Wake up America, righty hysterics have been trying

Wake up America, righty hysterics have been trying to scare you about 'guns going away' for a long time. If they didn't go away under Obama, they ain't going anywhere.

Which leave us with proposals for reasonable gun restrictions and expanded background checks to diminish the slaughter.

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Pro 8

A majority of adults, including gun owners, support common sense gun control such as background checks, bans on assault weapons, and bans on high-capacity magazines.

According to a Feb. 20, 2018 Quinnipiac Poll, 97% of American voters and 97% of gun owners support universal background checks. 67% support a nationwide ban on assault weapons, and 83% support mandatory waiting periods for gun purchases. [155]

As much as 40% of all gun sales are undocumented private party gun sales that do not require a background check (aka the "gun show loophole". [28]

56% of all adults surveyed approve of assault weapon bans and 53% of all adults surveyed approve of high-capacity magazine bans. [27] 89% of adults with a gun in the home approve of laws to prevent the purchase of guns by the mentally ill, and 82% approve of banning gun sales to people on no-fly lists. [27]

Don Macalady, member of Hunters against Gun Violence, stated, "As a hunter and someone who has owned guns since I was a young boy, I believe that commonsense gun legislation makes us all safer. [29]

Pro 12

Armed civilians are unlikely to stop crimes and are more likely to make dangerous situations, including mass shootings, more deadly.

None of the 62 mass shootings between 1982 and 2012 was stopped by an armed civilian. [41] Gun rights activists regularly state that a 2002 mass shooting at the Appalachian School of Law in Virginia was stopped by armed students, but those students were current and former law enforcement officers and the killer was out of bullets when subdued. [41]

Other mass shootings often held up as examples of armed citizens being able to stop mass shootings involved law enforcement or military personnel and/or the shooter had stopped shooting before being subdued, such as a 1997 high school shooting in Pearl, MS; a 1998 middle school dance shooting in Edinboro, PA; a 2007 church shooting in Colorado Springs, CO; and a 2008 bar shooting in Winnemucca, NV. [42]

Jeffrey Voccola, Assistant Professor of Writing at Kutztown University, notes, "The average gun owner, no matter how responsible, is not trained in law enforcement or on how to handle life-threatening situations, so in most cases, if a threat occurs, increasing the number of guns only creates a more volatile and dangerous situation." [43]

Pro 15

Civilians, including hunters, should not own military-grade firearms or firearm accessories. President Ronald Reagan and others did not think the AR-15 military rifle (also called M16s by the Air Force) should be owned by civilians and, when the AR-15 was included in the assault weapons ban of 1994 (which expired on Sep. 13, 2004), the NRA supported the legislation. [48]

The Second Amendment was written at a time when the most common arms were long rifles that had to be reloaded after every shot. Civilians today have access to folding, detaching, or telescoping stocks that make the guns more easily concealed and carried; silencers to muffle gunshot sounds; flash suppressors to fire in low-light conditions without being blinded by the flash and to conceals the shooter’s location; or grenade launcher attachments.

[49] Jonathan Lowy, Director of Legal Action Project at the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, stated, "These are weapons that will shred your venison before you eat it, or go through the walls of your apartment when you’re trying to defend yourself… [they are] made for mass killing, but they are not useful for law-abiding citizens." [50]

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