NFR: Gun Control

[Forever Fulham]

Saul Alinsky, Yankee Jim?  Really, now.  You're giving away your source for political thought and  information.  The article you republish attempts to equate the decline of religious belief and "self-control" (an amorphous notion at best)--for which the author, and impliedly you by republication, blame upon "the left"--as a root cause of such shootings.  Poppycock.  It's the plentiful access to guns by people who shouldn't have such access that is largely responsible for such abberant behaviour.  You paint with too broad of a brush.  I am a "lefty", I suppose, in that I am liberal on civil rights issues.  But I am a fiscal conservative.  I was a junior member of the NRA as a teenager, briefly, when living in the U.S.  Took firearm safety and use lessons.  I had begged my father for a shotgun, as several of my best friends went dove and quail hunting with their dads, and went on and on about the fun of it.  He bought me a 410.  After a month or two of shooting, I quit for a myriad of reasons.  When my father in law, a WWII decorated captain died, I inherited a number of his guns.  They sit in my closet, collecting dust.  Occasionally I get invited and go with colleagues to dove hunting outings.  But I do it for the social, not to shoot little birds trying to get home at dusk.  Point is, there are many like me.  Hard to pigeon-hole into a neat category who see a nation facing greater gun violence not because of your author's claims of societal norm breakdowns, but, rather, because there are an ever-growing number of easily obtainable guns in the U.S.  with no comprehensive database  and review/approval waiting period, with too few limits on the nature and kind of firearms one can legally purchase as a private citizen.  300 million guns and growing.  That's your real culprit. 

[hesedmedia]

Sophist, is it? As you've demonstrated no counter-argument but bald assertion and incredulity, this would appear to be a retreat to ad hominem. That's fine, in the interest of not escalating name-calling, I'll take that, and allow the reader to decide which of us is representing a rationally defensible viewpoint.

1. Had she not been able to possess the gun, he had not been able to find a gun anywhere else, he not have been willing to rent ferilizer and a Ryder truck, had he not locked the classroom so as to prevent escape during reloads, and had he not been willing to learn to reload a smaller-capacity magazine, fewer may have died.

2. What high-speed, low-drag Spetsnaz training do these mass-murderers undergo in your mind that turns them into unstoppable killing machines the only response to which is to hide and hope? Every person I've spoken with that carries a weapon would have given anything to have been in that school that day. No one is advocating arming your Sister Mary Ivo, or arming anyone against their will. However, if there is a teacher or administrator willing to undergo 40-120 hours* of tactical training in order to put their life on the line to stop this kind of violence, why would you stand between them and the killer down the hall insisting that only mad men can be effective shooters?

*40 hours total is the police requirement in most cases in the U.S. We shaky-handed, incompetent civilian shooters often undertake upwards of 90 per year for as many years as we can afford.

[Forever Fulham]

First, I apologize for calling you a sophist.  Second, as to your foreseeability argument (but for this, that wouldn't have happened), it doesn't support arming adults in elementary schools.  Here's an interesting article about the Bushmaster.  It's a bit long, so I offer it in two postings.

Eric Lach December 20, 2012, 11:54 AM 33489When he died in April 1997 at his home in Palm City, Fla., Eugene Stoner was a millionaire with about 100 patents to his name and, in the words of an obituary that ran in The New York Times, a reputation as "one of the world's foremost designers of and experts on small arms." In the late 1950s, working as an engineer for an upstart California company called ArmaLite, a division of the Fairchild Aircraft & Engine Corporation, Stoner had developed the AR-15 rifle.

After some bureaucratic resistance and early mechanical issues, the AR-15, rebranded by the military as the M16 and manufactured by Colt's Firearms Division in Hartford, Conn., made its way onto the battlefields of Vietnam and into the American popular imagination. Its profile became synonymous with the term "assault rifle," and it stood in contrast to its Soviet counterpart, the AK-47, designed by Mikhail Kalashnikov in 1947. Lightweight, air-cooled, gas-operated, and magazine-fed, four variants of the M16 — the M16A1/A2/A3/A4 — have been used by the military since the 1960s. A more compact version of the M16A2, the M4 carbine, was introduced in the 1990s.

When Adam Lanza stepped into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., last Friday, he was holding one of the millions of civilian descendants of Stoner's design.

