Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"Mass shootings are a tiny, tiny problem. Which isn't to say that they aren't utterly horrifying in more than one way. People's lives are destroyed, both literally and figuratively. What I mean to say is that if we were to prioritize our political attention to topics according to how many lives were at stake, mass shootings wouldn't even be on the radar.

[...]

"So in 1994, legislators were forced to ask themselves, 'What exactly will this ban do away with?' The category of 'assault weapon' didn't actually exist, and this was an opportunity for gun control advocates to create it, to say exactly what they wanted off the streets.

"As it turns out, they were mostly opposed to things they saw in movies. Which is to say that most of the features that now defined 'assault weapons' had to do with form and not function, totally sidestepping the issue of violent crime altogether.

[...]

"Perhaps most tellingly, semi-automatic (legal) versions of automatic firearms were banned just because they looked like illegal guns.

"When the category of 'assault weapon' had finally been conjured into being, all of its included firearms together accounted for less than 2% of violent crime. None of them had any more functionality than a hunting rifle. It couldn't have been clearer that this was a war founded on image rather than reality."

-- Kontra, 2012-08-09 (Emphasis added, mostly because I feareded too many people would stop with a gut reaction to the first paragraph without that bit of context ... mass shootings make headlines and really hold our attention, but if we want to reduce gun violence, our efforts are probably better spent focussing on the more common forms of it.)