Here is the problem

[benEzra]

45. I wonder how many respondents

As far as I can tell, the polls simply use the terms "assault weapon" and "high-capacity magazine".

I've even seen polls where the majority support a ban on all semi-automatics.

I wonder how many respondents realize "high capacity" in this context means "more than 2/3 of what ordinary pistols hold" rather than extended magazines or whatever; or that "assault weapons" are not military assault rifles; or that "semiautomatic" means "works like an ordinary civilian gun, not a military weapon".

That was the fly in the ointment in 1994; the high polling support was meaningless when the backlash came, because a lot of the support was based on misunderstanding of terms, and most of the rest was a mile wide and an inch deep. So it turned into a Pyrrhic victory for the gun control movement.

BTW I'm speaking of the Congressional AWB proposals here, not of the 23 EO's from this week. Most of the EO's were pretty benign compared to what he could have done, leading me to believe that he was trying to scale things back.

I get the enthusiasm gap thing, but it seems to me that most of the people who really care enough about AR-15s to vote based on this alone are probably voting Republican anyway. Certainly, outside of DU, none of the people who are all upset about this seem to be likely Democratic voters.

There is some truth to that, but probably less than you'd think. If you run the numbers, about half of gun owners reporting party affiliation are Dems and indies. Dems are the fastest growing subset of gun owners according to Gallup. Most are nonhunters. Among nonhunters, black rifles, full-sized pistols, and CCW pistols are the most popular guns.

In 1994, the AWB did three things: it drove many gun-owning Dems to vote for repub challengers out of protest, it caused many gun-owning Dems to say "screw them" and stay home on election day, and it mobilized repub-leaning gun owners to donate/volunteer/campaign/vote like crazy.

BTW, if you have been in General Discussion lately, imagine how the rhetoric about owners of nonhunting guns sounds to us. Or how the "allow guns for hunters and 'sportsmen' only" thing sounds if you're not among the small minority who hunt. If you own any full-sized 9mm pistol designed in the last 90 years, or any of the 30+ million rifles that would be affected, or a Ruger 10/22 or Remington 597 or 1100, and you see such discussion...or the new NY law with politicians and activists wanting to take it nationwide...you realize that you may have to make a very difficult choice between surrendering your prized possessions to fearmongers, or living for the rest of your life in fear of going to jail. That is deeply unsettling, and drives people to support legislators who won't present them with that Hobson's choice.

And the media isn't helping. There was a newspaper editorial from Iowa or somewhere a couple weeks ago that went viral on the gun boards, in which the paper opined that owners of "assault weapons" and over-10-round magazines should be disarmed without exception, and those who refuse to comply should be shot. Or that stunt where the NY paper published an interactive map of gun owners, with all their homes flagged on the map with their names and addresses. Not helpful.

And as long as existing weapons are grandfathered, then all the talk of felonies is moot. Nobody is going to prison for a 30-round magazine that they forgot was laying around. So it's not really as drastic as you make it out to be.

I've yet to see any proposals that include full grandfathering of guns and magazines a la 1994; the gun control activists now call that a "loophole". In any case, a ban with full grandfathering isn't much of a ban when a quarter-billion banned items are in lawful circulation, even less so when you consider how much of the market a ban would drive underground. In Australia, 80% of the "assault weapons" in circulation went black, and the USA is unlikely to be more compliant than Australia. That is a hindrance only to lawful shooters, not to people with bad intentions.

Ms. Feinstein's favored approach for the last few years has been to push for confiscation from the family upon the death of the owner, via prohibiting transfers, and I've seen a push in this direction in the last month. And I believe New York's just-passed law is "get rid of them, emigrate, or go to prison if we catch you."

The question is whether Obama will be able to raise and sustain the enthusiasm from the majority. Apparently he thinks he can.

So did Bill Clinton, unfortunately, which is what led to his whole AWB miscalculation. He did raise that support, and sustained just long enough to get the Feinstein law passed. After that, it was inevitable that the people it screwed would feel betrayed and would work against it; we were slapped in the face by it every time we opened our gun cabinets, every time we went to a range, every time we went to a gun store. The current AWB proposals screw several times more voters than in 1994, and screw them harder, so I would expect the backlash to be worse.

I actually tend to agree that "assault weapons" are arbitrarily defined, and that it would be better to put political capital towards a national licensing and registration system for all semi-autos and handguns.

Honestly, I don't think licensing and registration wouldn't be all that controversial if gun control advocates weren't trying to outlaw popular guns and make ownership much more difficult. Look what NY and Illinois gun owners have gotten for accepting licensure: demonization in the press, near-annual threats of de-licensure/confiscation, and on the whole less gun rights.

On the other hand, gun owners in most states have accepted shall-issue carry licensure pretty well---*because* it is shall-issue, we are currently powerful enough to prevent criteria creep, and you don't get anything confiscated if you let it lapse.

But, seeing how angry the NRA has become kind of reminds me of how I felt after the healthcare debate. There were a lot of problems with Obamacare, but the simple fact that Republicans thought it was the beginning of a communist takeover meant that it must have dome something right.

Thing is, though, the NRA is only 4.5 million gun owners out of probably 40-50 million who would be affected by these bans. And our disapproval of said bans has nothing to do with the NRA, and everything to do with the ban proposals themselves.

FWIW, I'm not a member of the NRA. I used to be a few years ago, but let my membership lapse when they started to get too cozy with cultural conservatism. F*** that.

By the way, doesn't it seem a bit contradictory to on one hand claim that this is some draconian crackdown comparable to prohibition, and then go on to say that the ban is purely cosmetic?

My intended parallel to Prohibition was that the "temperance" movement pushed the 18th Amendment under the pretense that it was only about banning "intoxicating liquors", i.e. distilled beverages that were particularly dangerous to society. Then the Volstead Act defined "liquors" as anything with more than 0.5% alcohol by volume, thereby banning wine and beer and other non-distilled drinks. That to me is not that different from asking people about "military weapons of war intended to kill lots of people at once and mostly owned by extremists," then pushing a ban on the most popular (and in many cases, least misused) civilian firearms in the United States.

There are other parallels, though. Prohibition failed because a substantial minority of the populace disagreed with the ban strongly enough to violate it. You'd see that with an AWB as well. As I recall, Australia only got about 20% compliance with their AWB, with the other 80% of "assault weapons" going black; do you expect a higher compliance rate in *this* country? In the case of "assault weapons" and >10-round magazines, you are talking about 200+ million items owned by 40-50 million people here.

As to cosmetic-or-not, yes, the original 1994 non-ban was purely cosmetic/ergonomic. It was certainly a severe annoyance that reminded you of its ineffable stupidity ever time you picked up a gun or went to the range. But it didn't really affect magazine capacity too much (at least for rifles), the restrictions were laughable in terms of functionality, and it could easily be flouted by anyone who chose to (as I recall, there was not a single prosecution between 1994 and 2004 of any individual who violated the 2-features test, and folding stocks and whatnot were freely sold).

This time around, the proposals go much, much further. They are going for an absolute ban on "black rifles" even stricter than California's, not just a 2-features test; they are going for absolute prohibition of pistol grip stocks, adjustable stocks, and all over-10-round magazines; they are going after bulk and mail-order ammunition sales, which directly targets competitive shooters and collectors; and they are going for draconian prosecution for violations (10 to 25 years in prison, in some bills). And the advocates have shown that even the pre-Civil-War 10-round limit is not their end goal; NY just passed a 7-round limit.