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In reply to the discussion: Sausage making: what are you willing to concede in return for background checks? [View all]Recursion
(56,582 posts)Banning semi-automatics actually polls better than banning assault weapons, which maybe shouldn't be surprising because it makes a lot more sense.
Anyways, from my anecdotal experience of talking to a lot of people (and the plural of anecdote is data...), most people I know who supported the AWB thought it was a ban on semi-automatic rifles, or maybe their magazine capacity, rather than a regulation of their appearance (and, realistically, it's a regulation of their grip shape since that's the only place the really popular rifles fall foul of it). That it was packaged with a magazine size restriction kind of seems to have added to that confusion.
Anyways, you'll see a lot of doom and gloom from gun people that restricting magazine size is pointless because there's so many of them already out there, but not from me: magazines do (eventually) break, and that would be a start.