People want a closure of the gun show loophole and they want a restriction on high capacity magazines. Those things will probably happen, in Olympia or DC. But beyond that, nothing. This is one of the weird areas where Washington votes a lot more like Texas than Vermont.

Everybody knows that pistols are semi-auto too, right? And that a standard conformal (non-overhanging) 9mm Glock clip holds 17 rounds, right? This is why gun people really hate the proposed assault weapon ban. Because the next very small step is to banning pistols.

They propose limiting detachable magazines to a size of 7 rounds rather than 10.

Q: (to the slog gunnery) what's that about?
I don't ask cynically. Does the change from 10 to 7 cross some mechanical threshold?

@2, no, it's just an arbitrary number they pulled out of the air.

@1: That's the program - start small with a meaningless ban on scary looking rifles, proceed forward to everything else in a series of steps. Boil the frog slowly.

@1, 4: immediately to the slippery slope fallacy!

Hopefully a ban on high capacity semi-automatic rifles will not simply lead to the manufacture of very large, long-barrel, high capacity semi-automatic "handguns."

Because skirting bans and restrictions is something the firearms manufacturers are extremely good at doing, due to the highly technical nature of both gun mechanics and the mechanics of writing laws. The only way to stop gun massacres and the daily bloodbath of handgun crime is to ban everything but low capacity hunting rifles and shotguns. But I do not think this country has the desire to do so politically.

@2: Yes, that number is more or less arbitrary. The answer is really: "it is less than ten, but not by too much."

@ 1, "This is one of the weird areas where Washington votes a lot more like Texas than Vermont."

The American West is the most libertarian section of the country. And by that I mean truly libertarian, not Libertarian. Gun rights are generally held as important as other freedoms out here.

Anyway, I was under the impression that Vermont was actually pretty big on guns, too. Perhaps I got that from knowing Howard Dean was highly rated by the NRA.

@ 4, I'm unaware of any mass murders committed with assault rifles when the previous ban was in place. Do you know differently?

I don't see why the gun nuts are worried. The gun manufacturers will just flood the market before any ban goes into place like they ways do and then when another group of far right idiots gain control and put guns in every classroom they can take the long clips out from under their pillows and go back to praying a strange kid with some Skittles shows up...

Matt, there's actually a pretty long list. Including, um, Columbine.

If all the competent, law-abiding, sober adult gun owners kept their weapons locked up when not in their immediate personal control, most of the recent (and not so recent) gun tragedies would have not happened.

Lock the weapons away from children, criminals, and the mentally ill and a large part of the problem goes away.

At one time, the National Rifle Association was a leading advocate for gun safety and would get behind campaigns like that. But sadly not anymore.

There is no such thing as a gun show loophole. There is a person to person loophole. Private citizens at a gun show (non WAC members) may sell weapons to each other, or they could sell them to each other in a Safeway parking lot. Or they could buy them for cash at a gun buyback program. Call it what it is, a person to person loophole.

@ 10, weren't those guns acquired illegally?

What were some of the others?

@5: Fallacy? It's been laid out on here as a pretty explicit strategy, and I think it's probably the best one if your goal is draconian laws - pass laws that won't have any real impact, hope for more violence, then use that violence to turn the ratchet. If you address the violence too early in this process by fixing what's broken, it might subvert the larger goal of turning us into Norway (where, thankfully, mass shootings never occur any more).

Yes, they were, Matt. I don't have the list handy, but there were ~12 or so if remember correctly.

Ok, so there's a proposal to ban some guns and magazines of certain sizes.

Great.
Anything else?
Any proposals to limit media depictions of violence?
Any proposals to de-glorify guns?
Any proposals to increase mental health funding?
Any proposals to increase police funding?
Any proposals to provide education to high-risk people for dealing with anger?
Anything??

Yeah, I didn't think so.

But I'm sure this is all that's needed, because the only reason mass murderers kill people is because assault rifles are legal. If assault rifles were illegal, all those mass murderers would stop because they don't want to be arrested for having an illegal weapon.

@15

Yes! We love the violence and we're hoping for more! That's our dirty secret. Because exploiting dead kids is fun. It's who we are.

