I’m pretty sure the overwhelming majority of gun deaths in the United States involve a handgun. So I don’t know what you mean by “pretty low.”
It’s not too hard to make your own bullets. Unless you outlaw lead or fireworks, those people who want bullets are going to have them.
Had a friend into reloading. He’d spend hours in his basement, along with thousands of dollars of tools, and come out with a couple hundred rounds.
If everyone has to make their own ammo, it’ll reduce the ammo out there by orders of magnitude.
I happen to agree that it will probably be more effective to regulate ammunition than firearms, but…
There are many, many reloaders out there. Shooters buy them, get disillusioned about how cheap/easy it is to reload, and then stick them in their basements or attics. And a rotary unit can turn out hundreds of rounds an hour, once you get them set up correctly.
Now, regulating the manufacture of propellants (modern gunpowder) might be an approach. You can cast your own bullets, clean and trim your brass, and do just about everything else at home. Making a modern smokeless propellant is pretty hard. (Why do I have visions of Walter White in an old RV manufacturing propellants out in the desert?)
It would be trivially easy to smuggle huge amounts of bullets into this country. As long as there is a demand there will be enough bullets to supply that demand.
This. I think there is a lot of important signalling over guns that is not happening, and that it’s possible to encourage a more self-disciplined (well regulated?) culture around gun use than anything we have today. There’s a lot of complex signalling between the authorities, the public, the culture, politicians, special interest groups, and it’s become too divided and ineffectual, and as a result too permissive. Look at the mass shooting: what signalling is occurring after this event? The same “hands off” stance only enables more of these acts in the future.
I think that gun control is not the answer. Never has been, never will be. But that doesn’t stop libs from squawking it like parrots on crack.
Making bullets is harder than buying them. Buying bullets from smugglers is harder than buying them from regular stores.
Even presuming we do nothing more than take the bullets off the shelves, there will be a massive reduction in the number of bullets in the wild after a relatively short while. Casual crooks won’t be rolling their own, and if they buy from smugglers they will draw a lot of attention from law enforcement as soon as they fire a shot - they suddenly become a lead in a smuggling investigation, and if there’s one kind of smuggler a cop will care about, it’s ones supplying weapons to shoot them with.
Private non-crazy individuals are extremely unlikely to go the smuggling route, and only real affectionados will roll their own.
Crazy individuals of course have trillions of bullets. Nothing to be done about them via any approach.
What’s the answer?
Charging cable and tv news agencies with accessory to murder, they get to report news, but to go to such orgasmic levels of coverage gives perps a huge platform during and after the fact.
If it bleeds it leads, is unacceptable.
The number of people that can be killed with a handgun are pretty low compared to a military assault weapon
Several varieties of sport and target shooting, home defense, personal defense, hunting.
Auto or semi auto rifle is a good enough definition in my book. Semi auto shotguns are also part of the definition. Handguns are not assault weapons, imo. Ymmv
You hunt with handguns? Piffle.
Also guns are crap for home and personal defense.
I’m willing to sacrifice sport and target shooting for the good of humanity. You want to shoot for fun? Buy a hunting rifle. A big, non-concealable, not-often-used-by-criminals hunting rifle.
Seriously, there are two kinds of guns - the ones meant for shooting people, and the ones meant for shooting animals. I, as a craven liberal, see real reason to keep the guns meant for shooting animals around, and would be okay with keeping them in the hands of people. But handguns and military hardware? Ban the lot of them.
ETA: I don’t think the government’s first move should be banning them - I think that the government should move very carefully regarding disarming the populace. But seriously, there is no good reason for civilians to own weapons designed for killing people.
Not any effect? I think that stricter regulations can have some effect. It sounds like you’re limiting the options to regulations that we already have, and pointing out that these regulations didn’t stop this tragedy, therefore no regulations can.
