Do you not think the country with 1500 guns per hundred thousands enforces their gun laws? why are their murder rates so high?
What difference does it make, does a knife murder leave a person any less dead than a gun murder? Why ban guns if people will just use a different tool to kill someone?
I'm not talking about banning guns, those are extremists anyway. The push to control guns and who gets them is actually about preventing the massacres, about high-leverage weapons in the wrong hands. No one is going to kill 20 people in three minutes in a theater with a knife or a rock.
You seem to be missing the point, the harvard study showed that when guns were not present people simply use a different tool. So whats stopping a guy from buying and loading 5 hand guns and putting them in his pockets if an ar15 isnt there? You are trying to ban certain guns based on 100 deaths per year, and you have no evidence that people wouldnt simply switch weapons, infact the harvard study proves they will.
OK those are reasonable comments. I'll consider them. So I guess you are saying some people do need semiautomatic weapons to defend themselves. This is the only reason I can think of that would justify owning a semiautomatic gun. There is no sporting reason that I can think of that would justify these guns.
I'm talking about the massacres, and the five handguns scenario is a bit more difficult to pull off. If it weren't, our soldiers would carry five handguns instead. At any rate, we're both well aware of the public's perception of risk, and how "low info" it can be. Your team should have given ground on the expanded background checking because you're a massacre or two away from a clampdown.
The five hand gun scenario is obviously a slight hinderance in a mass killing scenario. In a war scenario you want to be as efficient as possible, so lets say in my handgun scenario people are able to kill 90 people per year in mass killings instead of 100. Your really telling me the left is kicking up this whole shit storm in order to solve just 10 deaths per year? It has never been about just banning ar-15's, it has always been about taking the first step. Haand guns kill far more people than ar-15's every year. This is one area i will give the left credit for, they patiently shift the bar further and further, where as the right seems to go all or nothing alot of the time, which is much tougher, the left is winning due to their ability to slowly but surely convince people that everything they get from the government is a "right" The american people will never knowingly adopt socialism, but under the name of "liberalism" they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program until one day america will be a socialist nation without ever having realised how it happened
The best target shooting expert I know is a liberal. He competes with mini 14s, ar15s, and many calibers of semi auto pistols. He doesn't hunt (to my knowledge), but he loves target shooting competition. He would adamantly disagree with you regarding shooting for sport. Unfortunately, he is a little hard of hearing,though on the other hand, he is 80 years old, which could explain some of that loss. But he is one hell of a good shot, so I would conclude his eyesight is still intact.
If you really wanted to make a dramatic change in the number of gun deaths each year, isn't the first thing you would do is take guns away from the police? I believe that was actually done in one Mexican city (was it Tijuana?) and I think it was later reported that there was a significant drop in the murder rate. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7048832