I think this paragraph from The New Yorker really sums up the gun control debate here on DU

[Shamash]

115. Amusingly wrong

Last edited Mon Jan 5, 2015, 10:18 AM - Edit history (1)

I've been here for years. I've just taken to tweaking twits here recently. I was for quite a while the co-host of the RKBA group on Kos, but had to throw my hands in the air and go cold turkey from the site due to the irrational bigotry and outright hostility towards gun owners there. The co-host of the leading anti-gun group at Kos has the stated position that Revolutionary War muskets fired several times too fast for any weapon civilians should be allowed to own, and is seen as a reasonable gun control advocate. Simply for holding a position on the 2nd that matches that of the Democratic Party and President I have been called by my fellow liberals an NRA stooge, kindergarden killer, accessory to murder and a delusional paranoid. It was quite literally bad for my aging blood pressure, and I'll probably leave here soon since it seems people like Fred Sanders are the leading intellectual lights of liberal gun control at DU and people like you are the best pro-gun liberals have to offer. So feel free to have the last word on the issue.

And I'm quite sure I would be blocked over at GCRA, as their ability to respond rationally to criticisms based on logic, fact or liberal philosophy is as negligible as it is over at Kos. (edit: as Fred Sanders, on cue, immediately demonstrates in the comment directly below).

I too believe in certain aspects of gun control, particularly training and legal knowledge requirements just as for any other hazardous technology. I also am a fan of the recent efforts by the Hartford police in curbing firearm murders, efforts which were both hugely successful and which did not involve banning anything on your list.

I am pro-gun and against useless, pandering laws like assault-weapon bans and magazine limits

I am interested to hear how this interacts with your comment above, since the qualities that have been used to legally define an "assault weapon" are the ones you both a) think should cause a weapon to be banned and yet b) you simultaneously oppose useless, pandering laws like "assault weapon bans". Your answer should be interesting and will go a long way towards explaining why you and Fred Sanders are never seen in the same room at the same time...

Your arguments in the post I responded to were fundamentally flawed in both a liberal and a logical sense. First, assuming that because some members of Group A are a hazard we should restrict all members of Group A is the exact same reason we have racial profiling. More specifically, your assumption that because some items in Group B are misused that all such items should be more tightly restricted would make you fit right in as a supporter of the War on (some) Drugs. And of course, make you a supporter of nude body scans and such at the airport to make sure folks are not carrying "restricted items" (seriously, they found a pack of matches and a lighter in my carryon at Logan last year (returning from a camping trip) and I had to give up one of them because having both would have been too much of a danger).

Since you are here at DU, I hope you hold to none of these absurd laws based on inaccurate stereotypes and ignorant fear. If for nothing other than the practical reason that the chance an average white gun owner will murder someone with a gun is substantially less than the chance the average black male will stab someone to death. No fauxtrage please, it is an accurate assessment of the per capita risk for these two demographics. I simply do not support preventative restrictions of either group (nor the supergroups of whites, blacks, people, gun owners, or knife owners) because of the bad conduct of individuals. The comparison is merely a pointed and very politically incorrect one to see if a person's position is genuinely based on the idea of stopping weapon-based murders, or is just a biased attitude against a specific weapon. Or as the history of gun control demonstrates, gun control laws have been due to bias against a particular race.

Second, your post is making the argument that the qualities people use to define an "assault rifle" make it suited for mass murder ("make it work better when some nutjob or overstressed worker decides that mass murder is the answer.&quot , and this justifies the restriction. From a practical standpoint, all of the proposed restrictions will cost significant political capital for gun control advocates and possible political backlash against Democrats, as has already been witnessed in Colorado. Additionally, murders with "assault rifles" are the least common type of firearm murder, and mass murders are in turn the least likely type of firearm murder (murders where large numbers of shots are fired (pistol or rifle) are the second least likely). So, this political capital would be spent on restrictions that are empirically guaranteed to save the fewest number of lives.

Third, in the places where things that you suggest have been implemented, they have been implemented badly. Your CT assault weapon ban legally defines as an "assault weapon" any part that can be added to a legal weapon to make it an assault weapon. So, the Democrats who wrote, passed and signed that law have set themselves up as the party that created a mandatory 2 year prison sentence for importing a plastic pistol grip, bayonet lug or flash hider (6 years if you give one to a minor, and add some time if you had it concealed in a pocket). Thanks to the miracle of the Internet, you have an infinite amount of space below to explain how that is a win for the Democratic party that will cement the support of the >30% of Democrats who are gun owners. Among its other travesties the CT law also defines multi-thousand dollar Olympic target pistols as prohibited "assault weapons" (its weight plus magazine that is outside the pistol grip), and interestingly enough, so do you (detatchable magazine, matte-black finish).

Fourth, weapons with many those characteristics (obviously not lasers) have been around for a century or more (semi-auto pistols with large detachable magazines date back to the 1890's) and the US murder rate with them was lower (or the same) with the negligible restrictions of 1950 than it is today. Similarly, Switzerland and other nations like the Czech Republic allow such weapons and both have overall homicide rates far lower than the US, implying the problem is not one of accessibility, but of culture. Refer back to Prohibition and the War on Drugs to see the laudable success rates of policies that ban objects without making an equally serious attempt to alter the culture behind them (not to mention the violent criminal markets that rose to prominence because of those bans). Then examine your position and other poorly thought out GC positions here at DU and see how many of them even admit there are larger cultural issues, let alone make substantive suggestions on that aspect of the problem.

Last, arguments like "banning bayonet mounts" stagger the imagination in terms of how poorly they are thought out, leaving me to believe your post was more emotional than practical, which again, does neither Gun Control & RKBA, gun control advocates nor liberals in general a good turn, making the post a trifecta of uselessness. And despite your pro-gun status and hosting Gun Control & RKBA, you honestly don't seem to know crap about actual firearms and even less about the history of the technology and weapon laws (or if you do, you are not showing it). So when it comes to your posts, perhaps you should dial back on quantity and work more on quality.