Hillary Clinton calls for renewed assault weapons ban: they're a 'weapon of war'

[AtheistCrusader]

65. You would be surprised.

That AR has a high cyclic rate. This is a reasonable item to regulate. That does enable shooing a lot of people. I suggested a means of registering and ensuring people who might not be entirely stable, but also haven't been adjudicated mentally unfit or convicted of a felony, might be denied such weapons upthread, based on some existing laws already in use on fully-automatic weapons today.

But there's power, and there's power. That AR can certainly kill someone every time you shoot someone with it. But that US M1917 can go through four people and maybe more, killing them all if you line then up. The AR can't. Yes, you'd end up shooting fewer people with the bolt-action, but the wounds and lethality of those hits would be much, much worse. Walt Whitman used a similar weapon for most of his murders in the Clock Tower Massacre.



Bottom line, ANY semi-automatic firearm with a detachable magazine is just as risky as the AR for public use. So that's most firearms going back to the 1930's, with some notable exceptions.

ALL firearms development is informed by or based on military design and usage, so that wasn't a meaningful distinction by itself.