"Guns Have Changed. Our Gun Laws Have Not Kept Pace."

[Threedifferentones]

42. This post is patently false. Gun laws obviously have changed since the days of muskets, like in 1934

Indoors, the Thompson SMG is considerably deadlier than any semi auto rifle. The laws were changed in the twentieth century to curtail ownership of such fully auto guns.

Of course the second amendment is ambiguous and does not really say what many "gun supporters" want it to; if it did we could all own machine guns and tanks and bombs and whatever else. There is nothing in the Constitution which spells out that fully automatic weapons are for the government only but semi auto variants are fine for everyone else, that is just the status quo we have (mostly) come to accept.

Still, it is obvious that mass shootings are not becoming more common because guns are more effective. If effective guns were the determining factor in mass shootings, the hey-day would have been back in the 19 teens and twenties because of the widespread ownership of Tommy Guns. Of course back then the mass shootings were almost all gang vs gang killings that had an obvious profit motive, very different from the random killings of today.

I don't think that "mental health" screenings will do much to stop these tragedies, but it does seem obvious to me that shootings are becoming more common because of changes in our culture and our "collective psyche," not because the guns are getting better.

It is also important to understand that roughly 2/3s of American gun deaths are suicides, and that the vast majority of gun deaths are committed with pistols that no politician is talking about banning.

Does anyone really think that Newtown would have been less bloody if that lunatic had just taken two pistols instead of the AR-15? At Virginia Tech Cho killed 33 ADULTS with pistols. At the Washington Navy Yard Alexis killed twelve, including an armed guard, with a shotgun and a pistol. How would banning the AR-15 have stopped Lanza from shooting up an elementary school?

In other words, in a discussion of gun violence, mass shootings and assault rifles are basically red herrings. They are emotionally powerful as individual events, but statistically they barely register. An average of 53 Americans die from lightning strikes each year, which indicates to me that I'm about as likely to die from a random mass murderer as I am from lightning. And mass shootings are quite possible using pistols and shotguns, which indicates that small risk would not be mitigated by banning the AR 15.

It would make sense to me to ban private gun ownership altogether. Rates of suicide and murder would likely see a permanent drop. But I am always puzzled by the mobs of people trying to ban certain types of guns. Such bans will not do much, if anything, to stop gun violence.