(x-post from LBN) AG Maura Healey: We will win gun lawsuit
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10141597906BOSTON — Attorney General Maura Healey on Friday predicted that she will win a lawsuit filed by a national gun rights group over her interpretation of the state's assault weapons ban.
This summer, Healey angered gun rights supporters when she interpreted a ban on assault weapons to make illegal certain types of guns that are similar to assault weapons. Around 10,000 of those so-called "copycat" assault weapons were sold last year in Massachusetts.
The lawsuit, filed by the National Shooting Sports Foundation and four gun shops, argues that Healey's interpretation of the law violates due process and is "unconstitutionally vague, invalid and unenforceable."
Healey spoke Friday at a rally on Boston Common urging voters to cast ballots Nov. 8 for candidates who support gun control.
Read more: http://www.masslive.com/politics/index.ssf/2016/10/ag_maura_healey_we_will_win_gu.html
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A reasonable compromise approach might be to treat semi-automatics more like fully-automatics.
Not very nice and not a true statement at all.
Saying that I sometimes talk about gun culture?
Why is gun culture so predatory?
and rifles as a class are the least misused of all weapons. Even the Liberal Gun Club forum is dominated by semiauto rifle shooters. I think you are either misinformed about the scope of rifle misuse, or in deep denial about the prevalence of semiautos in U.S. homes, including Dem and indie households.
Not just the USA, either; semiautos are legal and popular in Canada, most of Europe, New Zealand, etc., and even UK residents can own semiauto shotguns and semiauto .22LR rifles of unlimited capacity, if they so choose.
It's ironic that your avatar is a picture of an avid semiauto shooter who was murdered with a bolt-action.
The thing is (and I pointed this out in another thread), if all semiautos were banned (not going to happen), the professional gun-control lobby would simply switch to demonizing "Saturday Night Specials", "Vest Busters", "Big Boomers", "Sniper Rifles", "Combat Shotguns", "Riot Guns", "Silent Killers" (.22LR assassin's weapons, dontchaknow), and "Cop-Killer Bullets". Pumps and levers fall under the "assault weapons" catch-all, anyway.
Or would you be OK with people owning this pump-action?
Only a tiny minority of gun owners hunts, FWIW, so the hunting canard is irrelevant. If other guns were banned, you'd be saying "You can hunt with a bow, nobody needs a military-style sniper rifle" anyway.
I think the fact that they kill *fewer* people than shotguns, revolvers, knives, clubs, and even bare hands---making them among the least misused of all weapons---demonstrates that the obsession with rifle stock styling, and criminalizing responsible ownership thereof, is wrongheaded and counterproductive.
As to the nukes analogy, a .22 caliber non-automatic civilian rifle is many orders of magnitude less dangerous than a nuke, both in terms of storage and in terms of accidental or intentional misuse. I think banning alcohol is a better analogy than nuclear weapons, since alcohol and guns are both popular consumer products that are commonly enjoyed by a substantial fraction of the population, but with a very small percentage of misuse as well, and which a minority wish to outlaw on moral or pragmatic grounds---except that alcohol kills about 250 times as many people annually as rifles do.
As to banning only modern firearms, I don't think you'd really be OK with us owning guns from the 1830s through the 1870s either, since rate of aimed fire with a lever-action is pretty comparable to that of a modern semiauto, and I believe pumps go back to the mid-1800s as well.
I guess that's why there's special agency for them. That's 2 of the 4 in alcohol, tobacco, firearms and explosives. 
I have it on good authority that a former supervisor when appoint me as Secretary of Analogy when he's elected President.
One of my hobbies is riding singletrack on my old GT iDrive.
My point is that the scope of rifle misuse is vastly exaggerated by those who want to coerce their neighbors into living by their philosophical/religious beliefs on the topic, and being honest about the magnitude of rifle misuse would undermine your case. So instead we get rhetoric about "weapons of mass destruction" and "epidemics of violence" and even (in this very forum) intimations that a bloody fight for confiscation would be justifiable.
Many states have *zero* rifle homicides in any given year. The vast majority of states are in the single digits. Massachusetts, which just outlawed the most popular civilian rifles by executive fiat, averaged less than 1 rifle murder per year in the last 8 years for which we have data.
Murder, by State, Types of Weapons, 2015
[font face="courier new"]Total murders...................... 13,455
Handguns............................ 6,447 (47.9%)
Firearms (type unknown)............. 2,648 (19.7%)
Clubs, rope, fire, etc.............. 1,671 (12.4%)
Knives and other cutting weapons.... 1,544 (11.5%)
Hands, fists, feet.................... 624 (4.6%)
Shotguns.............................. 269 (2.0%)
Rifles................................ 252 (1.9%) [/font]
To put that into perspective, bicycles accounted for 722 deaths in 2014, the most recent year for which I could find stats.
If you don't think bicycle deaths are an "epidemic" that requires coercive solutions and prohibition (never mind, say, swimming pool deaths, or knife deaths, both of which kill an order of magnitude more people than semiauto rifles do), yet you use that level of rhetoric about non-automatic, small-caliber civilian rifles and threaten coercive action against their owners, then you are being disingenuous.
To quote the gun-control lobby, back when rifle murder was *twice* the problem it is now:
"O)ur organization, Handgun Control, Inc. does not propose further controls on rifles and shotguns. Rifles and shotguns are not the problem; they are not concealable."
--Nelson T. "Pete" Shields, Guns Don't Die--People Do, Priam Press, 1981, pp. 47-48).
Because he was a gun enthusiast who avidly enjoyed shooting semiauto rifles, and personally owned an AR-15, an M1 carbine, and a Garand. And rifle homicide was probably higher back then than it is now, since it has been at historic lows in recent years.
Was Eleanor Roosevelt a Democrat, with her concealed-carry license and her views on armed self-defense?
I'd also point out that prior to the first Clinton administration, when the Third Way types decided to go hard on gun control as a way to appeal to right-leaning law-'n-order types (thereby shooting the party in the foot in 1994), support for gun control was an urban/rural thing, *not* a liberal-vs.-conservative thing. Most gun control prior to that time had been instituted by conservatives seeking to centralize power in the hands of elites, and keep guns out of the hands of people with the wrong color skin or the wrong ethnicity. That's true of the Mulford Act in California (signed by none other than Ronald Reagan), NY's Sullivan Law (aimed at keeping guns out of the hands of immigrants), and the Jim Crow gun control in the South, vestiges of which still stand today (like NC's law allowing sheriffs to deny handgun ownership on the basis of subjective "moral character", which was originally code for "has the wrong color skin"
.
The modern gun-control lobby is primarily funded by a single Wall Street billionaire who believes in stopping and frisking brown people without warrant, among other illiberal police-state positions he advocates.
