"I'm a doctor. I want you to live and thrive. So I want semi-automatic guns banned." [View all]

[pnwmom]

And I do, too . . . so more 15 year olds can't get hold of handguns that can easily wound 16 of their classmates.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/10/04/im-a-doctor-i-want-you-to-live-and-thrive-so-i-want-semiautomatic-guns-banned/?utm_term=.a069cb1e52c8

The reality is this: A semiautomatic firearm — whether a long gun or a handgun — is a weapon of profound destructive capacity. Though semiautomatic (as opposed to automatic) guns require that the trigger be pulled once to discharge each bullet, they still allow a shooter with a quick finger to unleash an avalanche of bullets at a horrifying pace. When unloaded into a densely packed space, the resultant hail of bullets is just as capable of inflicting massive damage. Once fired, each of these projectiles then cuts a path through body, stretching adjacent tissues and so creating a path of destruction — the “wound cavity” — that can widen even more as the bullet tumbles and sometimes fragments, creating new smaller missiles each with their own trajectory; more bullets thus mean more punctured lungs, more shattered bones, more lacerated arteries, more severed spines.

In short, semiautomatic weapons are capable of inflicting egregious harm on a large number of people in a very short period, even when wielded by deranged users with no remarkable shooting skills. For instance, Adam Lanza, the perpetrator of the Sandy Hook massacre, used a semiautomatic rifle to fire 154 rounds and kill 26 individuals in under five minutes, as MSNBC reported; Seung-Hui Cho, responsible for the Virginia Tech massacre, fired 170 rounds with a pair of semiautomatic pistols in only nine minutes, leaving 30 dead, according to The Washington Post. To the extent that anything should be done about the types of guns available in America, we should end the sale (as others have previously argued and as the American College of Physicians suggested in a statement Monday) of all semiautomatic firearms, whether handgun or long gun.


The liberal obsession with “assault weapons” is thus a colossal mistake. The assault weapons ban identified such firearms by a host of largely cosmetic characteristics that were mostly irrelevant to their lethal potential and had no discernible effect on overall gun deaths. Collapsible stocks, pistol grips, bayonet mounts — who cares? Perhaps there is some utility to some of these features in combat settings, but when it comes to a mass shooter in a civilian environment, what matters more than anything is the sheer quantity of terrifying projectiles flying through crowded spaces at thousands of feet per second. To a lesser extent, things like the kinetic energy of a bullet also matter, but this can actually be higher in traditional hunting rifles than so-called assault weapons.