Originally Posted by
jclay
How do other countries do it? I believe they don't allow civilians to possess semi autos of combat calibre/power and they heavily regulate other firearms.
They didn't spend time dicking around with magazine size or other technical details. They wisely prevented weapons that can rapidly spit out bullets from being in the general population. And they regulate the hell out of the rest. Do they get all of them? Of course not. But do they get enough that their rates of mass shootings are a couple orders of magnitude less than ours. I shouldn't even have to pose the rhetorical question but some of the previous comments force me to do so.
We, unwisely, opened the flood gates so remediation will take a long time and lots of sticks, carrots and conversation/cultural changes. We are a stupid lot about too many things.
I don't know about others but if I wanted to learn how to build bicycle frames I'd find out how successful framebuilders do it and then do what they do. Oh, shit, that's what I did...except for a couple of early crap frames where I didn't listen and follow. Hmmm. Is there a correlation?? I wonder.
If I wanted to build a NASCAR team I'd find out how successful teams do it, and to avoid mistakes, how unsuccessful teams do it. If I was chronically in the loser's bracket, which we are in the firearms violence arena, I don't think I'd be arguing that my clever methods worked better than the methods that the winning teams were using.
Low capy mags. What a joke. I can change a 6 shot semi-auto mag vastly quicker than I can a revolver; few mass shooters are going to take the substantial time and trouble to learn to reload wheelguns quickly. And then when low capy mag restrictions, along with other Balkanized regulations, fail the folks who oppose regulation will be able to say "see, gun laws don't work"; it's perfect for them.
We will see a reduction in mass shootings when we have reduced the population of semi autos to a tiny fraction of what it is now, and not a day sooner. A national health care system, better worker protections, breaking up oligopolies/strong anti-trust enforcement and the like would also be of benefit to this problem and society in general...but no, as I said, we are a stupid lot and both parties are beholden to big $$ interests. We are like the frog in the water that's being slowly heated, and about way too many things.
Conceptually this is not a difficult problem but practically we've damn sure made it one.
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