Two handguns and a rifle were recovered at the scene of the massacre, but reports have indicated that Lanza used the .223 semi-automatic rifle to shoot most, if not all, of his victims, including his mother, Nancy Lanza, to whom the gun was apparently registered. On Saturday, Connecticut's chief medical examiner, H. Wayne Carver II, said that each of the victims had received multiple gunshot wounds.

"My sensibilities may not be the average man, but this probably is the worst I have seen or the worst that I know of any of my colleagues having seen," Carver told reporters.

As Times journalist C.J. Chivers described in his 2011 book "The Gun," when Stoner was working on the AR-15, he also redesigned a commercially available .222 Remington round in order to meet a standard set by the Army: that a bullet fired from the rifle be able to strike and penetrate a steel helmet at 500 yards. For this purpose, Stoner created the .223 round, slightly longer than the .222, able to be filled with more powder. Lightweight, but high-powered.

"To its champions, the AR-15 was an embodiment of fresh thinking," Chivers wrote. "Critics saw an ugly little toy. Wherever one stood, no one could deny the ballistics were intriguing. The .223's larger load of propellant and the AR-15's twenty-inch barrel worked together to move the tiny bullet along at ultrafast speeds — in excess of thirty-two hundred feet per second, almost three times the speed of sound."

[Forever Fulham]

Part II.


Adam Lanza/Image via APAuthorities have not yet said publicly what model of rifle Lanza used in the massacre. Media outlets, however, have identified it as a Bushmaster .223 caliber M4 carbine., a more recent variant of the AR-15. Bushmaster has been one of the most prominent manufactures of military-style rifles being sold to civilians in recent years.

Bushmaster didn't respond to TPM's request to discuss the history of its guns. The company bills itself as the "leading supplier" of AR-15 type rifles in the United States. It makes both aluminum and advanced carbon-fiber-based AR-15s, and its weapons are used, according to the company, by "hundreds of police departments and law enforcement organizations nationwide, by the military of more than 50 countries worldwide." Several Bushmaster rifles currently advertised on the company's website appear to meet the reported description of Lanza's weapon, among them the XM-15 M4-A2 Type Patrolman's Carbine.

Newtown was not the first time that a .223 Bushmaster rifle has been involved in violence that attracted national attention. In 2004, two survivors and the families of six people killed in 2002 during the Beltway sniper attacks reached a $2.5 million settlement with Bushmaster and Bull's Eye Shooter Supply in Tacoma, Wash., the store from which John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo stole the Bushmaster XM-15 E2S used in the killings. The Washington Post reported Bushmaster contributed $550,000 of the settlement, and did not admit to any wrongdoing in the case.

Unlike their military cousins — which have three-round burst settings — commercially available AR-15 type rifles like Bushmaster's are semiautomatic, meaning one bullet per trigger pull. But a little searching on YouTube turns up numerous videos showing how quickly AR-15 type rifles can unload dozens of rounds and even one example of how to turn a "semi-auto into a full-auto machine using a household rubberband!"

One estimate put the number of AR-15 type rifles made in the U.S. and not exported between 1986 and 2012 between 3.3 million and 3.5 million. (From 1994 to 2004, when the Federal Assault Weapons Ban was in place, certain semiautomatic rifles were outlawed, but not all of them — including, reportedly, the one used at Newtown.) According to the NRA, meanwhile, nearly half a million AR-15 types were manufactured in the U.S. in 2009. The AR-15 is simply the latest example of a military weapon that has become popular after soldiers returned home, gun advocates say. But there are other reasons for the gun's current appeal.

Some enthusiasts say AR-15s are popular because of how customizable they are. According to Joseph Olson, a professor at Hamline University School of Law in Minnesota and a member of the board of directors of the National Rifle Association, the guns are conversation starters at firing ranges. He told TPM he bought a Bushmaster in the early 1990s.

"It's all cosmetics and it's all marketing," Olson said, adding, a bit later: "It's the American consumer getting what they want."

Advocates say semi-automatic rifles are also becoming more popular for home defense. A recent article in Guns & Ammo, titled "Long Guns, Short Yardage: Is .223 the Best Home Defense Caliber?," said sales of AR-15 type rifles "skyrocketed" after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The same article pointed to a 2010 National Shooting Sports Foundation survey which found that the second most popular reason for owning a "modern sporting rifle" — the polite term for semi-automatic rifles like the AR-15 types — was home defense. The first was recreational shooting.

Investment money has followed this consumer interest.

