"This Is What a Gun Control March on Washington Looks Like"

[Straw Man]

19. Well, that will make it better.

the AR-15 wasn't banned

and the answer is 20 dead 6 year olds.

If they had only banned AR-15s, this never would have happened. Can't be done with any other kind of firearm.

This fixation on the AR-15 is truly bizarre. You do realize that the only significant difference between banned and not-banned rifles is a pistol grip? We're talking about ergonomics here, not lethality. Magazine capacity is a factor, but not the be-all-end-all. The killings in Newtown could have been accomplished with just about any rifle produced after the advent of repeaters in the latter part of the 19th century. There was no one there who could have stopped him in the 10 minutes that it took the police to arrive.

The fact that ARs figure in so many of these incidents speaks more to the fact that they are the single most popular rifle in the country now than to the fallacious notion that they are many times more lethal than a wide variety of other firearms that are legally available in Connecticut and every other state in the Union, not to mention many of the supposedly enlightened European nations.

Guns can kill people. Any guns. This is not news or a surprise to anyone. If your goal is the total elimination of private ownership of firearms, why don't you just say so? Then the real discussion can begin. All this chatter about "reasonable restrictions" and demonization of scary-looking guns is just a smokescreen to get the vast middle on board, right? Start with the low-hanging fruit and work your way up. If you manage to get everything banned, then in an generation or two you might start to see an impact on the frequency of shooting sprees, which are actually a very small part of the overall homicide rate. Or maybe not. Charles Whitman did his awful work without benefit of an AR-15, and Andrew Kehoe murdered 38 children and six adults without using any firearms at all.

You will also have destroyed any possibility of armed self-defense (I know, I know, you don't believe it actually exists anyway), completely alienated the rural population, shredded the Constitution, and further infantilized the American public, who eventually will not even be trusted with pointy scissors. The only people who will have a working familiarity with firearms will be the military and the police, which will take on the character of separate and distinct warrior classes.

The notion that tragedy can be managed out of existence through gun control is a hubristic delusion. Do you really believe that the children of America are in imminent danger of being murdered at school on any given day? If you do, what possible reason could you have for opposing armed guards in every school? And if you don't, then where does all this urgency and high moral dudgeon come from?

I submit that is a transference, a form of scapegoating springing from the inability to cope with the enormity of what happened in Connecticut. It must be someone's fault. The perpetrator is dead, as is his enabler. Someone must be blamed. Something must be done. It doesn't matter what. Let's pin it all on our political enemies. They're less than human anyway. Welcome to American tribal politics in the 21st Century.

OK, it's your turn. Tell me about how I don't care about dead children.