Henkie36 said:
I agree with Jones to a certain point, that guns can be used for personal protection. But he can't convince me that you would need a full-automatic heavy assault rifle for that.
Notably, fully automatic firearms aren't particularly easy to acquire legally in the United States and are used in very, very few crimes. They require strict additional licensing and a pretty significant financial investment. The AR-15 variant rifles used in these recent shootings aren't even capable of firing in burst or automatic, which by definition, means they aren't even assault rifles. They
look like assault rifles, but they aren't assault rifles in functionality.
I have an AR-15. It's a Colt AR-15 "Sporter" HBAR, .223 Remington. I use it for hunting from time to time, but mostly it's just for plinking targets at the local range for recreation. All legal, and no one is being harmed. That said, they don't make ideal personal defense weapons. For individual and home defense, there really isn't a whole lot that they can do that a handgun or a shotgun can't do better - and with less risk of collateral damage.
My understanding of the issue however is that it's not about what's "ideal" for defense in a given scenario. It's a matter of having choice and variety restricted due to a reactionary response to a tragedy. The use of AR-15 clones recently is actually a bit of an anomaly. It's fairly rare for that style of weapon to be used in gun crime. The majority of gun crime in the US is committed with handguns in fairly common chamberings like .22, 9x19mm, and .45ACP since they're cheap, easy to acquire, and easy to conceal. The argument that it's their magazine capacity that makes AR-15 style rifles so dangerous is the best argument I've seen so far, and it's mostly irrelevant since high-capacity magazines exist for handguns as well. I met a man at a firing range once who, for whatever reason, liked to use a 100-round C-Mag drum, similar in design to the one used with the rifle in Aurora, with his 9x19mm Glock-17 handgun. So to them, starting off with AR-15's and other similar rifles in the wake of tragedy is just step one into easing the public as a whole into complete disarmament.