You know what the NRA-controlled Republican delegation could do foil our wicked plan? Do something to reduce the violence.

End the senseless killings and nobody will be thinking about your guns any more. Posting the NRA's same 10 talking points over and over on the Internet isn't going to cut it.

@18

A shift away from the me-first give-me-my-toys mentality of the libertarian Tea Party NRA nexus will limit the glorification of violence. They think guns are purely a right. They don't perceive them as a privilege, and a responsibility. They want their social security and their medicare and their wars, but they don't want to pay for them. They want their easy guns, but they don't want to learn to use them, or to secure them. They're literally too fucking lazy to unload and lock up their gun. They want the ego boos of carrying it around without all the hassle.

One of the Big Lies of rugged individualism is their failure to take personal responsibility for their actions. The culture of guns without consequences comes from the top, from leaders in Washington and in every statehouse who pass laws every day removing responsibility from gun ownership.

The sun is setting on that era of American politics. Look at how America feels about the "rugged individualists" on Wall Street, begging for bail outs when they screw up then whining at "overregulation".

Oh, and then there is a proposal called "universal health care"? Maybe you've heard of it? Expand Obamacare to help more Americans and you get more mental health care. Guess who's standing in the way of that?

@14 @17

Here.

The Assault Weapons Ban doesn't need to be perfect to save lives. Strictly controlling machine guns didn't result in no machine gun murders ever. That would be absurd. It did drastically reduce the numbers on the streets and save thousands of lives over the years. Who knows how much worse the escalation of violence would have gotten if we had let everyone have a fully automatic gun. Cops, citizens, criminals would have all wanted to be even more heavily armed.

This fallacy that the proposed regulation has to be bullet proof perfect won't die. Why? Because they only other argument against it is "don't take my toys" and "slippery slope".

We came down hard on machines guns 90 years ago, and how steep is that slippery slope? Did we slide down it? No. That's why "slippery slope" is called a fallacy.

Don't forget the www.standupwa.org march and rally this coming Sunday starting at 1:30 at Westlake Park. See you there.

Uhh, Sunday at 1:30 I'm going to be watching the end of the Seahawks game.

The "slippery slope" tools seem to forget about the 2nd Amendment. Which is surprising because they seem to have it tattooed on the insides of their eyelids.

@7 Bans in places like Chicago don't work because blood thirsty vampires like you insist that the rest of the country be flooded with death machines. The more dead, the more you like it because every bloody death supports your world view that you are a vulnerable victim under constant threat. The NRA likes every extra death because they are an arm of the gun manufacturers and they know that more deaths equals increased sales to people like you.

For the NRA, Sandy Hook was a seasonal promotional godsend. Gun nuts like you ran out in droves to buy even MORE assault rifles and other weapons.

I can't wait to donate money to Tom's next election opponent!!

@23 looks like you really have your priorities straight.

Phi..tagn I don't like that handle; I do like your recent postings. Rah rah!

@15: you are fucking paranoid. the slope has been explicitly tilted towards relaxation of gun laws in the last 30 years.

the "agenda" of the left is not "draconian laws", its REDUCING the incidence of MASSACRES, specifically OF CHILDREN.

either contribute conbstructive strategies towards achieving that agenda (which i assume you agree with - or are you pro-child massacre?) while preserving your arsenal, or stop using logical fallacies to derail the conversation.

@29: Reduce massacres of kids, like in Norway?

Prosecute gun crime and violent crime, stop funding criminals through stupid drug laws, provide protection where children congregate.

Sure, it's "possible," Ken. But you're talking about placing restrictions on millons of decent, law-abiding citizens here to reduce numbers that aren't really all that overwhelming to begin with (70-80 deaths a year).

So it's being a "slippery slope tool" to point out that two Glocks equals one AR-15? All of you are cool with Glocks, then?

Didn't think so.

It's good to see you back, Sven. And making sense, too. Not that that's unusual or anything.

@6 Too late! By a long time... ;-)

http://www.classicfirearms.com/hand-guns…

@34 thx, 5280. Post when I can.