In 2006, Bushmaster, which was founded in 1973 in Maine, was bought by Cerberus Capital Management, a New York City-based private equity firm that quickly and quietly became a major force in gun manufacturing in the mid- to late-2000s. Cerberus acquired several other big name gunmakers, including Remington and DPMS Firearms, and brought them together under a new banner of Freedom Group, which emerged so quickly on the gun scene that it inspired conspiracy theories about its intentions.

For the first nine months of this year, Freedom Group reported $677.3 million in sales. In its most recent quarterly report, the company said that "we believe the adoption of the modern sporting rifle has led to increased long-term growth in the long gun market while attracting a younger generation of shooters." As The New Republic pointed out, the company sells more than a million rifles and shotguns a year, and Wal-Mart accounted for about 13 percent of the company's total sales.

"In many areas, the market is expanding quicker than the industry can increase production," the company said in its quarterly report. "Accordingly, our company is experiencing strong demand for modern sporting firearms and handguns, as well as above capacity demand levels for more traditional hunting and target shooting platforms."

On Tuesday, citing the tragedy in Newtown, Cerberus Capital Management announced it planned to sell its stake in Freedom Group.

[A Humble Man]

The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.  Armed guards on every school is the only way to protect our children.

The hoped for conciliatory words from the gun lobby.

Weep and cry.

[YankeeJim]

Saul Alinsky, Yankee Jim?  Really, now.  You're giving away your source for political thought and  information.  The article you republish attempts to equate the decline of religious belief and "self-control" (an amorphous notion at best)--for which the author, and impliedly you by republication, blame upon "the left"--as a root cause of such shootings.  Poppycock.  It's the plentiful access to guns by people who shouldn't have such access that is largely responsible for such abberant behaviour.  You paint with too broad of a brush.  I am a "lefty", I suppose, in that I am liberal on civil rights issues.  But I am a fiscal conservative.  I was a junior member of the NRA as a teenager, briefly, when living in the U.S.  Took firearm safety and use lessons.  I had begged my father for a shotgun, as several of my best friends went dove and quail hunting with their dads, and went on and on about the fun of it.  He bought me a 410.  After a month or two of shooting, I quit for a myriad of reasons.  When my father in law, a WWII decorated captain died, I inherited a number of his guns.  They sit in my closet, collecting dust.  Occasionally I get invited and go with colleagues to dove hunting outings.  But I do it for the social, not to shoot little birds trying to get home at dusk.  Point is, there are many like me.  Hard to pigeon-hole into a neat category who see a nation facing greater gun violence not because of your author's claims of societal norm breakdowns, but, rather, because there are an ever-growing number of easily obtainable guns in the U.S.  with no comprehensive database  and review/approval waiting period, with too few limits on the nature and kind of firearms one can legally purchase as a private citizen.  300 million guns and growing.  That's your real culprit. 

You make assumptions without fact about me. I have often called myself a fiscal conservative and a social liberal. What individuals do, whom they marry, what color, what religion, whatever, is irrelavent to me. How they behave in society is what matters. the purpose of reprinting the article is simply the one line:

Does one reader of this column -- including individuals on the left -- fear being massacred by a decent person? Of course not.

Unlike my friend hesedmedia, I do think that the ability of a weapon should be controled. I refer you to an earlier post where I made suggestion about weapon capability. All of those suggestion would do one thing, buy a little time for the 6th through 26 person in the room. It would do nothing to totaly stop the likes of Adam Lanza. For that I refer you to Mr. Prager.

[hesedmedia]

" Second, as to your foreseeability argument (but for this, that wouldn't have happened), it doesn't support arming adults in elementary schools."

Well, I agree. Obviously not. It was directed as a satirically analogous point to your suggestion that "had she not had the rifle, he might have killed slowly enough to allow escape", to demonstrate the tenuous nature and proper gravity of the argument. If not for X, maybe not Y.

I'm not sure what you're getting at with the article. The sale of firearms is certainly increasing as fears of a ban run rampant, no objection here.

[Forever Fulham]

I wish you both well.  No more from me on this subject.  Enjoy your holidays and let's hope we pick up some much needed points.

[YankeeJim]

I wish you both well.  No more from me on this subject.  Enjoy your holidays and let's hope we pick up some much needed points.

Amen to that.  :merry christmas:

[McBridefan1]

People are often surprised that this type of violence has only happened in rural type places... I've heard people say, I wonder why this type of thing has never happened in innercity schools... my guess would be that there are already police stationed at these schools and are therefore somewhat of a deterant. My other guess is, its probably just a matter of time.

