Gun Control & RKBA

I disagree, but I respect your "no bullshit" approach. It has always been foolish to try to target certain "types" of semiautomatic rifles. The Newtown shooting (Sandy Hook school) was done with an AR-15 that was not an "assault weapon" as defined at the time; Connecticut had actually banned them a couple of years before the Federal ban in 1993, and without a sunset provision. So at the time of the shooting, Connecticut had had an AWB in effect for 20 years.

Now, scary media images aside, handguns are of course much more deadly than rifles. Less than 400 people a year are murdered with any kind of rifle, and semiautomatic rifles are a subset of that number. Handguns are something like 7,000 people a year.

So if we're trying to reduce the murder rate, the logical thing to do would be to outlaw sales and ownership of all handguns with no grandfathering of current guns. So, basically, confiscation. All handgun owners would be forced to sell their handguns to the government, with the only exceptions being the usual suspects: cops, security guards, and bodyguards.

But this doesn't really come up. It's about a culture war and publicity; they try to ban high-profile guns like AR-15s because they continue to think it's both low-hanging fruit AND effective in stopping mass shootings.