I think there are ways we could really cut back on the number of people with weapons like the Vegas shooter had, and that will reduce the number of these kinds of tragedies. Others have already mentioned liability insurance, which I hadn’t heard before but sounds like a good idea. We can also outlaw the kinds of guns that are fully automatic, or can be practically modified to be automatic or near-automatic (like the stock-bump thing), and put in place severe penalties for anyone caught with them. More limits on magazine capacity. And what is that perforated sleeve around the barrel of the gun that guy was using? Is that for cooling the barrel? Let’s outlaw those for civilian use, you don’t need that for protecting your house or hunting.
I’m sure there are lots of things I haven’t thought of. Let’s not fall for the slippery-slope fallacy and do nothing this time.
Walk me through it then. What regulation would you put in that would have avoided what happened in Vegas? The guy bought the gun he used legally, going through the FBI background check and meeting all of the local and state regulations. So, what would have prevented this? AFAIK, the guy didn’t have a history of mental issues, didn’t have any sort of criminal record, so unless you propose a total ban on guns (or maybe on semi-automatic rifles) and a time machine I don’t see how anything that is possible to do in the US today that would have prevented this. But perhaps it’s a lack of imagination on my part, so like I said, walk me through it.
How would any of this prevented what happened though? 
Sure, if we had time travel to know which people to cut back guns of this kind too we could do that. But this guy seems pretty bog standard and almost certainly would have gotten a gun regardless, unless we ban them all from everyone. Liability insurance? You think this guy, who had over 10 rifles and rented a suite in Las Vegas (it certainly looks expensive to me) is going to have some sort of issue with paying for or getting insurance? I read on CNN that he wired $100k to the Philipines last week (gods know why). So, sure, after the fact he’d have trouble getting insurance, but last week? :dubious:
As for the modifications, afaik modifying such a gun to fire full auto is already illegal, and owning an automatic is highly restricted. So, he did something illegal, but, sadly, wasn’t caught before it mattered. I don’t know how or who modified the gun for him to do that…for all I know he did. He seems to have been a pretty secretive guy who kept a lot of things secret from those around him. Hell, he also had homemade explosives in his car, I suppose as a backup and managed to get all of that into Las Vegas. All of this, and I’ve yet to see anyone with even a theory on why this guy did what he did. We dont’ even have a freaking note from him, nothing on the internet…just nada.
sigh What’s with people today? Did you read the REST of the OP?
I don’t understand the premise. The fact that the guns were all bought legally means that gun control would have worked here, not that it wouldn’t. The current state of gun laws allows this sort of thing to happen, so maybe we should change the gun laws so they don’t allow it. If this shooter had had the same goals, but had been in any other First World nation, he wouldn’t have been able to do this.
Again, walk me through it. What gun control measures do you propose that would have stopped this. They did a background check through the FBI, so obviously that one isn’t going to work. What other checks to do see that would have worked?
As for the last part, do you consider Norway a 1st world country? What about France? There isn’t any sort of silver bullet from these kinds of random attacks, AFAIK, and gun control isn’t going to stop them. Myself, I think we should focus on the day to day violence and just accept that these sorts of terrorist type attacks are going to happen. Isn’t that what many on this board say about 9/11?
I can’t speak for Chronos, but I think his point is that this dude didn’t break the law to get the guns, so he would be subject to the interference of law in a way that, say, a secret agent airdropped in from russia with his arsenal of weapons already strapped to his back wouldn’t be.
So, for an example, if he had been completely forbidden from buying the weapons to start with, he would have been forced to resort to rubber bands to do his shooting spree with, which have a 30% lower fatality rate.
From what I understand, less gun control would also have not stopped this from occurring. A lone gunmen at height above a crowd of people cannot be stopped by someone in the crowd also having a gun unless it was a sniper rifle (highly unlikely someone goes to a concert with one). There is absolutely no way to prevent this besides simply criminalizing all deadly weapon ownership or having Big Brother watch absolutely everyone and be ready to step in when someone is about to go off. Neither of those are really feasible. This incident may have been designed by the perpetrator specifically to show the futility of any gun control or widespread carrying of guns by civilians that might be put in place to stop mass shootings. They will occur. And we’ll have to deal with them the same way we deal with earthquakes and hurricanes.