system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: Supporting an assault weapons ban is intellectually dishonest.

I want to start off by saying that I'm not against all forms of gun control. I think strengthening background checks, preventing guns from entering the hands of the mentally unstable, and closing the gun show loophole are all great ideas with no downside to society.

However, if you support an all out ban on assault weapons, I can only assume it's for one of two reasons. One, you don't know the information surrounding current assault weapon regulation, statistics surrounding assault weapon usage, or the history of assault weapon bans in this county. Two, you know this information and choose to ignore the only logical conclusion in favor of an emotional and irrational response, making you intellectually dishonest.

Here are the facts in questions that make an assault weapons ban illogical.

Of the roughly 30k gun related deaths per year, 20k are suicide, leaving 10k that are homicide. In 2012 specifically, there were 11k homicides. Of that, only 322 people were killed with ANY kind of rifle, including assault rifles and hunting rifles. Handguns make up 80% of total gun crime, and shotguns bridge the gap. In fact, the total of handguns, shotguns, and rifles considered to have "military features" only accounted for 2% of total gun crime.

Assault weapons bans have been passed before. One was passed under Clinton, and expired in the early 2000s. Gun crime fell... AFTER the ban expired, and analysis proved no correlation between the fall in crime and the ban.

Americans are wrong about gun crime rates as well. Gun crime has fallen 49% since 1993, and after sandy hook 56% of Americans wrongly believed that gun crime was higher now than it was 20 years ago. This is likely due to media focusing so heavily on mass shootings.

Assault weapons are already strictly regulated. No fully automatic weapon designed after 1986 can be legally purchased in the U.S. and the few that are legal to purchase require the individual to go through much more extensive paperwork and fees, including having your local police force sign off on allowing you to own the weapon. They are also prohibitively expensive, with cheaper ones costing well over $15,000 a piece before fees. Semi automatic assault style weapons do not follow the same rules, but cannot have features that make them too similar or easily convertible to their fully automatic counterparts.

A side issue is illegal trafficking. Most guns used in homicide crime, specifically mass shootings, are obtained illegally. In fact there is very little evidence suggesting a ban on any type of gun would have a meaningful impact on any type of gun crime because of how prevalent illegal gun trafficking is in inner city gang violence which makes up the large majority of gun homicides.

A common argument made in favor of an assault ban is that people don't need them, and that's true. Strictly speaking, nobody NEEDS an assault style rifle. However, who gets to decide when something people want shouldn't be allowed to be had? What about cigarettes, alcohol, or even cars? Certainly nobody needs the first two, and if you were really dead set on saving lives you could argue that we could invest heavily in self driving cars and mandate they be used by everyone. All three of those things kill many many times more people a year than assault weapons. What about flu vaccines? More than 30,000 people die a year in the U.S. from the flu. You could save more lives by requiring people to get flu vaccines. There are just so many things that kill so many more people by such a large margin that we don't "need" that making that argument is very disingenuous.

The only way I could see someone in support of an assault weapons ban as being intellectually honest would be if they were in support of any government restriction on personal freedom that could save even a single life, because otherwise your stance isn't rational.

I might even support an assault weapons ban if there was any evidence at all that they were an actual and real problem, and that the ban would have a real effect on the problem. As it stands, the absolute most that can possibly be said, assuming nobody kills anyone with a hunting or sport rifle, is that .0001% of the population is killed by assault rifles every year. There have to be hundreds of completely innocuous things that kill more people per year than assault rifles, things non of us would ever think about controlling through legislation. So why assault rifles? Because people are scared of them for no reason? Because people don't like the big bad gun lobby? I don't know. I'm sure most politicians in support of an assault weapons ban probably believe it's the right thing. If they do, frankly they're idiots. However, I wouldn't be surprised if quite a few of them recognize that an assault weapons ban is an easy way to take millions of dollars away from the gun lobby, weakening republicans, and I would be absolutely shocked if that wasn't at least one politicians primary motivation.

My last thing I would like people to consider before attempting to change my view is that guns aren't just abstract objects. They are real things made by people. How many people's jobs and livelihoods would are dependent on or would be impacted negatively by an assault weapons ban? Companies would lose a lot of business, people would lose jobs from those who manage the acquiring and selling of raw materials, to those in charge of the acquisition of those raw materials, to the people who make those materials into guns, to the people who distribute the guns to retailers and to the retailers themselves. Then count that plus all of the same people in the process for making bullets for those guns. Consider the economic impact that a ban like this could have on many thousand more people than are currently being harmed yearly by assault weapons.

EDIT1: thank you so much everyone for your responses. I have not been able to respond to every comment I would like to, but will post another edit later when I can to address some of the more common points people are making and why I disagree with them.

