We Have Our Work Cut Out For Us

Bryon York, Chief Political Correspondent for The Washington Examiner, details a trip he took to Birmingham, Alabama over the holidays. He went to Hoover Tactical Firearms to shoot some of the more "controversial weapons".

Disregarding his comments that the .45 ACP in the KRISS Vector is "hugely powerful", I think his comments about his talks with friends and relatives about gun and magazine bans are instructive. These are the gun owners who must be made to understand that an attack on one of us is an attack on all of us. Moreover, they need to realize that their scoped deer hunting rifles are nothing but "sniper rifles" to the gun prohibitionists.

From his comments:

Should guns like the KRISS be legal to buy? Or, at least, should they be harder to buy and their magazine size limited to, say, 10 rounds? Talking with relatives and friends, all of whom own firearms, I didn't sense much opposition to limiting the size of magazines. Nor did I sense much opposition to imposing the same sort of background checks on people who buy guns at shows as are currently imposed on people who buy them at licensed dealers like Hoover Tactical Firearms.

As far as banning some types of guns altogether, many point out that beyond their military styling, "assault weapons" are basically semi-automatic rifles like zillions of other semi-automatic rifles with wooden stocks and a traditional look. They're the same guns. Even so, I didn't sense much opposition to banning the sale of some types of rifles.

Even though as York reports that he didn't sense much opposition to the bans, he did report that nobody thought that they would be effective in stopping another Newtown-type shooting or any mass shooting.