General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: I'm all for a total ban on semi-automatic guns [View all]NeedleCast
(8,827 posts)...could a shooter (Colorado, Virginia Tech, Newtown, etc.) kill just as many people with a pair of six-shot revolvers and an auto-loader as they could with a semi-auto, higher mag capacity and in most cases, to me it looks like the answer would be yes. In the case of Newtown, Lanza killed himself before law enforcement intervention and that's generally how these things have gone...either the shooter kills himself or gives himself up based on whatever brand of crazy they're on before the cops kill them.
So the question I find myself asking is - regardless of whether the weapons being used shoots fast or really fast - is whether or not a shooter would have been stopped before they killed themselves, ran out of targets or just stopped because their crazy switch did something different (like in the case of the Aurora shooter). To me, it's not a matter of body count - the implication being that it would somehow be less tragic if Lanza had only killed a dozen kids with his revolvers instead of 20+ with his semi-auto handguns. I'd like to see the argument changed from one of semantics (which is what the OP's argument is) to one of cause.
DU not really interested in that though.