Aurora Colorado Violence

I don't see how he could have fired any faster with the AR-15 than with the Glock, but he certainly could have fired more rounds with a 100-round box magazine than the 30-round magazine he had in the Glock. Loughner was subdued when he stopped to reload.The clear implication is that rounds-between-reloads is the operative factor in these mass shootings, not rounds fired per minute.

Number of people killed per class of weapon. Handguns kill far, far more Americans than rifles. I don't see how it's dishonest. I defined how I was using the term back in Message 64. Nobody has put forward any competing criterion. And look, this isn't Call of Duty or whatever where we can rate weapons by their DPS. It's fine for you to believe that an AR-15 is more dangerous than a Glock 19, but if you expect me to agree you need to present some reasonable criterion to support that opinion. Contra Brit, not every opinion is created equal. I suspect they'll both shoot all the way to the back of a movie theater, at least. Agreed. I think the fact that you can put a handgun in a pocket makes it a lot more dangerous than an AR-15. I'm not a gun owner, either, and I only care that demonstratively dangerous people aren't allowed to own guns. But the thing is - not everyone who does these things has a demonstrable history of violence. Some guys just seem to be fine, if a little weird, right up to the point where they shoot up their workplace. That said, I think we may eventually uncover some uniquely American environmental factor - something in the air or water that they don't have in other places. You know, a decade or two after they stopped putting lead in paint, violent crimes had fallen by more than half.

The dictionary definition is just a recourse to other words that all mean "danger." It's no guide for how we should go about measuring the danger, and I explained my criterion for it back in Message 64. It's just a flat-out lie to say that I didn't. But I've given the qualification. But I'm not comparing any one rifle to any one handgun. I'm comparing rifles to handguns. How so? Why should I believe that caliber is a proxy for "danger"?

So what improvements do you propose? CS is right to refer to your position on this as "vacuous", since so far you've called for the law to be made "tougher" and "stronger" without giving any indication of what actual policy you would change.Your position, so far, has all the content of a politician's promise to be "tough on crime." Ok, but what would you actually do? James Holmes didn't have an "arsenal", he owned a total of four firearms. He also had booby trapped his home with explosives, something he definitely wasn't "allowed" to do, so you'd have to explain exactly how any further laws would have helped in this instance if you're going to use the Aurora shooting to justify new laws.

Well, I don't know what to do about that. I can't link to specific sentences within posts. Copying and pasting the material would be pointless - if you couldn't read or understand it the first time, repetition won't have any effect. I told you what post is was. If you don't want to read it - not my problem. Why would I chose the most dangerous weapon? Why wouldn't I choose the weapon that was the most reliable, versatile, and accurate? Oh, I see. You think "caliber" means "size." I didn't even once say that handguns are more dangerous than landmines.

I didn't say that. Yes, I did. Message 125 in response to you asking that exact question.

Oh, I didn't know that. Thanks for the info. I stand (sit) corrected.

It was message 64. And then it was a message in reply to you. So that's at least two times. You accused me of having never done it. So you're admitting that you lied when you claimed that I'd never defined my usage?

Right, and there's basically nobody who would consider a rifle chambered for .22 LR to be an "assault rifle." So a ban on such weapons - whatever they are, since there's no operating legal definition for that term - wouldn't have proved an impediment.It just demonstrates the futility of trying to ban "assault rifles" as a category. The impetus to do so comes not from any verifiable evidence that such guns present a characteristic and unique danger, but from fear of the association of the term with military forces and SWAT. I think the evidence is overwhelming, however, that magazine restrictions would be more effective. Many of these shooters are apprehended during the reload; forcing more frequent reloads would mitigate the damage any individual mass-shooter is able to inflict. And there's just no legal ambiguity whatsoever about what constitutes a "round", a "magazine", or the number "seven." (I chose seven for basically the same reason everybody picks seven for everything.)

Come on, buddy. You know none of us support gun violence to any extent whatsoever. Murder (whether by gun or otherwise) is completely illegal and we fully and ardently support such laws. And we've shown incredible restraint in dealing with your poorly-reasoned and vague arguments, when we could have, in the worst tradition of gun defense, referred to you as a goose-stepping, Constitution-shredding, proto-Nazi weenie and reminded you that among the first acts of Hitler's domination of Germany was that he disarmed the populace. I think we deserve more reciprocal consideration than to be accused of condoning murder. You don't need to be fully informed to voice an opinion on any topic, of course, but if you decide to hold forth on a topic while admitting you lack a comprehensive understanding of the issue, you can hardly complain when people call your opinion "ill-informed."

I don't see how you get to that while the Second Amendment exists.

As I said, we could have said those things, but didn't. I mentioned them not to introduce them into the conversation, but because those are common arguments by gun defenders when things get a little heated.Godwin's Law doesn't apply, here - you weren't compared to a Nazi.

Since citizens of the United States are explicitly given the right to bear militia arms that they could use for defense of the security of the state, it most certainly would - in the same way that telling an American citizen that he could not petition the government for the redress of a grievance would violate the First.Like it or not the Second Amendment is a real thing, and it very much does stand in the way of the sorts of sweeping gun bans that you're talking about. You can't just wave your hands and say "oh, no, it wouldn't." The Second Amendment doesn't protect the right of Americans to own small-bore rifles and shotguns so that they can hunt or target shoot. It protects the right of Americans to own arms that they can muster in defense of the nation.

Since handguns and rifles are exactly the weapons you would use to defend against an invading army, the Second Amendment very clearly protects the right to ownership of these weapons.If the text of the Second Amendment said "venison being damn tasty, the rights of the people to keep and bear hunting arms shall not be infringed" you'd have the latitude to ban handguns and rifles. But it doesn't say that, so you don't. Handguns are protected by the Second Amendment.

No, it does specify. It specifies the arms that are necessary to the security of a free state, and to the formation of a well-regulated militia.And note that the entire perspective of the Amendment is not in the form of what it grants to the people, but what it takes away from the government. Like all the rest of our rights in the constitution, it is construed not as what we are granted but as what the government is prohibited from infringing.So by definition an interpretation of the Second Amendment from the perspective of "what is the minimum level of armament the American people are allowed to possess" is illegitimate. The Second Amendment has to be interpreted from the perspective of "what is the minimum level of regulation the government is allowed to enact on arms." Joe Blow does have the right to own a minigun, provided that it was manufactured before 1986 and registered with the ATF. I assume that since his ownership is legal he can mount it on anything, including a car, assuming that doing so doesn't violate the laws about cars. I'm sure you view this as an unacceptably dangerous state of affairs, but can you point to even a single mass shooting in the US that was perpetrated with a legally-owned minigun?