Tougher gun laws are widely acceptable — but also futile
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.
But at the same time, nobody believed those measures would actually address the problem of mass shootings. Indeed, what has been remarkable about the post-Newtown debate is the degree to which gun control advocates have passionately pushed proposals that would not have prevented the Newtown shootings and ridiculed ones, like stationing armed guards in schools, that might have worked.