EDIT2: ok so I would like to address a few common points.

1.) there's no need to own an assault weapon.

No, there isn't. As I've said, that's not a reason to not allow people to have them. I don't need fast cars, I don't need comfortable cars, I probably need some kind of car, but I don't need all of those features, so I shouldn't be able to have them? No, that makes no sense. A more direct comparison is alcohol. More people are killed by drunk driving in 15 days than are killed by any kind of rifle in a year. That doesn't even factor alcohol related homicides or overdoses. There is no need to have alcohol, nobody strictly speaking needs it just like nobody strictly speaking needs an assault weapon. We have decided as a country that we are ok with the consequences of having alcohol be legal because we value personal freedom and recognize that freedom comes with consequences. It's far more logical from a death toll standpoint to outlaw alcohol than it is to outlaw assault weapons. Actually, almost any ban on any product would make more sense than an assault weapons ban in terms of death toll.

2.) assault weapons are different because they are designed to spread death quickly.

There are two issues with this. The less important though still significant one is I could easily put 500 guns in pairs in front of you, all with the exact same clip size, exact same bullet size, and exact same firing mechanism (semi automatic). 250 of them would not count as assault weapons under and assault weapons ban, and 250 of them would classify as assault weapons. The only difference is cosmetic appearance.

The second and more important issue is that what something is designed for has no relevance to what it is actually used for. Alcohol as a consistently good example. Alcohol is a drink designed to inebriated and be enjoyed. In no way shape or form is alcohol directly designed or made to cause violence and death. Yet, alcohol causes many many times the amount of of death that assault weapons do. I would even argue that since most assault weapons available to the public are stripped less lethal versions of their military counterparts, and that most of them AND their military counterparts are chambered in a NATO 5.56 round, which is a small bullet designed to be LESS deadly and more penetrative/accurate, one could argue that assault weapons are not necessarily even designed to rapidly kill people. Still, even if you accept that they are designed to kill people, it's doesn't matter because that's not what they are actually being used for by civilians. There are millions of legally owned assault weapons and a tiny handful are ever used to do harm. I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't a single case of a legally owned full blown assault rifle (selective/automatic fire actual military model weapons regulated by the 1986 law) being used in a homicide because of how difficult and expensive they are to get.

So you have something designed for personal enjoyment, and something "designed to kill people," but the thing designed for enjoyment results in many many times more deaths than the thing "designed to kill." Before anyone says alcohol deaths only affect the user so it's different, say that to the sober people killed by drunk drivers or victims of alcohol related homicide.

3.) Europeans have strict gun laws and they have low crime rates.

First off, my stance is not anti any gun law, my stance is specifically anti assault weapons bans, and by extension anti weapons bans. Many Europeans countries have stricter laws than we do, but even the strictest do not have all out bans. In fact, many European countries have some of the highest rates of civilian gun ownership in the world. The top 20 gun owning countries include Switzerland (4), Sweden, Norway, and France (9,10,11), Austria, Iceland, Germany, and Finland (13,14,15,16) and all have very very low rates of gun crime. Another good example, though not European is Canada, placed 12th in gun ownership per capita while simultaneously having very very low gun crime. Asserting that Europe is a good example of why gun bans are a good idea is a complete non sequitur, as they don't have gun bans and have very low gun crime. Again, this post is specifically about bans, not limitations.

4.) it's not intellectually dishonest if your goal is to save any amount of lives.

This can be true, but only if you also support the limitations of other personal freedoms like alcohol for the same reasons. It is not logical to say "I'm willing to take away people's freedom to own guns in order to save lives, but I'm not willing to take away people's freedom to consume alcohol to save lives," when alcohol is just as unnecessary and far more lethal than assault weapons. I would not perceive you as being intellectually dishonest if you believed in any and all personal limitations of freedom that can save even the most minuscule number of lives, I would still disagree with you, but there wouldn't be anything dishonest about your stance.

Bonus round of miscellaneous things that kill more people per year than any kind of rifle including assault weapons, just for fun;

Drowning in a bathtub (300 so probably more than assault weapons but less than rifles overall)

Falling down the stairs (1600)

Falling out of bed (450)

Cell phones if you count texting and driving (6000, which I'm willing to omit as an actual comparison since most people are against texting while driving anyway. Still interesting.)

The flu (36,000, more than the total of gun deaths from all suicides and homicides, more than 100 times the deaths of any rifle)
gpt
If you believe that all guns should be banned, then banning assault weapons is entirely coherent with that. There is no intellectual dishonesty, one follows logically from the other.

The arguments in favour of continuing gun use are particularly weak when applied to assault weapons, which makes banning them a more achievable part of the overall goal.