A "high firepower weapons ban"

[Recursion]

71. jmg257 has a point, and his way is simpler

There's always a simplicity/nuance tradeoff and I think your idea and mine are both leaning towards the "nuance" side. And I'm sure 20 advocates would have 21 different schemes.

There's a million different ways this idea could go and it's not the specifics I'm concerned about at this point; what I like so much is the idea of addressing the capabilities of firearms in regulating them. The much-mentioned NFA was a capabilities-based schedule, and it's worked very well.

There's two very different kinds of shootings we're trying to address here: Newtown/Aurora/Columbine stuff, and "normal" shootings. Weapons regulations like this are a way to address the first kind, and really jmg257 got to the gist of how to do that (limit magazine capacities) as well as the inherent limitations of that (lots of magazines already out there). "Normal" shootings can pretty much only be dealt with by background checks, police work, early intervention, etc., because they pretty much use "normal" guns. (This is less sexy but would save many more lives.)

Basically, as a process issue I'm "for" discussing capabilities of weapons rather than anything else about them. As a policy issue I'm open to a lot along those lines.