The Virginia House of Delegates approved an assault weapons ban on a party line vote Friday.
Fairfax County Democratic Del. Dan Helmer’s bill would end the sale and transfer of assault firearms manufactured after July 1, 2024. It also prohibits the sale of certain large capacity magazines.
“This bill would stop the sale of weapons similar to those I and many of the other veterans carried in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Helmer said.
The push back against full auto and bump stocks is particularly interesting because there are two advantages to full auto:
1: Haha that was fun for two seconds
2: There’s a crowd of people I want to shoot into and accuracy doesn’t matter.
From a cold blooded logical perspective full auto on small arms is mostly useless for hunting, self defense, and military needs alike. If you want to argue for burst fire, fair enough, but there’s just no need for full auto or imitations.
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.