[cameldrv]

Yeah but those kids hunting had single shot or bolt action rifles with 4-5 round fixed magazines, with either .22 or full power rifle cartridges, a conventional stock, and a long barrel. An AR-15 with a pistol grip, 30 round detachable magazine, short barrel, and semiautomatic action is much more dangerous in a mass shooting attempt.

Pistols are also much more powerful. Instead of the standard 5 shots and slow to reload, modern pistols have 17-23 round detachable magazines.

All of these things have been available since the eighties, but now they’re the standard purchase and they’re in a lot of homes.

[sickofparadox]

This may have been true in the 60's but the vast vast majority of rifle hunting happens with AR platform rifles. That being said, talking about rifles in the context of gun deaths is all misdirection anyway. Less than 400 people died to rifles in the last year that we have statistics for, 2019[1]. Banning them is not only constitutionally untenable, but wouldn't provide much at all in the way of decreases to overall gun deaths.

[1] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

[cameldrv]

Ok now do high capacity semiautomatic pistols.

Edit: also “only 400 people per year.” Great.

[sickofparadox]

1. All pistols (except revolvers) are semi-automatic.

2. High capacity is not a descriptor of a gun, but of the magazine holding the bullets.

3. The stats are all right in the link I posted. Handguns account for the vast majority of gun deaths, but gun control debates are dominated by talking about regulating rifles.

4. Sub-400 people per year in a country with 14,000 killings that year is a negligible number, regardless of any eye rolling.

[cameldrv]

High capacity is a descriptor of a gun in terms of what magazines it can accept. Prior to the 1980s, pistols were generally single stack low capacity like the 1911, 7 rounds or so, now they’re double stack and around 20 is common. This is extremely relevant to all kinds of gun violence because the vast majority of shots in real gunfights are misses. Revolvers were also much more popular than pistols prior to the late eighties or so when the Glock and competitors came out.

The AW ban that limited these to 10 rounds expired in 2004 and people have bought a lot of these guns in the last 20 years.