[Logicalman]

The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.  Armed guards on every school is the only way to protect our children.

The hoped for conciliatory words from the gun lobby.

Weep and cry.

Seems my satirical post earlier regarding having armed guards in each corridor wasn't too far from the mark, was it? Unfortunately, I made it in a very sarcastic tone, and mentioned it wasn't feasible, seems the NRA and I do not see eye-to-eye then, like that's a surprise.

So, whose first to suggest we have a gun ban now then? Hopefully those that believe all Americans must just be acting 'macho' because of the love of guns have learnt something from this discussion, and that is there is no machismo here, just a deep ground belief in a persons rights as given to them by the Constitution.

I can see the same discussion next year, when the next shooting atrocity occurs, but until then, I hope everybody a great Christmas and a very, very merry New Year.

[hesedmedia]

I wish you both well.  No more from me on this subject.  Enjoy your holidays and let's hope we pick up some much needed points.

Fair enough and pray I caused no offense. Here's to some marks in the win column.

[YankeeJim]

This comes under the heading of  :dead horse: , but is indicative of how gun control does not work. The examples are from England and from down under, not from the uncivilized colony.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323777204578195470446855466.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_h


copy & paste

[Logicalman]

This comes under the heading of  :dead horse: , but is indicative of how gun control does not work. The examples are from England and from down under, not from the uncivilized colony.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323777204578195470446855466.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_h

Excellent bring YJ, I have reproduced it below so it can be easily read ..



Joyce Lee Malcolm: Two Cautionary Tales of Gun Control
After a school massacre, the U.K. banned handguns in 1998. A decade later, handgun crime had doubled.

Americans are determined that massacres such as happened in Newtown, Conn., never happen again. But how? Many advocate more effective treatment of mentally-ill people or armed protection in so-called gun-free zones. Many others demand stricter control of firearms.

We aren't alone in facing this problem. Great Britain and Australia, for example, suffered mass shootings in the 1980s and 1990s. Both countries had very stringent gun laws when they occurred. Nevertheless, both decided that even stricter control of guns was the answer. Their experiences can be instructive.

In 1987, Michael Ryan went on a shooting spree in his small town of Hungerford, England, killing 16 people (including his mother) and wounding another 14 before shooting himself. Since the public was unarmed—as were the police—Ryan wandered the streets for eight hours with two semiautomatic rifles and a handgun before anyone with a firearm was able to come to the rescue.

Nine years later, in March 1996, Thomas Hamilton, a man known to be mentally unstable, walked into a primary school in the Scottish town of Dunblane and shot 16 young children and their teacher. He wounded 10 other children and three other teachers before taking his own life.

Since 1920, anyone in Britain wanting a handgun had to obtain a certificate from his local police stating he was fit to own a weapon and had good reason to have one. Over the years, the definition of "good reason" gradually narrowed. By 1969, self-defense was never a good reason for a permit.

After Hungerford, the British government banned semiautomatic rifles and brought shotguns—the last type of firearm that could be purchased with a simple show of fitness—under controls similar to those in place for pistols and rifles. Magazines were limited to two shells with a third in the chamber.

Dunblane had a more dramatic impact. Hamilton had a firearm certificate, although according to the rules he should not have been granted one. A media frenzy coupled with an emotional campaign by parents of Dunblane resulted in the Firearms Act of 1998, which instituted a nearly complete ban on handguns. Owners of pistols were required to turn them in. The penalty for illegal possession of a pistol is up to 10 years in prison.

The results have not been what proponents of the act wanted. Within a decade of the handgun ban and the confiscation of handguns from registered owners, crime with handguns had doubled according to British government crime reports. Gun crime, not a serious problem in the past, now is. Armed street gangs have some British police carrying guns for the first time. Moreover, another massacre occurred in June 2010. Derrick Bird, a taxi driver in Cumbria, shot his brother and a colleague then drove off through rural villages killing 12 people and injuring 11 more before killing himself.

Meanwhile, law-abiding citizens who have come into the possession of a firearm, even accidentally, have been harshly treated. In 2009 a former soldier, Paul Clarke, found a bag in his garden containing a shotgun. He brought it to the police station and was immediately handcuffed and charged with possession of the gun. At his trial the judge noted: "In law there is no dispute that Mr. Clarke has no defence to this charge. The intention of anybody possessing a firearm is irrelevant." Mr. Clarke was sentenced to five years in prison. A public outcry eventually won his release.

