Ah, the line-by-line retort. It's like pulling off rounds on an AR-15.
Mak wrote:It would demonstrably make a difference. Research has shown this for literally decades.
K. I'll let you and faqs battle over claims without references as to what has been literally been proven for decades. Your next lines doen't seem to "hit the mark" as it were in responding to what you quoted from me. I think had you read my whole post first, and then responded, it would have made for a better discussion.
we need to distinguish between what's effective for solving for mass shootings and what's right in the bigger picture. I agree, for instance that wiping out access to guns in severe ways will solve the problem of mass shootings, defined loosely, but the cuts will need to be significant enough it raises questions about property rights, way of life, and so on, and so that's where I'm not quite ready to pull the trigger. You can't "ban gun culture", and so that means getting from point A to B here includes pissing off a lot of good people like Rockslider and basically mowing them over in a search and seizure scenario. The question arises then, if the government can get away with
that, then what's next on the list? It would have been better had "gun culture" not happened and if we were like France in this regard, but we aren't, and you can't just say, OK, we're going to be like France now. It's going to be a lot of pain to get there. I know a lot of people with a LOT of guns, all are successful, contributing members to society, who really, really love their guns. One guy has 400 guns. In fact, the guns I think have become a symbol as much as a real hobby, and they only increase in symbol status the more the left-right thing blows up. Calling gun hobbyists idiots and morons -- good luck on solving the problem that way. The whole thing is self-reinforcing because the heated battle makes for great news, and the media has a vested interest in legislation angering the right, and the antics of gun owners angering the left, and both sides are doing what they can to vent, get it off their chest, and piss off the other.
In terms of what's
effective, it's nearly a tautology, no research required, to say that a mass shooting requires semi-auto/high capacity magazine. How else are you going to pump out enough bullets to make it a mass shooting? The problem is, those who are pro-gun legislation are pulled in two direction. One incentive is to highlight the number of mass shootings, which means to lower the number of people killed as much as possible to get an impressive-looking figure, while another incentive is to underscore the problem of semi-auto weapons, and then point to gun owners as unreasonable, and that they can keep their hunting rifles. If killing 2 people is a mass shooting, then clearly, hunting rifles are on the table as a susbtitution good for a mass-shooting weapon. If there is a statistic that shows guns fully
capable for being substitutes wouldn't be substitutes for whatever reason, I'm open, but need to be careful about how we compare to other societies. If the institution of mass shooting never developed in society A because society A only has hunting guns, that's different than society B where the institution developed, in part because of its assault weapons, and now we remove the assault weapons. Why would we believe hunting rifles wouldn't be a susbstitute?