I take it from your eloquent response that you don't believe that banning "assault weapons" will lead to further bans. Let's take a look at that assumption, using a novel approach - actual facts.
A bit of history: Anti-gun rights campaigns first focused on handguns. By the late 80's that campaign had run out of steam, so an anti-gunner named Josh Sugarmann came up with a new approach to pep up his anti gun organization. From his paper,
Assault Weapons and Accessories in America:
It will be a new topic in what has become to the press and public an “old” debate. Although handguns claim more than 20,000 lives a year, the issue of handgun restriction consistently remains a non-issue with the vast majority of legislators, the press, and public. .....Assault weapons—just like armor-piercing bullets, machine guns, and plastic firearms—are a new topic. The weapons’ menacing looks, coupled with the public’s confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons—anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun—can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons. [underlining added]
The upshot: It's easy to market bans on "Assault weapons" because they are scary looking, especially to people who don't know anything about guns. Based on many of the posts here, the strategy has worked quite well.
According to the
FBI's 2019 crime statistics, there were 364 murders committed in the US that year using rifles. That's ALL rifles of all kinds. They don't keep statistics for "assault rifles", but given the hundreds of millions of other kinds of rifles out there, it's unlikely that it's more than half. Let's call it 200 to be generous. This is tiny compared with the 1,476 murders committed with "knives and cutting instruments". Just to put it into perspective, there were 600 murders committed using fists.
So the odds of being killed by someone punching you are three times as high as being killed with an "assault rifle".
Yet attacking "assault rifles" is a cornerstone of Democratic gun policy. "Hell, yes, we're going to take your AR-15!". Why are they making such a big deal about them if they are so rarely used in murders?
First and foremost is to generate an atmosphere of fear from which you can only be saved if you vote Democratic.
The second reason is that the Supreme Court has declared that weapons "commonly used for lawful purposes" are protected by the Second Amendment. AR-15s are commonly used for lawful purposes. They are also used in a very small percentage of crimes. So why are the Democrats so determined to ban them? Because they desperately want to establish some way around the common use protection. Once they've done that, more and more guns will be classified as "assault weapons". First all semiautos. Then bolt action "sniper rifles". Etc, etc. This is entirely consistent with a long established strategy of incrementalism as manifested in Democratic anti-gun states like California, New York and Illinois.
So given the near certainty that assault weapon bans are going to be found unconstitutional, why are so many Democratic states rushing to pass them? So that when the bans are over turned, they can claim "We tried to save you, but that nasty old Supreme Court doesn't care about your children" and use it to try and pack the court.
