Man arrested for 2x4 labeled "High Powered Rifle"
I don't disagree with most any of that (except comparing murders by guns to murders by bombs, which I think is totally legitimate given Timothy McVeigh and the Bath school massacre).
I don't think banning so-called "assault weapons" would do any good. After a lengthy debate with a friend on facebook who disagrees, I think I narrowed down why the more I mull it over, the more opposed to it I am. I hope the next four paragraphs, whether you agree or disagree, are coherent. Given that I'm trying to minimize forum time as a New Years' resolution, I might not follow-up on this post for a while.
Targeting the AR-15 is a red herring. At Virginia Tech, Seung-Hui Cho, with minimal training, two self-defense-oriented handguns with standard magazines (a Glock 19 and a Walther P22), and ten minutes, killed three times as many people as the Aurora shooter with his AR-15 and drum magazine. People claim that Connecticut and Aurora wouldn't have been as bad with other weapons. Virginia Tech proves otherwise. It's not the specific model. Any firearm can kill two dozen people in ten minutes.
And this red herring is dangerous. Why? Because AR-15s and AK-47s are also incredibly, incredibly common, and trying to register and monitor each and every one (which we'd have to do with a grandfather clause, and any ban without a grandfather clause has ex post facto legal problems) is going to cost a metric ton of federal dollars. Dollars we could be spending on increased police presence in public areas--the single most consistently successful method of stopping massacres. Prevented them in San Antonio 2012 and Salt Lake City 2010. Stopped them partway through by killing the shooter in New York (the firefighter murder) and Jerusalem (Mercaz HaRav) and University of Texas (Charles Whitman), or by apprehending the shooter (Aurora and Norway). And the shooters shot themselves as the police approached at Connecticut and Virginia Tech.
More common police presence means more massacres prevented, and shorter police response times mean fewer deaths when a massacre does occur. Federal dollars are a zero-sum game. Every dollar spent on a massive bureaucratic system meant to weed out semi-automatic rifles and handguns (i.e., most rifles and handguns currently sold in the US) is one less dollar we could use to improve our police presence. Let's remember that Norway 2011 wasn't the worst single-shooter massacre in human history because there was anything special about his weapon (it was just a run-of-the-mill 5.56mm hunting rifle sold for hunting purposes under Norway's restrictive laws); it was the worst massacre ever because the police response time was so exceptionally long.
Finally, mass shootings are a high-profile but statistically insignificant portion of America's annual homicides. Even if a massive bureaucracy regulating rifle ownership diminished the severity or frequency of mass shootings (and Virginia Tech suggests otherwise), that's ALL it would do. Increased police presence, on the other hand, would not only reduce mass-shooting severity and frequency, but would deter everything from convenience-store robbery homicides to teen gang fights to drunk-driving negligent homicides. Far, far more lives would be saved per dollar because we would be fighting all crime, including but not limited to mass shootings. Given that federal dollars are a zero-sum game (and given the so-called fiscal cliff, who can doubt that), it simply seems to me a better way to reduce more murders with a given amount of federal funding.