If pro gun people are going to insist that assault rifles can't be banned due to definition problems

[rrneck]

50. Right.

"Ban this gun and we'll make one just different enough to dodge the law but still able to do the same thing."

Regulating the generic capabilities of the gun are the logical approach to the problem. That's what Feinstein's law is trying to do without admitting it. She wants to make a semi automatic firearm shoot more slowly and the operator to have to reload more often. She's working on two of the big three characteristics: caliber, capacity, and rate of fire.

Since I don't know which guns she wants to specifically ban I can't say for sure, but I am guessing the ones she wants to ban are the ones that can be easily redesigned around her criteria (or that look really scary to her constituents). As for the others, by requiring either a fixed magazine or a ten round limit on the gun, she wants to turn the remaining rifles into single shot guns or as close to it as she can get. And that's just fine, but she needs to come out and admit it. I'm obviously not the sharpest knife in the drawer and I can see what's going on, and there are a whole lot of people with a lot bigger bully pulpit who will make her proposals look as underhanded and feckless as they are.

The problem with regulating the function of firearms any more than they already are is that those regulations will be either easy to circumvent or will negatively impact the bulk of the firearms made in the world today. If you want to limit magazine capacity, fine, the bad guy will just bring more magazines to his mass shooting. Those limits won't hinder him at all, but will add bureaucratic headaches to legislators, manufacturers, law enforcement and gun owners at the cost of precious political capital. If you want to regulate rate of fire you have to step down from semi automatic to single shot fire. It's foolish to try to legislate anything in between by making a gun hard to use. Anybody that owns a gun simply won't go for it and they will see it for what it is - an effort to regulate them out of existence.

But let's say she gets her bill passed as is. Handguns and rifles will still be able to shoot ten times rather quickly unless she can ban all semi autos. What do you think the chances are that someone will shoot a bunch of people with post ban guns? Two guns is twenty rounds. The solution to all that complicated legislation is a New York reload. Just bring more guns. How many clusters of dead people is a horrible tragedy? What will that law have accomplished? Fewer mass shooting casualties? Maybe, but it seems that if a goof like me can think his way around the law, a real bad guy won't have any problem. And while keeping guns out of the hands of people who shouldn't have them is always a good idea, the tighter you make gun laws the more likely you will keep somebody who might legitimately need a gun from getting one, and they will suffer for it. But you won't likely hear about those people in the news, unless our political enemies want to use them to generate political capital for themselves.