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this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2024
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Remind me in ten years after semi-auto rifles are banned and handguns are up next on the chopping block because they [offers specific advantage to criminals that rifles didn't]. I could probably sit here and name a good few, but the handgun's overwhelming majority usage in crime compared to other weapon types already testifies to the dishonesty of the campaign against semi-auto rifles; a captivating or tragic story coupled with a classic alarmist piñata gets better ratings and speaks much louder than statistics, and as a consequence of effective campaigning, a conversation about banning handguns now would feel like an irrational leap to the public until semi-auto rifles are out of the way first.
Mass shootings specifically with semi-auto rifles are of the perfect (relative) rarity to make the rounds on national news occasionally, whereas the same coverage with handguns would have to make headlines almost every morning. And when you realize that only about 3% of all criminal gun homicides are related to mass shootings, it should be clear that anyone with public safety as a concern should keep their televisions off when considering how attention and resources should be allocated to the gun violence issue. The conversation about semi-auto rifle bans has put politicians and the media into symbiosis, and truthfully, there's a chance it might not even happen.
Many of the common sense gun laws proposed are long overdue, but a ban on semi-auto rifles isn't one of them right now.
Nice to see someone who actually acknowledges that most gun crime involves handguns. The focus on semi-automatic rifles should be secondary. Far, far fewer people die from semi-automatic rifles than they do from handguns.
A semi-auto rifle ban is also one issue that I believe if we laid off of it, Republicans would be more willing to play ball with common sense gun regulation knowing negotiations weren't being made in bad faith and with an ultimate goal of opening a pathway to banning semi-auto rifles.
All of what I've said is already common knowledge to Republicans, but polls show they are open up to things like universal background checks and mandatory licensing. Just not when they feel like they need to use those things as a buffer to less justifiable regulatory ambitions. The Democratic attempt at voter appeasement with a hardball "all or bust" approach and a low willingness to have regulatory talks without a semi-auto rifle ban on the table has been very counterproductive on a federal level.
Well said, but unfortunately most of my fellow progressives will just disagree emotionally and not engage in good faith. They're not willing to accept that semi-automatic rifles are not the main problem. Maybe because all they care about is school shootings and don't care about the more frequent, random violence that involves handguns. After all, even the progressives don't exactly talk about how they want to prevent gang violence, a major factor in gun violence. And whenever they talk about firearms and suicide, they never link together that this is handguns that people are using to kill themselves.
But semi-automatics are scary and make better talking points, I guess.
Edit: It occurs to me that this is actually probably even more pandering than I realized. Democrats are extremely unlikely to own semi-automatic rifles but not that unlikely to own a handgun. So it's easy for them to accept semi-automatic rifles being banned while it's not so easy for them to accept that the handgun they keep by their bedside or in their closet might be banned.
Tell me you're a bad hunter or a wanna-be mass-murderer. There's really no other plausible - I said plausible - scenario where a semi-auto anything isn't laughable. But, I'm biased -- I was trained to use an automatic rifle.
Were you trying to communicate a point, or was this just an opportunity for you talk down to non-military gun owners as a whole using whatever nonsense you could pull out of your ass?
Knowing how to use one sort of weapon doesn't make you an expert on the topic of gun crime. In fact, the two things are entirely unrelated.