It's Time to Ban Assault Weapons. Civilians Don't Need Weapons of War
Assault weapons were designed to kill the largest number of people in the least amount of time and there is no sane reason for civilians to own them. Americans are no longer safe in churches, schools, concerts, and other public places. Our other freedoms, guaranteed by the Constitution, are being sacrificed on the altar of gun rights, which were never absolute in the first place. The bogus argument that the government will take everyone's guns would be laughable in the face of government missiles, tanks, and predator drones, if it wasn't so tragic. Evil will continue to triumph if good Americans continue to sit back and do nothing. Meanwhile, the death toll skyrockets upward.
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developing such restrictions. As I've said before, I've probably shot more than most gunners here and could field strip guns like a 1911 by age 10, blindfolded. But I grew up and we never engaged in training for urban warfare and shooting people, carried guns in public, etc.
The majority of today's gunners aren't in it for competition or hunting (unless they consider people prey).
As to bayonet lugs, pistol grips, flash hiders -- That's one of my biggest issues with today's gunners. Why? Because if those things are useless and not important, then they are manufactured or marketed to appeal to gunners' attraction to combat weapons, tactical weapons and all that BS. We are not in a war zone, no matter how much the militia types think we are. If that is what some gunner is interested in -- and the marketeers are exploiting -- then the potential buyer is a sick MFer and should be evaluated for maturity, anger, etc., before allowing them to own any weapons. I see no reason to coddle these immature individuals and nurture their hatred, immaturity, aggression or whatever the heck are their issues.
These guys have no business owning guns --
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I do appreciate your reasoned response.
Limiting magazines, I like, especially as a short-term solution.
If we are looking for long-term solutions, maybe the marketing of these weapons needs to be controlled like tobacco products. It's difficult to accept sniper rifle ads, ads showing people equipped for urban warfare, etc.
Similarly, there is just no way to justify ads like this --
I'll come back when I have more time. Besides, you are into defending guns that are made and marketed to people who obviously aren't mature enough to own guns, as evidenced by the fact they are attracted to guns with a bunch of combat type features. I don't think you get what I'm saying -- one can't separate the rifle from the people attracted to them.
As to Feinstein, she is trying to write legislation that applies to certain types of rifles. She's dealing with NRA types and gunners who play the nomenclature game in an attempt to obfuscate. We need to just bite the bullet and ban semi-auto rifles period. They do nothing but fuel the gun market and are marketed to immature individuals who are easily misled with ads playing to what are clearly questionable needs.
I agree with limiting magazine capacity as a short-term solution. Longer term, we need to paint people who are into this kind of stuff as a threat to society. There will always be those who use guns to bolster their self-esteem and advance political ideology that should be deemed "terrorism." But, it needs to be limited and parents need to understand raising their kids in the gun culture is not in their best interest.
I'll leave this with excerpts from an article that explains it better than I can:
"Consider the ads that gun manufacturers run to lure their buyers.
"Glock guns give men "confidence to live your life." The Walther PPX handgun is "Tough. Very Tough." The Tavor Semi-Automatic Rifle, gripped menacingly by a faceless man wearing a sniper's jacket and shooting gloves, will restore the "balance of power" to anyone holding the gun.
"Ads often invite men to imagine themselves as warriors in camouflage taking on a hostile world. Buying a Bushmaster semi-automatic "confirms that you are a Man's Man, the last of a dying breed, with all the rights and privileges duly afforded."
"In other words, guns give these men strength, status, power, and respect -- exactly what many white men feel they have been hemorrhaging ever since the 1960s.
http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/154225
If we carefully craft laws using technically correct terms, that's one hurdle we do not have to face. In point of fact, clips and magazines perform entirely different functions. If you ban "clips," you are not in fact banning magazines, regardless of what you actually intended. See?
I'm not trying to "discredit"" Feinstein, I'm saying she should hire a staffer who actually knows something about the matter technically if she is going to try and craft effective legislation. I don't see why that's controversial. Do you want the laws to be effective, or not? Talking about the rate of fire of semi-automatic rifle is technically meaningless. It doesn't matter what you mean, it matters what the law SAYS.
The problem with the last AWB was that it focused too much on stuff that did not matter. I'm an engineer. FUNCTIONS, not physical features, are what make a machine a particular kind of machine. If most sports cars are red, banning red cars does not eliminate sports cars, right? Focus on FUNCTION, not appearance, or irrelevant features.
The one part of that law that made sense was the magazine ban.
And I thought we were making friends. 
