Let's try this again, maybe this time someone can answer the question.

[dmallind]

85. Well there are other ways of interpreting that

Hardly any gun enthusiasts I've met support civilian access to weapons designed for war such as MOABs or ICBMs, so we would be better served by dumping the semantically correct examples on the extremes of the phrase and seeking realistic definitions of where the line should be.

My suggestion is doubtless imperfect but should be a more reasonable start than staking out silly positions on medieval arms or city-destroying strategic weapons. Let's go for the difficult middle not the easy but pointless oratorical devices of the extremes.

I'll start with where I'm comfy accepting civilian bans (and unless you are for Fred Phelps owning a nuke, we all have a line somewhere : Weapons which when used with basic competency and as designed, pose a significant risk to those other than a single legitimately targetted individual human threat.

Sure we would need to hash out the subjective terms basic competency and significant (and even risk) for a start, but again avoiding cheap argumentum ad absurdum tricks like positing ninja fighter pilots as competency models on the one side and "significant risk" meaning a ricochet from a passing car into the heart of a window cleaner thirty stories above on the other, it should be workable. It should exclude weapons with broad blast areas or bullets with extreme penetrative characteristics while allowing any of the "scary black rifle" variants that are in fact less powerful than a kid's first deer rifle. The line I suspect would end up being pushed somewhere around wildly inaccurate spray and pray cheap machine guns, which I'm ok with banning for one.