Feinstein will introduce assault weapons ban in Senate

[NickB79]

150. I'd love to, but I can't find any good ideas

My wife and I have been discussing this since it happened. Just a couple nights ago, it was a hot topic at a big dinner a friend threw. We all came up with nothing, and we like to consider ourselves fairly intelligent, college-educated professionals.

Like I said, the old AWB was all about cosmetics, not functionality, so renewing it wouldn't make a difference. You have to focus on the functioning of the rifle, what makes it so lethal, but that's virtually impossible to enforce.

Short of a police state, we can't ban and round up all the assault-style rifles currently out there. You could offer to buy them back, but with 50 million of them out there at $1000 and up each, you run into funding issues, and then what do you do to get the ones people don't voluntarily turn in?

Most handguns today are semi-autos, and function the same way as those assault-style rifles. I seriously doubt we could ever get those banned either, given how widespread they are.

There are tens of millions of perfectly legal, non-assault-style hunting rifles that use the same semi-automatic functioning that the AR-15 uses that would be caught in any kind of functionality ban. Millions of shotguns for duck hunting are semi-auto, for example, as well as the .22-rimfire rifle I like to use for target practice and hunting squirrels and rabbits in the fall.

Ban all but 10-rd magazines? That's fine with me, but it doesn't change much. You can reload an AR-15 in about 5 seconds, and if you grandfather in old 30-rd magazines they'll be easy to find online for sale. If you tried to ban them and destroy all of them, good luck. There are literally hundreds of millions of them in this country.

The background check system is already pretty good as it is. A waiting period wouldn't hurt anyone, but it wouldn't do much good either, so it's right up there with banning cosmetic features on guns. Same goes for 1-gun-per-month rules.

Ever since this shooting, I've been reading posts here on DU about it, hoping someone would give some good ideas that would both improve safety in this country AND stand up to the court challenges. Mostly though, all I've seen is "fuck guns, ban them all!" without any thought given to the fact that the Supreme Court would never sign off on that. When that's pointed out, it becomes "fuck the Supreme Court", like that's any better.

Mental health screening would help, but by all accounts the mom was the one purchasing the guns, not the son. Plus, it sounds like she had more than enough money to get her son the proper treatment for his personality disorders, but just didn't want to. How do you treat that?