[angersock]

Please educate yourself about American gun availability before you give the wing nuts a reason to discredit your point. We do not sell automatic weapons without a whoooole lot of paperwork and money, we could not remove the weapons overnight, and your Walmart example is tasteless.

[jacquesm]

Automatic vs semi-automatics is brought up frequently. The simple fact is that for killing a bunch of people in an enclosed space a semi-automatic is the 'right' kind of weapon, full-auto would actually be a lot less efficient. You'd run through your ammo quicker and you'd put many rounds into the walls and the ceiling.

[skyhook_mockups]

As I mentioned, I'm from Australia, so if I misrepresented anything about the US then I'm happy to be corrected.

In my original post I described an exaggerated caricature of gun ownership. The point still stands though: that any private citizen (regardless of the amount of paper work they filled out) can choose to sleep with an assault rifle (or shotgun or semi-auto pistol etc.etc.) under their pillow at night is rather .... disturbing.

[apl]

  > We do not sell automatic weapons without a whoooole lot
  > of paperwork and money

Availability of money has zero bearing on mental health and fitness to carry a weapon, so that criterion goes right out the window. What kind of paperwork is required? Does it entail thorough background checks etc.?

Erecting barriers isn't sufficient; we need the appropriate type of barrier.

[FelixP]

The short answer is that it is very hard to acquire fully-automatic weapons in the US today. Aside from the fact that anything available for sale to civilians will be both prohibitively expensive (1-2 orders of magnitude more expensive than a comparable semi-automatic weapon) and most likely an antique (only weapons manufactured before 1986 are available to civilians), the acquisition process itself is pretty arduous (e.g. FBI background investigation, signoff from head of local law enforcement, etc.). From my understanding, these weapons are almost never used to commit crimes.

The real danger are handguns - something like 3/4s of gun deaths are from handguns.