"Senate Dems introduce 'assault weapons' ban bill on 205 gun models"

[krispos42]

41. If it's not a culture war, why are the guns most attacked the ones that cause the least harm?

Hmmm....

Moving on, I will cop to misreading your post slightly. I focused on "assault weapons", which are usually meant to be semiautomatic rifles of a certain configuration. I still appreciate that you don't try to weasel around with stupid and useless definitions regarding pistol grips and folding stocks.

There are several catagories of "gun violence" and not recognizing the differences between them is a critical error. The majority of firearm deaths are suicides, which would not be reduced at all by your ban. One shot, one suicide. That's about 18,000 people per year.

And the vast majority of firearm homicides are single-victim homicides. About 95% of homicide incidents only have one victim, and 4% are double-victim homicides. So nearly all of the time only a few shots are fired despite the ultimate magazine capacities of the guns involved.

So again, how many people are you saving? Let me put it another way: what will save more lives, Democrats passing Medicare for All, or passing Feinstein's ban on "assault weapons"?

And with your ban, we'd still have compensated confiscation of all semi-auto guns by the government. At least, that would bring get rid of the most guns in the shortest amound of time. An alternative is to grandfather in current guns but prohibit sales of new guns and sales of used guns to anybody but the government. This, however, will take get rid of the guns very slowly, not finishing up until about the year 2100 even if the policy goes untouched for the next 79 years.

And of course, with your ban or Feinstein's ban the market will of course respond. There are already pump-action AR-15s, for example. AR-15s with no gas mechanism that take every magazine and accessory that exists for regular AR-15s, but are pump-action and thus not "assault weapons". And revolvers remain a popular choice for handguns.

So why pick this hill to die on?

Universal background checks are a good idea, and will save far more lives. And will do this without stirring up the Republicans in 2022.