We need to take away their guns

Forget the wishy-washy stuff, Democrats.  Forget all the mealy-mouthed talk about “common sense” laws on background checks.  Forget all the talk about gun safety and gun control.

Forget assuring the gun owners that we’re not after their guns.  Taking dangerous weapons of war off the street is the only thing that will work.  We’ve got to push for a ban on semi-automatic rifles like the AR-15 used in the last two mass killings in Buffalo and Uvalde and so many others, and a ban on the kind of semiautomatic handgun used to wound Gabby Giffords and kill six other people, including a federal judge, outside a Safeway store in Arizona in 2011.  That guy used a 9 mm semiautomatic handgun with a magazine that carried 33 rounds, so let’s throw in these unnecessarily gigantic magazines while we’re at it.  Don’t ban so-called high capacity magazines and allow the ones that carry 10 rounds.  Ban them down to five rounds, and fuck anybody who says he needs more bullets than that when he goes to the range to shoot targets or wants to go out in the woods and shoot at animals.

We’ve already got federal laws on the books against owning automatic weapons like the Uzi submachine gun or the military-spec M-4 used by today’s army, both of which are capable of full-automatic fire.  So far, at least, the Supreme Court hasn’t found a constitutional right to own an automatic weapon in the words of the Second Amendment, which everyone is fond of pointing out was written when muskets and flintlock pistols were all the rage. 

So why can’t we ban semiautomatic weapons as well?  As I wrote a few days ago, one of these AR-15’s is capable of firing two to three rounds a second and between 130 and 150 rounds a minute, even when accounting for reloading magazines.  That is way too many bullets coming out of the barrel of any weapon that should be in the hands of civilians.  When I was writing about being trained to fire the M-16 many decades ago, I forgot to mention that in the three weeks we spent on the weapon, we probably fired it on full-automatic for a grand total of five minutes.  Why?  Because all the thing does is spray bullets in a direction away from you.  It’s impossible to aim any weapon and fire it with any degree of accuracy in full-automatic operation.  That’s why we spent days on the shooting range firing one bullet at a time.  That’s the way you hit something.

So forget all this talk about compromising on so-called gun control measures.  We need to get weapons of war out of the hands of civilians, and if that means some kind of expensive “buy-back” program, so be it.  Buy the damn things back, and if they won’t sell them, then ban their use on firing ranges and for hunting, and if the police stop someone and find an AR-15 in their possession, give them the legal power to confiscate it.

The 18-year-old in Uvalde walked into a classroom in an elementary school and shot 19 children who were only eight to ten years old and killed them, and he killed their teachers, too, and he used an AR-15 semiautomatic weapon to do it.

Never again.  Ban them. Buy them back.  Confiscate them.  Throw them into forges and melt them down.  Tell the NRA to sit on it and rotate.

We’re better than this.