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They wouldn't be hidden. What's next.

I'm sure they can figure out an appropriate penalty for reneging your social contract.

Who is they? Who will be sent? The constitution is the social contract, who is reneging? I want you to say it. I want you to admit that you want the police to use AR-15s to take mine away.

Yes, our Constitution says it's the job of the Supreme Court to determine what's constitutional and what isn't. If they determine it's constitutional to ban auto fire weapons, are you going to do what the Branch Davidians did? I just watched the Waco series on TV. What a sad, pathetic tragedy, and both sides were at fault. I'd certainly opt for elimination of social benefits for those who opt out of our social contract before advocating the use of violence like the ATF and FBI did.

Auto fire weapons are already banned.

Have you taught yourself what a semiautomatic firing mechanism is yet? Seriously, there's a thing called Google, where you can just type in stuff and learn all about it. I can't believe that it's so hard that it isn't even worth it.

Why not have an educated opinion? I was the ENTIRE purpose of this post, and it's hard to understand why you didn't check it out. These distinctions are important.

Pardon me, but I might have included semi-auto in with that "auto fire" when I said that. I do know something about guns. Got a couple trophies on my wall for shooting matches I've been in, sponsored by the NRA. Yes, people prefer semi-auto for hunting, but you can hunt with manual load just as effectively. I don't think it makes it harder to bag that game. Some people like to make it even harder and just use bow and arrow.

Yeah, it's amazing how frequently people mix up their terminology - how little the differences seem to matter to them. You correct them, and they just toss it off - like "yeah, whatever".

One would think that if gun control advocates knew what they wanted, they wouldn't get things mixed up so consistently. If people are being murdered because of some specific category of weapons, and those weapons should be kept out of the hands of people who obey laws, It's important to know exactly which weapons those are. Is it the black weapons? Is it the "military style" weapons? It is machine guns? Rifles? Handguns?

Or is it that small ubiquitous, semi-automatic firing mechanism? It all sounds emotionally irrational to me.

Is there a principle for which firearms would be banned? All semiautomatics? Only scary semiautomatics? Only rifles? How about semiautomatic handguns? Is there some sort of principle involved? Which weapons would I lose the right to bear, and for chrissakes, why? What difference does it make?

It all sounds like a utopian pipe dream to me.

You'll notice that this conversation ended when I asked what the plans are for confiscation. I have yet to get someone on the left to admit that they will have to use the guns they want to ban to confiscate them from Americans who will not give another inch. They expect existing military and law enforcement to do it for them, and they are in for a rude awakening. You'll be lucky to get 20% to even carry out the order. Even then, a good SWAT team can only carry out 6 or 7 raids a day before they need to rest. Once the word gets out, the communities they rely on for support will turn against them in a hurry. Here's a news flash: regardless of what the media portrays, the majority of Americans in the "flyover" states will not tolerate the loss of liberty being demanded by large metropolitan cities. The last election should have been a clue.

I recently heard that there are already 15 million AR-15s in the country. And the deputy had a Glock 40. So, the Supreme Court will magically declare both of them exempt from the Constitution? Then all the law-abiding folks would lose their weapons, while the policemen protect us from the law-breakers just like they did in Florida.

Sure. Uh huh.

I still can't grasp the gun-banners' logic.

I also have to agree about the civil disobedience. Confiscation ain' gonna fly in huge swaths of the country. City folks simply don't understand. The 2nd Amendment is foundational stuff. It's not about hunting - it's about freedom. We don't sit like mice and wait for the authorities to show up around here.

That's what sickens me about this Florida event - what an epic failure of authority - and still they want to rely EVEN MORE on the check-suckers, leaving us defenseless.

I can't grasp their mindset - it makes no sense. We've always had guns, always had semiautomatics. How does taking them from law abiding people help? And what the heck is "them" anyway?

Why did it work in Australia?

Are you sure it "worked"?

I hadn't paid any attention to it, so I finally did just now. Wiki says that 1 million additional firearms have been registered since 2012. And how many did they take out of circulation originally?

I'm not sure what "worked". They still had 24 weapons per 100 residents as of 2007, after the second banning in 2003 - plenty enough for a student to get ahold of one, I would guess.

I think it's the culture, not the weapon.

Yes, the culture got tired of people being slaughtered in public places so enacted gun laws that reduced mass shootings to zero. They didn't want to be like the USA. The goal was not to eliminate gun ownership. The goal was to reduce mass shootings. It worked.

But ... they took 700,000 weapons out of circulation, and 1 million have been registered since. So ... there are more guns than there were before.

There's no correlation. What's the correlation? More weapons = no mass murders? That doesn't compute.

It's more important that the culture got tired of people being slaughtered in public places. Trucks have been a popular weapon of mass murder lately. Does it really matter how many people own one? Or what kind?