One of the things by which I was heartened in the aftermath of the Las Vegas shooting, was that instead of a renewed push to pass the Assault Weapons Ban in its current form, we instead saw a more narrow push to ban bump stocks, which is in my opinion, the much wiser course of action.
As someone else noted here, we strengthen the NRA when we overreach with gun control laws. The current definition of what constitutes an assault weapon is perhaps the single most cogent example of that within my lifetime, because in an effort to classify this as an assault weapon:
They also classified this as one:
Now to understand that in proper context, it should be noted that those are actually the same rifle, a Ruger 10/22, and the reason that both are classified as assault weapons, under both the most recently proposed version of the federal assault weapons ban and under current NY state law, is that both of them are semi-automatic rifles with a detachable magazine, and both have a hole in the stock for your thumb.
We could get a great deal more support in banning assault weapons if we would simply limit regulation to the aspects of a firearm that actually do have some bearing upon how dangerous the weapon is, like a bump fire stock which increases the rate of fire, or high-capacity magazines without which a high rate of fire is actually a disadvantage.
But when we ban rifles on account of things like there being a hole for your thumb to go through, we hand our opponents an easy victory, because they can say we're banning stupid shit, and be correct.
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