Assault rifle ban?

I've kept pretty quiet about this assault rifle ban thingie, mostly because the rhetoric I've seen is so inane. However, it's gotten inane to the point where I can't keep silent. I wish someone would explain, using, like, logic and reason and stuff, just what it's supposed to do. All I hear is shrieking, and since that seems to be the only understandable thing, I'm going to do some shrieking back.

I admit that I enjoy firearms, but I'm not dogmatic about it. I don't think that the 7-11 need sell anti-aircraft missiles. So when people tell me that there's an easy, obvious, rational way of making the US safer without seriously restricting the right to firearms, I'm going to pay attention.

OK, so rifles of all kinds account for about 3% of all US murders. (Pistols account for about 47%). But the rifle, especially the assault rifle, is especially horrible and needs to be gotten rid of.

What's an assault rifle? We're talking about the Bushmaster XM-15, right? That's the one that law enforcement reported to the Wall Street Journal killed 28 people including 18 kids at Sandy Hook.

Except, of course, that the Bushmaster web site says that you can't buy an XM-15 without a Federal firearms license, which costs a lot of money, takes 60 days, and requires fingerprints. So no civilian restriction or waiting period could possibly have any effect at all.

So maybe it's the Bushmaster AR-15, which looks the same and has also been reported. Looking the same is really important. I know this, because I've seen Facebook images with all those totally obvious and common sense reasons including "military styling."

Stupid me. I thought that weapons killed because of high-speed metal projectiles powered by self-oxidizing explosives. That's what I get for taking "advanced physics" in High School. Now I know it's the styling. Maybe the black plastic overloads teal and fuchsia receptors in the brain, causing instant death.

Now we know what we're talking about. Those are the Bad Guns. They are legitimately assault weapons according to military definitions. They have unusually small bore, short barrel, and low charge, and you can hardly aim the damn things.

That is, they are designed to be LESS lethal, which is exactly what you want in an assault. But they're the Bad Guns, right?

So we get rid of them. We even get rid of the ones that nutcases can kill their mothers to steal. So now, nutcases cannot get any of the Bad Rifles, which we know are bad because they have black plastic. They can only get the Good Rifles. We know they're Good because they have nice warm wood and much more precise sights, which let someone hit the target every time. Maybe the stocks even have drawings of the 400 FUCKING POUND ANIMALS THEY ARE DESIGNED TO KILL IN ONE SHOT.

Those can't possibly make more than a tiny boo-boo on a child, right? They're MAGIC! Maybe they're like in Roger Rabbit, and they grow moustaches and talk in dialect and say, "Yeehaw, Lemuel! We can't possibly kill a kid. We're for HUNTING. It says so on the box."

It's probably hoping too much that all my friends who assert that this is all totally obvious and common-sense will come up with a rational explanation of how this makes the slightest sense whatsoever. They'll probably just say that they, unlike me of course, love children and want to do something to protect them. Bad, bad me.

Until that happens, the most reasonable conclusion is that this is all just verbal categorical bullshit, self-important posturing by people whose adrenal glands are too big and whose neocortices are too small.

And, please, don't tell me about banning large magazines. They're magazines, not rifles. They're not "assault magazines." Maybe banning large magazines is a good idea, but they aren't "assault" or "rifle," the two words that seem to set people off. Furthermore, the last time this happened, the magazine ban mostly affected Browning pistols which had a nine-round magazine in 9mm.