Gun ownership poll

[steve B]

Originally Posted by Smarti5051

The question I do have for the pro-gun side, is: what is the advantage to having legal guns that can shoot 100+ rounds per minute? If the concern is gun for safety and protection, I have to think a 10-12 round gun would cover 99.99% of safety threats - indeed, even our police who are put in harm's way daily do not walk around with machine guns.

You've fallen into a common misconception. One which is easy to fall into.

It conflates three different things.

Rate of fire - Rounds per minute
Capacity- how many the gun holds
Full vs semi-automatic.

Easiest one first.
Fully automatic=Pull the trigger it shoots till you stop or the ammo runs out.
Semi Automatic= One pull one shot, but you have to pull the trigger for each one. A large percentage of guns are this type. The shotgun my friend has me use for trap shooing is. I just load one at a time to stay within the rules.

Fully automatic - "machine guns" have been heavily controlled since the mid 1930's. Full registration, $200 tax to transfer, very serious background check, some serious legal trouble for not doing things properly. Since those controls were put in place, last I checked there have only been 2-3 incidents involving a legally owned full auto weapon.

And that moves right into the "police don't have machine guns"...One of those incidents was a law officer using a department machine gun that he was legally allowed to use. Just not at all the way he used it.

Most guns, depending on how they were made and local laws hold less than 10 rounds. If you're in a place that allows higher capacity maybe as many as 30. Much more isn't common, but is possible.

So yes, you may be able to fire hundreds of rounds a minute, but you'll be out in a few seconds. And usually anything past the first one isn't going where you want it to go. (Yes, I've tried, shot 1 was pretty good. They said I did well to get number 2 on the paper, and the backstop fortunately caught number 3 - It was good that was all I was allowed for that exercise. Could I have done better with practice? sure. But anything outside the target is pretty much a fail.

Oh, and a huge percentage of regular hunting rifles are semi-auto. They just don't look "tactical" so the crazy people don't usually buy them. In some cases they have the exact same inner machinery as the ones everyone wants to ban.