hrdwareguy, I do agree that law abiding citizens should not be prevented from owning automatic weapons. I already stated that in previous posts; I was addressing your comment about how deadly automatic weapons can be relative to semi-auto.
I suppose I should clarify myself a little bit. When I say automatic weapon, I mean ANY weapon that can fire multiple rounds with a single pull of the trigger. The M16, with its 3-round burst capability, is an example of an automatic weapon.
So in essence we're arguing about semantics, while the original point of the debate was agreed upon and left in the dust a couple of days ago.
There is one situation (and this is what I was thinking about; I apologize for not being more specific) where a fully automatic weapon would be far more dangerous than a semi-auto, and that's in a crowd situation. If your goal is indiscriminate killing of a large group of people, firing full auto into a crowd will accomplish that.
Either way, we're all on the same side here.