Troll smarter, not harder dude!

Yes, there were aspects of gun control in the past that were motivated by a desire to disarm black folks. You cannot make a reasonable or good faith argument, however, that similar motivations are at work in the desire to restrict assault weapons, so that’s not going to get you very far.

So the lack of crime with automatic weapons is proof that prohibition accomplishes nothing. Got it.

I’m not quite sure you took my point re: regulation of machine guns. The fact that you could point a tiny handful of incidents going back thirty years tends to cut against your blanket statement that prohibition never works, no?

I’m just not so sure that having combat weapons like that in our society is a net gain. Again, I’m not disputing that there could be significant improvement made to background checks and the like, but if we’re going to have hundreds of thousands (millions?) of these weapons floating around, it’s probably not realistic…

As was mine! That’s Leela’s line.

The magician?

I think what makes it more difficult is what goes unspoken in your comment. Private ownership of what? Private ownership of a pump shotgun with a five shell capacity is simply a different critter than private ownership of an AR-15 with a detachable magazine that can put out a couple hundred rounds in a minute or two.

For what it’s worth, those proposals put you much more in the camp of those you said you didn’t want to hear from, opposed to the Dana Loesch’s of the world. This is not a criticism, by the way.

See, here’s the thing: you have your reflexive talking points down so cold that you aren’t even attempting to respond to what I’m saying. And that’s how the vast majority of discussions on this topic go: you see someone use the term “assault rifle,” you go into the “well, actually...” protocol, and then finish up with…

The unknown is the scariest thing of all.

What “new controls” would you find acceptable?

If it were about honesty as opposed to pedantry, you wouldn’t fight tooth and nail pretending that these weapons get conflated because of aesthetics or disinformation. They get conflated because they are designed to do the same thing, and they do it really well.

What’s not honest or helpful is to pretend that you’re doing anything other than trying to derail with a pedantic distinction that makes no difference to point being discussed. The AR-15 platform was designed and intended to be a combat weapon, and it does a really really good job of it.

Well, to be fair, as other have pointed out here the show itself made clear some time ago this was happening. So maybe not exactly the same thing as GoT.

Come for the songs you remember from high school. Stay for the lecture on New World Order mind control techniques and Alex Jones pamphlets.

Serious question: what is the length of time you think that people should refrain from spoiling television that has already aired? If someone is a couple seasons as opposed to eight episodes behind, do they have a right to be mad if a headline spoils the fact that Glenn is dead?

Which, of course, doesn’t actually contradict my point that the reason assault weapons like the AR-15 platform get conflated with the assault rifles soldiers use isn’t because of some naming conspiracy, it’s because they spring from the same design to accomplish the same thing.

Wait, you can...die from that?

C’mon, don’t be disingenuous. This isn’t about looks, it’s about what the platform was designed to do.