Adrahil is correct in that the technicalities of language do matter in the eyes of the law, both in terms of what is covered and in what is not. It's because a weapon fitted with a bump-fire stock still only fires one round per pull of the trigger (which is as you probably know the technical characteristic by which a weapon is classified as semi rather than fully automatic) that they are legal, despite the fact that bump stocks serve the same purpose of a fully automatic weapon of allowing the operator to fire faster than they can physically depress a trigger.
But it's not quite as simple as using the correct terminology to describe a specific product that we want to regulate. We should instead use the correct terminology to describe the specific effect that we want to regulate. Banning "devices that harness recoil energy to allow the user to cycle the weapon at a higher rate of fire", for example, would not ban cam-based rotary trigger operation devices, which can achieve a similar effect, because they use some mechanic other than recoil energy. Banning "devices that increase the rate of fire by any means" on the other hand, would ban both all varieties of products with that function that are currently available and any others that may come along in the future.
Now as to pistol grips / thumb hole stocks, that one is somewhat of a pet peeve of mine, because there actually is a very sound reason to have them, and it relates to the angle of the wrist (and thereby the shoulder) when firing from the shoulder. By placing the hand more perpendicular to the action of the weapon, the shoulder can be kept in the lowered position, which is a dramatically stronger and more stable posture. This is a critical concept in proper structure in some martial arts for precisely this reason. The shoulder permits much less travel front to back when in the lowered position than it does when elevated. That's just the reality of how the human body works.
As I outlined in post 8 below, I think we can all agree that this...
does not suggest "unhinged wannabe soldier" in quite the same way as this...
but both would be banned under the assault weapon ban just re-introduced in the Senate, because they both have a thumb-hole, which serves essentially the same purpose outlined above as a pistol grip, and the law was not crafted with adequate care to properly target what they were actually trying to achieve.
I think the argument that Adrahil and I are both making is that if we are more careful about properly and adequately defining the things we want to ban, we can ban those things without banning things we really aren't that concerned with banning, and that will mean that we will stand a better chance of achieving our common goals, because we avoid unnecessary resistance.
and profiteers are selling more and more guns, and ignorant white wing racists are snapping them up.
We need to quit worrying about whether some gun-stroker is going to be upset because his favorite lethal weapon is being banned.
Society is more important than some fool obsessed with guns.
I can concede that there may be something to be said for banning "assault weapons", but that is largely predicated upon how one defines what an assault weapon is. The glaring problem with previous bans has been that it classified rifles as "assault weapons" on the basis of a number of things that have absolutely no bearing upon the purpose of the weapon or its suitability for civilian ownership.
I suspect that fair number of people might be okay with banning rifles like this
and yet be opposed to banning rifles like this for the exact same reason:
Legislation banning the former without banning the latter could most certainly be crafted with relative ease, but it will require a more nuanced approach than simply banning holes for your thumb, purely because some military weapons have them, which is exactly what we have now in the state of NY, as well as in both the federal AWB from the 90's that was allowed to expire and the more recent one proposed after Newtown, which actually went further in the wrong direction. As a result of this, the NRA has been able to ridicule the AWB, and have the benefit of several of their arguments actually being valid, because the law's language was crafted out of emotion rather than logic, by people with an obviously inadequate knowledge of what they were regulating.
There's no reason we need to hand them such a win, and all we really have to do to avoid it is insist that our representatives bother to actually learn at least the basics of such important things about which they write legislation, and confine those things they ban to things that actually do matter.
[edit] I should clarify that I don't mean to belittle or deride the application of emotion to solving this problem. Emotion does and should lead us to act. But we also need logic in order to act wisely. [/edit]
At the end of the day though, the things I think we need to actually be concerned about are how many rounds a weapon can fire in how short a time, and the primary factor by which we can control those is magazine capacity, since a rifle firing 10 rounds a second like a bump fire stock allows isn't terribly attractive if its ammunition capacity is so low that you have to reload literally every second at that rate of fire.
Now there's no reason we can't pursue a ban on actual assault weapons too, but if we fail to define what constitutes an assault weapon in a way that can withstand scientific scrutiny, we are destined to fail, so let's be smarter about it than our lawmakers have been in the past.
I swear Alex Jones gets a raging hard on every time there's a mass shooting. As sick as that sounds it's got to be true. Not only does he get to spout his usual bullshit that the shooting was a false flag (it wasn't) but he gets to stir up his army into harassing the victims.
Only in this country can you survive a mass shooting, only to have your life threatened and people act like it didn't happen and it was no big deal. The fucking conspiracy theorists have made it impossible to pass any meaningful legislation on gun control. It sucks. Fuck those assholes. 
