Please sign the petition to ban assault weapons

The '94 ban wouldn't have caught the weapons in Aurora or Newtown, because neither had bayonet lugs or flash suppressors.

My casual impression is that

A) people want to ban semi-automatic weapons, and
B) people think that's what the assault weapons ban did

The first is not something I agree with, but certainly not a crazy idea. The second is just factually false, and (frankly) a result of our own dishonest marketing of the ban.

All it says is to reinstate a law that was once on the books.

Which is why I think it's worth spending zero political capital on it

Not worth the effort for you.

Sometimes, the weight of a million signatures is enough to get a conversation started.

teeth into it. So get on it!

As witnessed by the fact that most people on DU (who are, after all, smart people) seem to think that it banned semi-automatic rifles, and seem not to notice that the rifles from both shootings would have been legal under it. This also gets to why people think people like me who don't support the law are "crazy"; if you think the law kept people from getting AK-47's, it makes sense to think anybody who opposes it is crazy.

If we want to ban semi-automatic weapons with detachable magazines, then we should say so. I don't really agree, but mostly because I think it could never be enforced, not because I think it's a bad or unconstitutional idea. And, my feelings about party loyalty being what they are, if the party backed it I would fall in line. But resurrecting a stupid law that didn't do anything, at potentially great political cost, is not something I support at all.

Mandate secure storage with criminal liability for failing to. Biometric safeties on all new guns and free retrofitting on old ones

Would you ban any types of guns? Or rather, I should say, which types guns are not reasonable for a homeowner to want to use for hunting or reasonable protection.

What about gun shows? How would you change those rules?

Are you aware of any buy back programs that have been effective?

I'm asking because, as you pointed out, many of us, myself included don't know enough to know how to put teeth into this. I plan to become my congress members' best friend/worst nightmare.

This needs to be begun.

I haven't been on K street for about a year so I don't remember people's position papers, but there are some. Unfortunately the Members willing to stick their necks out for gun control aren't for the most part the ones who understand firearms.

Would you ban any types of guns? Or rather, I should say, which types guns are not reasonable for a homeowner to want to use for hunting or reasonable protection.

Well, I don't think focusing on types or features of guns is very useful. I think the 1934 NFA pretty well defines what guns are appropriate for civilians: semi-automatic or slower, .50 caliber or smaller. However, that's a statutory limit and there's no reason we couldn't change it.

What about gun shows? How would you change those rules?

We really, really, really need to stop talking about gun shows. Seriously. Trust me on this. Gun shows are legally no different than garage sales or classified ads. And people who go to gun shows, whose support we will need for this, hear the sneer with which we talk about them and the completely false myths we seem to have bought into about them ("no background checks required! complete anarchy!") and get turned off immediately.

As most of the DU gun nuts have said, private transfers of firearms should be able (or for that matter required) to use the same background check system that licensed dealers use. That's a much less inflammatory way of describing the "gun show loophole" (which isn't a loophole, and has nothing to do with gun shows).

Are you aware of any buy back programs that have been effective?

We have no idea, because we aren't good at counting the actual number of guns anywhere. I'm morally certain they don't do any harm.

The idea that guns shows are just like garage sales doesn't make me feel better. I have never been to a gun show; is there a way that your licensing suggestion could be enforced at a gun show? And ARE those myths? Are there background checks already in place for gun shows?

If as you suggest the private sellers could use the same background check system that dealers use, would it be enforceable to make that mandatory for every private sale?

Really. I do appreciate this information.

there is nothing unique about gun shows.

The issue is private sales - where ever they take place. Presently gun sales by non-gun dealers within their own state to another resident of their state are not regulated by the federal government. It is a state issue per the commerce clause of the constitution - the feds have no jurisdiction. So for there to be background checks on private sales each state has to pass legislation and set up their own system.

seems insurmountable, because there are a lot of states that won't. Are you aware of any ideas circulating to get around that?

for very good reasons.

a state? It seems like a lot of reasonable gun control would depend on licensing. The sale between individuals within a state doesn't seem to lend itself to licensing. Can you think of a way to catch those sales?

Both licensing and private sales are state issues.

in sales between individuals within a state, each state would have to enact a policy individually. This seems to be where the ability to implement your licensing suggestion would be difficult. Can you think of any way to catch those individual within-state sales for licensing?

I'm not opposed to it, I just don't think there's a huge difference between one 30-round magazine and three 10-round magazines. As far as that goes, here's what I see as a spectrum we could do (again, with the caveat that I think none of this is really going to do much). The spectrum is from "most extreme" to "least extreme":

1. Ban detachable magazines for semi-automatic weapons.

2. Require a bullet button so that magazines cannot be quickly reloaded.

3. Limit magazine size to X for some value of X

4. Nothing

1 & 2 would require wholesale acquisition (I'm avoiding the inflammatory word "confiscation") and/or modification of hundreds of thousands of existing guns (difficult and scary), or the grandfathering in of hundreds of thousands of existing guns (rendering it pointless for a generation or so).

3 would require a similar acquisition or grandfathering (with the same problems) of tens of millions of existing magazines out there.

Of those, 2 is the most interesting to me, but getting tens of millions of people to voluntarily modify hundreds of millions of guns would be, well, problematic. But maybe it's something we should consider for newly manufactured guns.

This was an assessment of the '94-'04 assault weapons ban, sponsored by the Clinton DOJ

http://www.sas.upenn.edu/jerrylee/research/aw_final2004.pdf

Glossary: LCM = Large Capacity Magazine, AW = Assault Weapon

Some highlights:

that seem to be happening every couple of weeks now, it seems to me that the faster the gun shoots and the fewer pauses in shooting, the more people can be killed. Am I missing anything in that?

Admittedly, these rampages are only a fraction of gun violence, and they probably don't contribute noticeably to the statistics, but if the magazine size could reduce deaths in these cases I think it would be worth trying.

And thanks for joining the conversation.

The VT shooting is the example most often cited- the shooter used 10 round magazines, and killed more people than Friday's shooting. Another is the Luby's massacre back in the 90's. That one involved two guns with 10 round magazines.

Nor do I think that in an enclosed space such as the school on lock-down, magazine size restrictions would have resulted in fewer deaths and injuries.

Theoretically, yes, it might help. In reality? There's not a lot of evidence that it actually does.

nobody has ever defined "assault weapon" in an enforceable way. There is a video on youtube (I can find it if you wish) of the attorney general, the head of the BATFE, and the armorer of the LAPD all testifying before congress explaining their inability to define this term. Until there is a constitutional, meaningful definition, there will be no law.

a necessary part of any law is definitions, we'll see what happens. The attorney general, director of the BATFE, or even gun control organizations have never actually defined this term in any enforceable, constitutional way. As long as nobody can do that there will be no "assault weapons ban". Defining them as semi-automatic rifles will require a constitutional amendment since semi automatic rifles have been "in common use for lawful purposes" (the standard set by SCOTUS) for nearly a century. The last 10 year "assault weapon ban" did nothing...there are no studies or statistics which could document a single benefit from that Democratic disaster.