If Twenty Dead First Graders Won't Do It... And Six Dead Adults... What Will ???

[metalbot]

109. Ironically, I think the opposite is true

Had Sandy Hook not happened, and if we'd gone another 4 years without a significant move toward national level gun control, the NRA would have been seriously weakened by the fact that they had been screaming for 8 years that "Obama is coming for your guns", when he was arguably more second amendment friendly than Ronald Reagan.

The NRA couldn't have dreamed up a bigger windfall than this.

Sandy Hook is not a particularly good argument in favor of gun control. It got news and attention precisely because killings like it are so rare. If you want to make a reasonable argument for gun control, one should start from the common case, not the rare one. The common case is gang related violence that is linked to drug trade. If you can't address that, "common sense" measures like assault weapon bans and magazine bans are simply feel good measures that aren't going to statistically affect the murder rate in a measurable way. In any given year, less than 350 people are killed with rifles in the US, and only a handful die because their attackers had magazines carrying 11 rounds or more. If one were to support gun control as a mechanism for murder reduction, the only mechanism by which that might be successful would be if you could really disarm the entirety of the American public, and that isn't going to happen in our lifetimes. And once gun control advocates really acknowledge that they DON'T support "the right of Americans to own firearms for hunting and sport", it makes opposition to ANY form of gun control that much of an easier position to defend.