I was in class and must have missed this post.


Quote Originally Posted by Bogg View Post
Combination of things. The truth of the matter is that the vast majority of violence committed with guns is the small scale one, two, or three homicide shootings that get a 30-second blurb on the evening news and that's it. Keeping guns out of the hands of criminals and the mentally unstable (including people with clean criminal records but with histories of alcohol/drug abuse) is going to do far more in terms of addressing gun violence than banning one particular type of weapon.
You can't really do any more in terms of legally limiting criminals from getting legitimate access to guns. According to current federal law, any person committed of a felony or a misdemeanor spousal abuse (... having a brain fart on what the actual legal charge is). Making it so that any person convicted of any other misdemeanor is a simply ludicrous idea.

As for the mental health aspect, I have no faith in sincere government regulation of any sort. What kinds of mentally unstable people are we talking about? paranoid schizophrenic? ADD? If it were limited to only truly severe cases, then I'd consider that route, but there is too much leeway for the system to be abused unless there are clearly defined/restricted illnesses. Especially nowadays when just about everybody makes up some excuse to go see a "Doctor" and get their hands on prescription drugs.

Unfortunately(for some), a big part of that would be a beefed-up screening process with more in-depth background checks
This is a silly buzz phrase the left tries to peddle around the news media. Every single gun purchase (except sales between private individuals in some states [like SC, but not NC]) is accompanied by a thorough NICS background check done by the FBI. You fill out a multiple page form, including your SSN, address, and all other identifying info, plus a list of legal questions that serve to check your qualifications.

Can you lie and say you haven't committed a felony? Sure, but as soon as they go in the back and call up the FBI and they run your information, you're going to a) get denied the purchase and possibly b) get arrested for trying to purchase a firearm under false pretenses.

As it is, you can't really go more "in-depth" as far as background checks go without checking mental health history, but I've already touched on that topic a little bit.

vastly increased oversight on gun dealers
Sure, if you want, but FFLs are already pretty heavily regulated as it is. I won't pretend to know exactly which business practices they have to adhere to, but I don't think it's very easy for them to sell under the table or any other means as I'm sure they have specific invoice quotas to meet.

and, yes, that boogeyman that gun-rights advocates hold over their audiences' heads: universal registration of firearms.
This would serve absolutely no purpose other than to be more de facto regulation. What good does it do for the fed to know exactly where and how many guns are out there? This isn't the Minority Report where they can stop the crime before it happens.

Besides, please tell me how many criminals (who purchased their guns illegally or stole them) are going to say, "Okay fine, I'll register my guns..." What you'll get is all of the law abiding citizens like myself, who wouldn't have committed a crime otherwise, to register. No problem is solved.

That being said, if someone does get it into their head that they're going to commit a mass-shooting event, you can kill more people faster with a military-style rifle than you can with a revolver.
No, not really. Many pistols are capable of holding the same number of rounds as standard capacity AR mags. Hell, you can buy beta mags for pistols. My M&P Pro holds 17+1 rounds, the gun and magazines are much more easily concealable than their AR counterparts and mags can be changed in less than 1 second by any competent gun owner. What if some scumbag walks in with two of those? That's more rounds downrange in a more efficient manner.

Now if you want to get into the argument of calibers, then sure, but you need to understand that the vast majority of those mean ol' military-style rifles (I have to lol at that term) use the .223 round, which is on the low end of the damage spectrum compared to many other rifle rounds.

What it boils down to is that the media is ignorantly pushing to ban those ARs simply because they look like "evil" "military-style" rifles