I'm not a gun owner and I have never fired one. I listen to people talk about gun control and I have no axe to grind. And consistently, after every event, I hear the same tired, misguided arguments. Today, we're listening to uneducated students deliver long impassioned speeches about how awful it is to experience violence and death at the hands of a shooter. And they've been told that gun control will help prevent it in the future. They've been told that an "assault weapon" is a different sort of gun that can be outlawed, and that outlawing such a weapon will help.
But ... there is no such thing. A semiautomatic firearm is simply the metal part of the gun, in the middle, with the trigger, etc. It can be small like a pistol or large like a rifle. It can have a long stock and a long barrel or it can have no stock and a short barrel like a pistol. It doesn't matter if the stock is made of wood or metal or plastic and it doesn't matter what color it is. It operates exactly the same as any other semiautomatic weapon. Each time you pull the trigger, the old cartridge is expelled, a new one is loaded and the trigger recocks, ready for another pull.
The only other type of mechanism is one that has to be manually reloaded each time you fire, like the old lever action rifle. You fire, then operate the mechanism manually, then fire again. The idea that semiautomatic weapons are made to kill people is absurd. They're made to kill, yes, but people buy them and own them to kill game animals, not people. There are roughly 400 million firearms in the country! The semiautomatic part that everyone is focused on is just a mechanism, present in almost all guns sold in the past decades. No one prefers a gun that has to be manually operated. Legislating against semiautomatic weapons would apply to every gun, not just the scary looking black ones, and the scary looking black ones operate no differently than any good hunting rifle.
And then there's the problem of the Constitution and its Amendments. The 2nd one gives us the right to bear arms. If we want to do something about guns in America, we need to repeal that Amendment.
It's a matter of education. The passion is good for TV ratings, but it's useless - all it does is feed passion. Education would help.
When someone begins the Amendment repeal process, we can argue back and forth about how to confiscate the 400 million guns that already exist. Until then, gun control as presently argued is simply ignorant and pointless. It doesn't matter how a gun looks. It's nothing more than that small metal mechanism, and it exists on 100s of millions of guns that people already own.
If you're passionate about gun control, please research the subject while you march and rally and shout.
Please.