In November of this year, Danny Nightingale, member of a British special forces unit in Iraq and Afghanistan, was sentenced to 18 months in military prison for possession of a pistol and ammunition. Sgt. Nightingale was given the Glock pistol as a gift by Iraqi forces he had been training. It was packed up with his possessions and returned to him by colleagues in Iraq after he left the country to organize a funeral for two close friends killed in action. Mr. Nightingale pleaded guilty to avoid a five-year sentence and was in prison until an appeal and public outcry freed him on Nov. 29.

***
Six weeks after the Dunblane massacre in 1996, Martin Bryant, an Australian with a lifelong history of violence, attacked tourists at a Port Arthur prison site in Tasmania with two semiautomatic rifles. He killed 35 people and wounded 21 others.

At the time, Australia's guns laws were stricter than the United Kingdom's. In lieu of the requirement in Britain that an applicant for permission to purchase a gun have a "good reason," Australia required a "genuine reason." Hunting and protecting crops from feral animals were genuine reasons—personal protection wasn't.

With new Prime Minister John Howard in the lead, Australia passed the National Firearms Agreement, banning all semiautomatic rifles and semiautomatic and pump-action shotguns and imposing a more restrictive licensing system on other firearms. The government also launched a forced buyback scheme to remove thousands of firearms from private hands. Between Oct. 1, 1996, and Sept. 30, 1997, the government purchased and destroyed more than 631,000 of the banned guns at a cost of $500 million.

To what end? While there has been much controversy over the result of the law and buyback, Peter Reuter and Jenny Mouzos, in a 2003 study published by the Brookings Institution, found homicides "continued a modest decline" since 1997. They concluded that the impact of the National Firearms Agreement was "relatively small," with the daily rate of firearms homicides declining 3.2%.

According to their study, the use of handguns rather than long guns (rifles and shotguns) went up sharply, but only one out of 117 gun homicides in the two years following the 1996 National Firearms Agreement used a registered gun. Suicides with firearms went down but suicides by other means went up. They reported "a modest reduction in the severity" of massacres (four or more indiscriminate homicides) in the five years since the government weapons buyback. These involved knives, gas and arson rather than firearms.

In 2008, the Australian Institute of Criminology reported a decrease of 9% in homicides and a one-third decrease in armed robbery since the 1990s, but an increase of over 40% in assaults and 20% in sexual assaults.

What to conclude? Strict gun laws in Great Britain and Australia haven't made their people noticeably safer, nor have they prevented massacres. The two major countries held up as models for the U.S. don't provide much evidence that strict gun laws will solve our problems.

Ms. Malcolm, a professor of law at George Mason University Law School, is the author of several books including "Guns and Violence: The English Experience," (Harvard, 2002).

A version of this article appeared December 27, 2012, on page A13 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Two Cautionary Tales of Gun Control.

[Forever Fulham]

Just a few thoughts in response to my friends on this board.

The Heller Supreme Court decision was 5-4, splitting on ideological (political) lines, with Justice Kennedy the swing vote, this time siding with the ideologues on the Right.  Any 5-4 ruling is inherently suspect.  The Wall Street Journal, quite the right wing voice, especially under its current owner (of whom the British are all too familiar), loves to engage (pay?) Prof. Malcolm for her historical-political (opinion) pieces.  Indeed, she was hired to write an amicus brief to the Supreme Court on behalf of the respondent in the Heller case.  It's often been said that "There are lies; there are damn lies; and then there are statistics."  I've been around statistics and statistical science enough to know that statistics are easily manipulated.  It often gets down to how you ask a question, to whom you ask it, what controls and variables are in place, are not in place, and so on.  Without more, I don't trust Professor Malcolm's use of statistics.  Writing that exposes me, of course, to challenge, because I haven't yet pointed to a single particular statistic she has used, and offered up different conclusions or challenges.  Fair enough.  She's the gun lobby's legitimizer-in-chief.   I leave it to others to decide whether her analysis of British gun controls, and the effects thereof, have been fairly presented. Here's a very different amicus brief, though, before the Court in the Heller case—on behalf of the other side:

http://www.oyez.org/sites/default/files/cases/briefs/pdf/brief__07-290__1.pdf

I've often heard the pro-gun rights crowd claim that no massacre with firearms has yet occurred where there was a "good guy" (as NRA's Wayne LaPierre likes to characterize them) with a gun.  More to the point, I've heard it argued that if only we'd arm someone in each of our schools, then these sorts of massacres wouldn't take place, or they would be minimized, or the death count would be reduced.  Columbine had an armed guard.  He regularly ate lunch with the students.  Neil Gardner.  http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2000/columbine.cd/Pages/DEPUTIES_TEXT.htm 

Deputy sheriff Gardner had training in the use of his weapon, a semi-automatic with, I believe, ten rounds.  He wasn't a school teacher or counselor or a member of the Administration.  He was a trained professional.  Just the kind of "good guy" the lobby says is needed to stop the "bad guys".  So much for that argument.   

