I'm just not sure how any of these new proposed regulations will help? I'm all for coming up with a compromise, however I don't feel that banning high capacity magazines or any assault rifles will make a significant difference.
Let's look at the statistics of mass shootings. Since 1982 there have been 62 mass shootings in the US.
Of those, 142 total guns were used with the average shooter using about 2 guns per event. 48% of the time the shooter used a semi-auto handgun. 25% of the time they used an assault rifle, 14% of the time they used a revolver pistol and 13% of the time they used a shotgun. (75% of the time, a non assault rifle was used).
79% of the time the killers obtained the weapons legally compared to 19% of the time when the weapons were obtained illegally (usually stolen I would assume) with one instance where they were not able to determine how the gun was obtained.
Banning assault rifles would still leave these crazies their number one weapon of choice.
Would banning the high capacity magazines make much of a difference? Changing out a 10 rounder 6 times vs. only changing a 30 rounder twice doesn't seem like it would make much of a difference to me? Maybe a few more seconds overall?
More shocking to me is out of the 62 tragedies, an overwhelming majority showed previous signs of mental illness. (You can hover over the map to see the specifics).
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/mass-shootings-map
Selecting the weapon is the easy emotional thing to do. I just don't see it solving the issue at hand.
Let's focus in on the individuals who commit these crimes and work on better means of controlling them. Most don't have a criminal record which is why they could continue purchasing the weapons with out any issue. Or, they will just steal one anyways. The ban would not stop them. And, minimizing their magazine capacity won't stop the event from happening either. Maybe it will limit casualties...maybe not?
