politics

I think that realistically the push back is because the full auto ban undermines a lot of their rhetoric.

After high profile mass shootings such as the Saint Valentines Day Massacre -- which includes the kind of photo you'll never see on a Wikipedia page about Sandy Hook or Ulvade -- killed 7 people, fully automatic weapons were deemed an unacceptable public risk without stricter regulations.

Like you say, they have functionally zero redeeming qualities and are far more useful to criminals than to "responsible gun owners". The laws have stood for a long time, the sky hasn't fallen and full auto weapons aren't turning up in mass shootings or organised crime. The regulations worked and they weren't even an outright ban.

But now people are asking why we can't do the same thing, for the same reasons, with semi-automatic weapons and the pro-gun community desperately doesn't want that for various self-aggrandizing, baseless reasons.

They know that "some weapons should be more tightly regulated because of the risk they pose to the public but not these ones" is a much weaker position than "no weapons should ever been regulated", so they opt for the latter.

If they actually succeeded, we would absolutely see those weapons used to create higher levels of violence, but the pro-gun community is fine with sacrificing more innocent lives for their hobby, especially if they get 2 seconds of fun at the range.

The pro-gun community opposes this because the intent of 2A was always to protect the ownership of militarily-useful arms.

Isn't it cool how the intent of the amendment happens to align exactly with what the pro-gun community wants, which in turn aligns exactly with what is most profitable to the gun lobby?

It's a good thing it does too, otherwise you'd have to say things like "I want to play with a full auto and I think the consequences will happen to people I don't care about".

Militias were groups of armed citizens, separate from the army, and they were often expected--and legally obligated in some cases--to provide their own arms in serviceable condition, and to train themselves in their use.

So do the gun laws in America mandate that a gun is kept in serviceable condition and it's owner is trained in how to use it? Or have we shrugged off "intent" before the second paragraph?

The way to effectively curtail violence without curtailing rights is to change the circumstances that lead to violence

And while you spend the next 100 years doing that, the best way to minimize the amount of violence those people can inflict is to not sell them semi-automatic weapons after token checks that routinely fail.

I hate to break it to you, but gun control isn't about stopping all violence forever and never has been. It's about turning a murder into a black eye.

The fact that you slipped so effortlessly into that straw man makes it clear that you let pro-gun groups tell you what gun control is and then never thought critically about it.

It looks like it's on the docket, so expect it to get overturned 6-3, especially since their friends in the 5th circuit already gave them their argument

Under federal law, a machinegun is a gun that shoots multiple bullets “automatically” and “by a single function of the trigger,” or any accessory that allows a gun to do so. This definition, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled, clearly does not apply to bump stocks, which harness a rifle’s recoil to rapidly depress the trigger without the shooter having to pull and release his trigger finger. But even if the definition were not clear, the 5th Circuit continued, bump stocks should be excluded from the definition of “machinegun” under the rule of lenity, a doctrine that instructs courts to apply ambiguous criminal laws in the way that is most favorable to defendants.