From Talkingpointsmemo.com, here's a report on the views of the  conservative (Bush appointment) judge who presided over the trial of Jared Laughner, accused of shooting U.S. Representative Gabby Gifford (Tucson, Ariz.) :
Larry Alan Burns, the federal district judge in San Diego who just last month sentenced Tuscon shooter Jared Lee Loughner to seven consecutive life terms plus 140 years in federal prison, is no darling of the gun control movement.
Burns is a self-described conservative, appointed to the bench by President George W. Bush, and he agrees with the Supreme Court's decision in District of Columbia vs. Heller, which held that the 2nd Amendment gives Americans the right to own guns for self-defense. He is also a gun owner.
But while sentencing Loughner in November, Burns questioned the need for high-capacity magazines like the one Loughner had in his Glock, and said he regretted how the Federal Assault Weapons Ban was allowed to lapse in 2004. On Thursday, reacting to last week's mass shooting in Newtown, Conn., Burns publicly called for a new assault weapons ban "with some teeth this time," in an op-ed published by The Los Angeles Times.
"Ban the manufacture, importation, sale, transfer and possession of both assault weapons and high-capacity magazines," Burns wrote. "Don't let people who already have them keep them. Don't let ones that have already been manufactured stay on the market. I don't care whether it's called gun control or a gun ban. I'm for it."
Burns argued that while the ban that expired in 2004 wasn't very stringent, "at least it was something." Half of the nation's deadliest shootings, Burns pointed out, have occurred since the ban expired. In his view, high-capacity magazines fall outside the scope of good-faith debates about gun violence.
"I get it." Burns wrote. "Someone bent on mass murder who has only a 10-round magazine or revolvers at his disposal probably is not going to abandon his plan and instead try to talk his problems out. But we might be able to take the 'mass' out of 'mass shooting,' or at least make the perpetrator's job a bit harder."
Here's how Burns concluded his piece:
There is just no reason civilians need to own assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. Gun enthusiasts can still have their venison chili, shoot for sport and competition, and make a home invader flee for his life without pretending they are a part of the SEAL team that took out Osama bin Laden.
It speaks horribly of the public discourse in this country that talking about gun reform in the wake of a mass shooting is regarded as inappropriate or as politicizing the tragedy. But such a conversation is political only to those who are ideologically predisposed to see regulation of any kind as the creep of tyranny. And it is inappropriate only to those delusional enough to believe it would disrespect the victims of gun violence to do anything other than sit around and mourn their passing. Mourning is important, but so is decisive action.
Congress must reinstate and toughen the ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.
The killers at Columbine had a Semi-Automatic Tec-9 mm handgun with a 32 bullet magazine. It can shoot dozens and dozens of bullets a minute, and can hold magazines that hold over 70 bullets. It was banned under the Assault Weapons ban.

[Forever Fulham]

Further, here's a current article about the former loophole-ridden Assault Weapons ban.  The writer claims it wasn't as ineffective as the pro-gun crowed would like to claim:

NRA misleads on assault weapons
Don't believe the NRA spin: The '94 assault weapons ban was full of loopholes, but studies prove it was effective

