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Originally Posted by CaptainCrunch
I get what you're saying, but I would really believe that any downturn in the stats would be temporary at best, and you would get a large uptick eventually as an underground market is established. And it will lead to worse weapons becoming available.
Just banning the sale of semi-automatic weapons is not going to solve the problem. I want the banning to happen, but honestly its one step in many and I doubt American's will have the stomach forth the costs of it.
Its America, its a gun culture, and underground market will be a huge money maker for the cartels if they choose to do it. What stops that from happening full force is that its fairly easy to buy these weapons in a legal market.
As a side note, I was in Toronto this week on business and a lot of talk is around not the US mass shootings but the gun violence in Toronto right now including the 17 shootings over the weekend a couple of weeks ago.
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Toronto does have a major issue: it is rife with black market guns, more often than not, coming in from the US... but they also know that guns are a big issue and are actively trying to ban guns in metro toronto, not trying to suggest that more guns would help, nor that 'guns don't kill people; people kill people"
i would agree that it is unlikely that there would be any kind of ban on AR style weapons... even though there was once a ban put into effect, the US, especially politically, is very very different than it was in 1994...
universal background checks, eliminating the ability for the mentally unstable to purchase firearms and limiting extended magazines is probably the upper limit of what would get passed with bipartisan support.
while this may only seem like an incremental change, which pro gun lobbyists would argue, and that "it won't make a difference", i think one really needs to dive into that calculus.
is reducing the body count by one in a mass shooting incident worth it? because the shooter only had the capacity to fire 10 shots before having to reload? is giving people a couple of seconds to run away worth it while the shooter swaps out magazines? logistically, if a shooter needs to haul around 10 clips rather than 2 to a target is that inconvenience worth it? Would it give people a slightly higher chance of escaping?
if universal background checks prevented one mass shooting event per year, is it worth it?
for me, the answer is pretty obvious