how do you go from a handgun to possibly a rifle to no mention of handgun later?
Gun rights groups keep looking at gun control compromises as a slippery slope to full gun control. Yet they're overlooking how partial gun control could appease people enough to prevent the risk to them of total gun control "in one fell swoop" as Matt Damon would say about Australia.
https://ew.com/article/2016/07/05/matt-damon-gun-control-jason-bourne-interview/
https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/283-gun-violence-in-america
23:08 (Graeme Wood) "One argument that I've heard people make is the AR15 is an excellent against tyranny... But if we're just talking about self-defence... then you could just say no more AR15s but anyone who wants to can own a shotgun... The upper half of a home invader would no longer exist and it wouldn't be very useful as an offensive weapon... It seems like the good guy uses of a shotgun are high and the bad guy uses are pretty low. No more AR15s, no more handguns but you can have a shotgun anytime you want it?"
Criminals will adapt to the weapons legally available and if they can only get shotguns then lo and behold shotgun crime will rise exponentially.
24:15 (Sam Harris - paraphrased) "The overwhelming problem with firearms in our society is a problem of handguns. A handgun is preferable to a shotgun because banning the handgun is a non-starter in this society. The handgun can be concealed by a mass shooter until the last moment whereas an AR15 gives people the ability to notice that something is about to happen. Any place that doesn't have a metal detector is vulnerable to someone with a handgun. It's easier to wrestle a long gun away from an attacker."
A rifle is concealable if you disassemble the barrel and hide the parts in a bag. For example a springer air-rifle can be cocked to half of its length. So I don't think this a knock-down argument for rifles being safer than handguns. If it was an impromptu attack then the gunman might not bother to conceal a rifle but this wouldn't be the case for a stealthy shooter. The suitcases of rifles brought by Stephen Paddock into the Las Vegas hotel were invisible to the staff.
A broken rifle could fit inside a backpack:
44:13 (Graeme Wood) "You should organise the school such that there are lots of ways out."
An interesting half-measure but a playground mass shooting is almost as much of a threat as a classroom mass shooting.
1:10:05 (Sam Harris) "I was thinking about another heavily armed society where things like this don't happen; it plays out as the most dewy eyed NRA enthusiast would imagine. I'm thinking of Israel."
The problem with other heavily armed societies that don't have as many mass shootings as America is temporal; they haven't yet had a mass shooting. Sadly Norway could have said the same before Breivik's rampage. It only takes one evil person* to attempt such an atrocity and some of the relative safety in gun countries like Switzerland is attributable to luck. The longer the timespan since the last terror attack, the greater the risk that complacency among civilians will creep in. After Breivik's attack, does every village on remote islands through-out the world have an armed response team? Only state-wide gun control could prevent a repeat of such an attack. Having a society where half the population own guns and the other half don't isn't a great compromise in my opinion due to the strength imbalance against unarmed people. Banning rifles and legalising handguns for everyone would almost be less worse thanks to the equality in weaponry. A second point to make is that Israel has actually had mass shootings in its history:
"Goldstein opened fire on a large number of Palestinian Muslims who had gathered to pray inside the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron. The attack left 29 people dead, several as young as 12 years, and 125 wounded."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_the_Patriarchs_massacre
*A nation's multi-million population counts as a truly large number where criminal anomalies are to be expected:
Wiki: The law of truly large numbers (a statistical adage), states that with a large enough number of samples, any highly implausible (i.e. unlikely in any single sample) result is likely to be observed.
Now this is shortly after, but how do you go from a handgun to possibly a rifle to no mention of handgun later?