BY ALEX SEITZ-WALD
As Democrats move to once again ban assault weapons and NBC host David Gregory gets investigated for using a high-capacity magazine, banned in D.C., as a prop in his interview with the NRA's Wayne LaPierre, one key question still hasn't been properly addressed by the media thus far — did the 1994 Assault Weapon Ban actually work?
Even Gregory, who convincingly played a devil's advocate to LaPierre Sunday, was dismissive of its effect on Sunday. "I mean the fact that that it just doesn't work is still something that you're challenged by if you want to approach this legislation again," he said of the ban to New York Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer, a supporter of the ban.
There's a dearth of quality empirical research on the efficacy of the ban, thanks in part to Congress' statutory limitations on the type of gun violence research the federal government is allowed to conduct. Pro-gun lawmakers made it illegal for research agencies to advocate for gun control, which effectively means looking for any connection between guns and gun violence, but the evidence suggests the law had positive effects, if not as much as advocates would like.
The single formal assessment of the ban, as required by Congress in passing the law, was conducted by criminologists Christopher Koper, Jeffrey Roth and others at the University of Pennsylvania (Koper is now at George Mason). The National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the Department of Justice, paid for the evaluation, which was first conducted in 1999 and updated in 2004, and looked at everything from homicide rates to gun prices.
A few key findings emerged. Overall, banned guns and magazines were used in up to a quarter of gun crimes before the ban. Assault pistols were more common than assault rifles in crimes. Large-capacity magazines, which were also prohibited, may be a bigger problem than assault weapons. While just 2 to 8 percent of gun crimes were committed with assault weapons, large-capacity magazines were used in 14 to 26 percent of of firearm crimes. About 20 percent of privately owned guns were fitted with the magazines.
But even though assault weapons were responsible for a fraction of the total number of gun deaths overall, the weapons and other guns equipped with large-capacity magazines "tend to account for a higher share of guns used in murders of police and mass public shootings," the study found.
This shouldn't be surprising to anyone paying attention to the recent history of mass shootings. In just the past year, the same .223 Bushmaster AR-15 assault rifle was used in the Aurora, Colo., theater massacre, the shooting at the Clackamas Mall in Oregon, the Newtown elementary school shooting, and, just a few days ago, the killing of two firefighters in upstate New York. Jared Loughner used 33-round high-capacity magazines in a handgun to shoot former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and more than a dozen others. Seung-Hui Cho used a 15-round magazine to kill 32 and wound 17 at Virginia Tech in 2007.
An October 2012 study from Johns Hopkins, which looked at newer data than Koper's, concluded that that "easy access to firearms with large-capacity magazines facilitates higher casualties in mass shootings."
So, according to the official study, was the ban effective in stopping killings? The short answer is yes, though it's a bit unclear because of the massive loopholes in the law. "Following implementation of the ban, the share of gun crimes involving AWs [assault weapons] declined by 17 percent to 72 percent across the localities examined for this study (Baltimore, Miami, Milwaukee, Boston, St. Louis, and Anchorage)," the Koper study concluded.
Data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) also shows a significant drop in assault weapon usage in gun crimes. In the five-year period before the enactment of the ban, the weapons constituted almost 5 percent of the guns traced by the Bureau (the ATF is responsible for tracking guns used in crimes), while they accounted for just 1.61 percent of gun traces after the ban went into effect — a drop of 66 percent. The effect accelerated over time, as the guns presumably became harder to find.
The problem with the ban, as both gun rights advocates (seeking to cast aspersions on the law) and gun control proponents (seeking to explain its limited impact) agree, is that it was weak to the point of being meaningless. As the bill made its way through Congress, gun lobbyists managed to create bigger and bigger carve-outs, the largest being the grandfathering in of guns and magazines produced and owned before the ban went into effect. The guns and magazines could also continue to be imported, as long they were produced before the law went into effect.
At that time of the ban, there were already more than 1.5 million privately owned assault weapons in the U.S. and 25 million guns equipped with large-capacity magazines. Another almost 5 million large-capacity magazines were imported during the ban. These could continue to be used and traded completely legally.
"The ban's exemption of millions of pre-ban AWs and LCMs ensured that the effects of the law would occur only gradually. Those effects are still unfolding and may not be fully felt for several years into the future," Koper and his colleagues added.
The other big exemption in the law was the narrow definition of what the government considers an assault weapon. The ban initially targeted 18 gun models, and then prohibited any future models that contained two or more "military-style" features. Some of these features are decidedly superficial, such as a collapsable stock or muzzle shroud, leading the NRA to dismiss the category of assault weapons as artificial and "cosmetic." Indeed, gun manufacturers were able to legally produce and sell nearly identical guns to ones that were now prohibited by making a few minor tweaks.
Since the ban was allowed to lapse in 2004, there hasn't been another comprehensive national study. There is, however, some encouraging data on the state level. A Washington Post analysis of gun seizures in Virginia showed a significant drop in the number of high-capacity magazines seized by police during the 10 years the ban was in effect, only for the number to return to pre-ban levels after the law expired. In 1994, the year the ban went into effect, police in the state seized 1,140 guns with high-capacity magazines. In 2004, its last year on the books, that number had dropped to 612. By 2006, it was back to over 1,000.
Garen Wintemute, the director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis Medical School, looked at his state's experience and found a troubling pattern in who purchases guns that were once banned. First, "among those purchasing handguns legally, those with criminal records were more likely than others to purchase assault-type handguns," he told Salon. Second, "among those purchasing handguns legally who had criminal records, those purchasing assault-type handguns were much more likely than those purchasing other types of handguns to be arrested for violent crimes later." He wasn't able to study rifles because the state's archive of purchases was limited to handguns.
Abroad, the data is even more convincing. In Australia, a 1996 mass shooting that left 36 dead led the conservative government to act swiftly to ban semi-automatic assault weapons with a much stronger law. They did not grandfather in old guns and paid to buy back old ones. Gun-related homicide plummeted by 59 percent between 1995 and 2006, with no corresponding increase in non-firearm-related homicides. Meanwhile, gun suicides — which are responsible for most firearm deaths in most developed countries — dropped by a whopping 65 percent. Robberies at gunpoint also dropped significantly. In the decade prior to the ban, there were 18 mass shootings. In the decade following it, there were zero.
The resounding success of the Australian model shows where the U.S.'s attempt to ban assault weapons failed. By the same token, it shows where we could succeed by implementing a real ban without the carve-outs of the the 1994 law.

