04-05-2013, 07:53 AM
davester wrote:
...if Lanza used a fully automatic weapon then it would WEAKEN Obama's stance on gun control since those weapons are already illegal...
The bottom line is that Lanza did not use a fully automatic weapon.
One thing to note is that these so-called "assault weapons" were used in 2 percent of gun crimes before the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban.
And according to FactCheck.org:
Christopher S. Koper wrote:
Although the ban has been successful in reducing crimes with AWs (Assault Weapons), any benefits from this reduction are likely to have been outweighed by steady or rising use of non-banned semiautomatics with LCMs (large-capacity magazines), which are used in crime much more frequently than AWs. Therefore, we cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation’s recent drop in gun violence. And, indeed, there has been no discernible reduction in the lethality and injuriousness of gun violence, based on indicators like the percentage of gun crimes resulting in death or the share of gunfire incidents resulting in injury, as we might have expected had the ban reduced crimes with both AWs and LCMs.
However, the grandfathering provision of the AW-LCM ban guaranteed that the effects of this law would occur only gradually over time. Those effects are still unfolding and may not be fully felt for several years into the future, particularly if foreign, pre-ban LCMs continue to be imported into the U.S. in large numbers. It is thus premature to make definitive assessments of the ban’s impact on gun violence.
FactCheck.org wrote:
Koper concluded by saying that “a new ban on large capacity magazines and assault weapons would certainly not be a panacea for gun crime, but it may help to prevent further spread of particularly dangerous weaponry and eventually bring small reductions in some of the most serious and costly gun crimes.”
http://www.factcheck.org/2013/02/did-the...-ban-work/
davester wrote:
They should instead be all saying "Yeah! What the black kenyan president guy said!"
That's just...stupid.