| HN Mirror

I see a bill to ban assault rifles, to limit the sale of high capacity magazines and an article about a Senate proposal to ban the sale of firearms to people on the government's no-fly list.

The first two don't seem draconian to me, they seem reasonably targeted to address specific concerns. The bills listed appear to provide exceptions for weapons owned before the bill would take effect, for law enforcement, etc. I don't see the typical doomsday scenario of wholesale banning, mass confiscation or disarmament that we're told the democrats are always working towards. Maybe I need to read between the lines?

The third is disturbing because of the no-fly list, not the ban itself. Felons are already banned from owning firearms as a class, and no one would argue that terrorists or criminals should have guns, so the premise of banning firearms in some cases seems acceptable even to many gun advocates. The no-fly list wasn't created by Democrats, but it was expanded in scope and overwhelmingly supported by Republicans, so I can't really consider that part to be a Democrat issue per se - blame the Democrats for the ban, but blame the Republicans for the blacklist that makes the ban unacceptable.

If gun legislation is, as stated earlier by jonnycoder, "using a shooting event to blame guns and call for bans and stricter gun control," then the typical response by gun advocates amounts to "using a shooting event to promote guns and call for higher gun sales." Why can gun advocates criticize the former, but not the latter?