[YankeeJim]

So Prof. Malcolm is a political hack who is "the gun lobby's legitimizer-in-chief"  while Alex Seitz-Wald, dispite being the assistant editor of ThinkProgress (a decidedly leftist blog) and a litany of liberal groups on an amicus brief (hardly groups w/o an axe to grind) are open minded, clear & fair thinkers?   :kettle pot:

We have simply , as all discussions such as this do, come full circle.

I understand the need of some to react in some way, any way, in the face of the horrible events in Newtown. All I ask is that it be something that will work. I made some suggestions that would have a real effect on the capability of fire arms. Hesedmedia disagrees with me and it would seem that you feel the need to do something else. What exactly? If you support the confiscation of fire arms, say so. If you think registration will positively effect gun violence, tell me how.

[Forever Fulham]

YJ, we  both know I didn't call her a "hack" or a "political hack".  You ask me what I feel the U.S. needs to do.  I support the confiscation of assault rifles (automatic and semi-automatic) and large capacity pistols/handguns from citizens.  They don't need them for hunting or to protect themselves from a burglar. I seek reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions by the state on carrying concealed weapons otherwise permitted.  For instance, I am against allowing them in a church or a bar.  If you think guns should be allowed in church, please tell me why?  I've met some very odd people in church.  If you think guns should be allowed in drinking establishments, where men's judgments get clouded with alcohol, act irrationally, impulsively, and all that, then please tell me why?   I want a comprehensive system of background checks, and registrations, for all firearms owned by private citizens.  Honest decent people have nothing to fear from a background check and from registration.  If you are a convicted felon, or if you suffer from a mental disease or disability or recognized personality problem--from a list to be determined by a panel of noted authorities, with ample opportunity to appeal such determinations--then you don't get a gun.  That would be my starter wish list.  While we're at it, I would ban the use of lead in shot/bullets.  I wouldn't allow for such laws to be riddled with loopholes either.   Will my wish list be realized?  Probably not in its entirety.  Not with 300 million plus firearms in existence in the U.S., and increasing.  But I'll be happier if some of what I want occurs.  I'll accept half a loaf.  Never let the perfect be the enemy of the good. 

[YankeeJim]

No you didn't call her a "hack" exactly but calling her a mouthpiece for the gun lobby while presenting others who share your view as objective isn't accurate either. That being said, I have no doubt that if we sat in a room together we'd come up with a solution. Well, an agreement anyway. I doubt that there is a solution in this matter short of re-educating society. Compromise is something that is rare today. All you have to do is look at the hack who is Boehner & the ego that is POTUS to see that.

I complement you on your demeanor and the presentation of your arguments. Being reasonable is a talent which you possess.  065.gif

[Forever Fulham]

You disarm me with your generosity.  Thanks, YJ.  I never meant to imply that lefty Alex Seitz-Wald is objective, or any less subjective than Prof. Malcolm.   I was offering up counter presentations of facts.  I think Malcolm's work is result-oriented.  Same thing for Seitz-Wald.  They say the two things you should never discuss in public are religion and politics.  You're sure to alienate most people one way or the other.  We can add gun control or gun laws to that short list too, I suppose.  Best regards.