you've forgotten), one does not need to use anything that would violate such bans to kill lots of people (iirc, one of his pistols had a 10 round magazine, and the other a 15. It's unlikely having two 10 round magazines instead would have made any difference at all).
What does one need to rack up a high body count in such a shooting? It's not about the weapon(s) the shooter is using. It's the amount of time it takes for someone else with a weapon to show up to stop him. Gun free zones are the single greatest cause for the rise of mass shootings over the last couple decades, not anything related to "assault weapons". If you really care about reducing the total body count from gun deaths in mass shootings, that's the way to do it. Not with nonsensical bans on ill defined assault weapons.
And again, this all entirely ignores the fact that the overwhelming majority of gun murders are not mass shootings. They're one person shooting another, over a slight, during a criminal act, in a gang turf conflict, etc. And most of those involve handguns, not scary looking "assault weapons". And in most cases, the number of rounds in the magazine would also have had no impact either. Real gun crime doesn't look anything like it does in Hollywood. Maybe we should make some effort not to pass legislation based on assuming that it does.