Guess what, liberals? We will NEVER know enough about guns to be "qualified" to write gun laws!

[Recursion]

27. If we follow Feinstein's new AWB it's only going to get worse, I'm afraid

If the goal is to make mass random shootings much more difficult (and I question whether that rather than "normal" shootings should be our primary prevention goal), there's a very simple law we could pass:

Ban semi-automatic weapons with detached magazines.

That's it. It's that simple. No technical details to discuss. This is a class of weapons that can fire a lot of bullets very quickly (so it's what mass shooters tend to use). If we decide as a society that that is too much firepower for a civilian, there's no reason we can't schedule them under the NFA like we did machineguns back in the 1930's.

But there's not (or hasn't been in the past) the political will to do that (mostly because nobody knows what to do with the ones that are already out there). Instead, we invented a class of weapons called "assault weapons" that is a subset of semi-automatics, and defined that based on a few dozen technical details of how those weapons look. None of the details people throw around to your chagrin are about how quickly a weapon can fire, or how deadly it is, or anything like that. They're all about how it looks because that's what we have been and still are trying to regulate. We want to outlaw the weapon Lanza used in Newtown while still keeping legal an exactly equally-capable weapon as long as it looks like a hunting rifle. There's a definition of insanity that is often misattributed to Einstein, and I think it applies here.