Gun Control & RKBA

It happened in Australia and in most of the rest of developed nations.

Most Western nations" don't ban detachable-magazine semiautos, a fact that you appear to have overlooked. Semiauto rifles with detachable magazines are popular among sport shooters in Canada, most European nations, New Zealand, etc. etc., as well as in the strictest gun-control jurisdictions in the USA (NYC, MA, CA, NJ). The UK and Australia are extreme outliers, and even the UK allows semiauto shotguns of unlimited capacity, including detachable-magazine Kalashnikovs.

http://www.guncity.com/firearms/all-firearms/centrefire/semi-auto/223-rem (New Zealand)

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1172&pid=189580 (Germany, Denmark, Sweden, France, Norway, Hungary, etc...)

http://www.rusmilitary.com/html/firearms_saiga12.htm (United Kingdom)

http://calibremag.ca/colt-canada-worth-the-wait/ (Canada)

Canadians can even own a couple detachable-magazine semiautos that Americans cannot, such as the Norinco T97, and the civilian Tavor was in Canadian homes long before Tavors were imported into the United States. The amount of background checking and red tape to own guns varies from country to country, but few Western nations ban the rifles you are trying to outlaw.

We won't win tomorrow and maybe not in my lifetime--I only have 20 or so years left--but we will win.

I am a Gen-X'er (40's now!); most "assault weapon" enthusiasts are a lot younger than you are. The Baby Boomers preferred bolt-actions and the occasional wooden-stocked M1A, but my generation and younger are the primary aficionados of more modern, smaller-caliber designs, and AR ownership definitely skews younger than bolt gun or M1A/Mini-14 ownership. And guess what kinds of target guns millenials most gravitate to. Even Bloomberg himself hasn't gone out on the limb you are standing on; he made no moves to try to ban detachable-magazine semiautos while mayor of NYC, nor has he since. Rifle bans were a gamble by Josh Sugarmann and the VPC to try to build momentum for new handgun restrictions, and that gamble backfired spectacularly and is still doing so.

As far as ownership numbers, states that actually license ownership and hence actually count lawful owners (IL, MA) show that gun ownership in those states has substantially *increased*. Most polls also show an upswing in the number of gun owners nationwide, making U Chicago's non-anonymous General Social Survey quite the outlier. NFA licensure and carry licensure are also up sharply since the 1990s and early 2000s, even as gun crime has fallen by half.

The rifle-ban efforts in this country in this country are primarily driven by a few wealthy Baby Boomers, and has dramatically less popular support now than even 20 years ago, thanks in large part to *precisely* the same damn-the-facts irrationality we are currently discussing. The gun confiscation movement in 2016 is sustained primarily by the gigabucks of a certain authoritarian Wall Street kingpin and old-money corporate media, not the grassroots.

I do not hold all cc holders in disregard, just the 95% (my estimate based on personal observation) that are just paranoid, agoraphobic, racist and too foolish to know what they are doing.

And yet carry license holders are dramatically *less* likely to commit violent crimes than the unlicensed, and dramatically less likely to wrongfully shoot someone than police officers are (even though we outnumber police officers by something like 20 to 1). I think your characterization of us as "95% paranoid, agoraphobic, racist and too foolish to know what we are doing" pretty much validates my point, does it not?

We agree to disagree.

That's *precisely* what I'm advocating---the right to disagree with you, and live peaceably and responsibly by my own choices regarding gun ownership. I respect your choices and your beliefs; I simply ask to be free to live by my own rather than yours.