Reply #7: What kinds of guns are you talking about? [View All]

[benEzra]

Maybe I should explain that much if not most hardware of this nature is not being taken out by happy families and played with.

I didn't see anything on the linked site (after I fixed the typo in the URL) regarding guns, so I'm not sure what classes of guns you're talking about.

The guns *I* am worried about people banning are the most popular centerfire target rifles in the United States--AR-15 type rifles, SKS's, Ruger mini-14's and Mini Thirty's, civvie AK lookalikes--so if those are the guns you're talking about, I'd like to see the data you're looking at.

Per the FBI, rifles of any type are almost never used criminally (out of 448 homicides in Illinois in 2005, all rifles combined accounted for only 4 of them, and less than 3% of homicides nationally), but small-caliber self-loading rifles are immensely popular among civilian gun owners. My wife owns one, and I own a couple.

Looking at the numbers, there are probably more "black rifle" owners in the U.S. than there are hunters. If you use a broad definition of "assault weapon" (the types of guns threatened by S.1431/H.R.2038), you're talking about potentially half of all gun owners.



Dems and the Gun Issue - Now What? (written in '04, vindicated in '06, IMHO)