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I appreciate that your comments are likely meant sincerely, but there are some serious flaws.
And like any other form of prohibition, it only has a chance of working in a "complete lockdown" situation. Good luck disarming every American in the nation.
Good luck ... to whom? I don't know of anyone, let alone anyone serious in the Democratic Party, proposing such a thing.
The response to other social problems is not generally to prohibit the products or activities associated with the problems; why would it be the response to firearms crime/harm? Why would a free and democratic society even attempt to completely eliminate something that many people have legitimate needs and uses for, if there are other ways of addressing the problems associated with the activity or the possession of the thing, by them or others, that strike a reasonable balance between individual interests and the public interest?
Alcohol isn't prohibited any more -- but the sale and use of alcohol certainly are heavily regulated.
Instead of being concerned about how many accessories a particular weapon has, we should be concerned with its rate of fire, with its capacity to puncture body armor, with the total amount of energy (in joules, perhaps) released per round.
I wouldn't disagree that those are all reasonable things to be concerned about -- but I think you've fallen for a very successful disinformation campaign when it comes to these "accessories".
I've never seen any evidence that the intent of the previous assault weapons ban in the US was to ban the accessories, or to ban any firearms because of the accessories. I really thought it fairly obvious that the legislation referred to the accessories because they were characteristic of the firearms that were in issue.
As an analogy, one could prohibit the sale of beer by banning the sale of beverages packed in brown glass containers -- a format that is (or used to be) characteristic of beer.
Obviously, such bans can be got around, with varying degrees of ease, by eliminating the characteristics in question, leaving an item or substance that is just as undesirable as its predecessor unbanned. Beer can be sold in tins. Firearms can be made that are exactly like banned firearms except that they don't have the characteristic in question.
Now, I'd point out that this appears to me to be the case for some of the characteristics in question, but not necessarily all. Someone will immediately correct me if I have failed to take sufficient interest in the US assault weapons ban to recite all its features by heart, but I gather that magazine size was one of the criteria by which the affected firearms were distinguished from others. And a high magazine capacity isn't just characteristic of a firearm that it was deemed undesirable to have in general circulation, it was a specific reason why the firearm was deemed undesirable.
In both cases, in any event, the concern could not fairly be characterized as a "concern with accessories".
I see gun violence the same way I see other crime. If you improve the conditions under which people live, they will be far less likely to resort to gun violence.
As a very broad generalization, that is undoubtedly true.
However, there are all sorts of aspects of firearms harm that it does not address.
Accidental or intentional harm done by children with access to firearms, to themselves or others, is one such aspect. The actions of children in those cases have little to do with the conditions in which they live (in terms of economic quality of life, opportunity, the usual suspects), and it in fact doesn't matter how privileged children are -- if they have inappropriate access to firearms, there will still be dead kids (and other victims).
The use of firearms by those law-abiding gun owner types is another problematic area, and one that is also unlikely to be affected by a general enhancement of socioeconomic conditions in the society. Alcoholism and spousal abuse are not specific to the poor or desperate (making them, themselves, further examples of problems that aren't going to be universally cured by enhancing economic justice).
But a whole lot of people are injured and killed by people in lawful possession of firearms, not using the firearms to facilitate any crime or as part of any part of a course of criminal conduct, who just use them to harm or terrorize people in their entourage. They aren't "resorting to gun violence" -- they are using firearms to achieve a purpose, that they have adopted for no reason associated with socioeconomic status or involvement in crime as an alternative to getting a job to pay the mortgage.
Measures that could reduce these kinds of harms are available, and don't call for a society as a whole to be overhauled ... or require that everybody sit around waiting for that to happen and doing nothing in the meantime.
On your basic question, the future of firearms control in the US Democratic Party, I'm seeing pretty much the same premise as I'm seeing among people who want that party to abandon the rhetoric of rights on the issue of abortion or same-sex marriage.
The premise is basically that a political platform exists to attract votes, and that if some part of it ceases to attract votes it should perhaps be jettisoned for that reason alone.
Seems to me that the reasons why the policy is in the platform in the first place have to be seriously considered before any jettisoning decision is made.
And maybe your traditional firearms-control-supporting constituencies would still vote for you if you advocated a handgun in every pocket. But what happens if you add opposition to same-sex marriage to that policy; and support for restrictions on access to abortion; and what the hell, support for the occupation of Iraq?
At what point do you have either
(a) the straw that broke the back of the constituency that would have tolerated one or two or three of these betrayals, or
(b) enough accumulated members of the various groups who have been betrayed, by enough of the various betrayals, who won't keep voting for you that you've lost more than you've gained anyhow?
If a party is going to start adopting platforms based on popularity, I can think of several things more likely to get more votes, on balance, than abandoning firearms control. Abandon women's reproductive rights; what are rights-loving women going to do, vote Republican?
Hmm, "aden_nak" -- any relation to the "Adanac"s who seem to own so many businesses where I'm at? ;)
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