Guns & Ammo Fires Editor After Publishing Editorial Calling for Gun Control

[krispos42]

49. Not very much

In a country where about 13 million guns a year are sold, I doubt more than a million of them are rifles that would be considered "assault weapons", depending on which arbitrary definition you were to use, out of the 4 or 5 million rifles a year sold. Tactical Semi-Automatic (TSA) rifles, if you wish.

What you're really doing is you're trying to fight "gun culture", so you (your side) wants to score a political and social victory by taking away what is popular to gun buyers, even though they are used in a tiny fraction of murders annually. IIRC, the total number of people known to be killed by a rifle is about 400 per year. TSA rifles would account for only a portion of those 400 murders.

Despite the rare use of these rifles in crime and murder, you're (your side is) so disturbed by the marketing, and by the reasons given by people buying those rifles, so you want to take them away as part of the culture war. Piss-poor reasons, in my view, especially considering that the intense dislike and calls for bans are part of the reason those kinds of guns (TSA rifles) are selling like hotcakes. The people that are willing to drop down $1500 for an AR-15 will, if denied the AR-15 due to an AWB, buy a tactical pump or lever-action gun and a handgun for the same price, and because of fears of further regulation.


Handguns are a more complex issue that I don't have the time to address right now, but would like to at some point.

The pro-gun people on this this site generally seem to be against ineffective, culture-war-driven legislation. They also seem to generally be for letting those that want guns to be able to get them (subject, naturally, to some limitations), rather than trying to artificially depress the market. And failing to point out the political consequences of the two previous points would be a disservice to the party and the nation.