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The studies you cite are faulty on at least one count--they only surveyed people incarcerated.
That leaves a gaping unknown hole regarding actual crimes committed.
Given that we are discussing portability and ease of using/getting rid of a weapon, the characteristic bears a direct relationship to whether the stats those studies are using is accurate. I'm surprised the authors didn't raise that question themselves, but maybe they did. I haven't read those studies personally. But it's highly inaccurate to argue how often a weapon is used in a crime based on who is sitting in prison.
Also, unless we know what percent of the population actually committed a gun related offense, those figures are artificially inflated. If 70% of our population is incarcerated due to drug related offenses (it is) and only ~8% are due to violent offenses (they are), then we want to know the percentage of those 8% who used such a weapon, not the entire 100% population--because we know that an IV heroin user isn't relevant to the count of how many people use these weapons unless his crime was bucking a .45 for a fix.
In regard to your last paragraph. You can disagree with my statement, I can't convince you about the intent of the bill because your mine appears made up already. When a bill winds its way through Congress, everyone gets to piddle with it until it's passable. I don't know what the machinations were that rendered it toothless in the end. But our representatives didn't sit around thinking of ways to scare the public into losing their 2nd amendment rights. They were dealing with a real problem of people shooting larger numbers of people than was the usual case in a more rapid fashion than a typical handgun and sport rifle.
I also made my position clear on the matter that it's downright nonsense to say a bill didn't intend to ban a particular function when manufacturers found loopholes to continue making rifles that did not vary in too much function.
Are you suggesting that you would support a ban if it criminalized all multi-round rifles that were easily concealable, highly portable, and rapid firing?
Or are you just picking at a bill and finding reasons retrospectively that justify the conclusion you already came to?
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"The theory of a free press is that truth will emerge from free discussion, not that it will be presented perfectly and instantly in any one account." -- Walter Lippmann
"You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists." -- Abbie Hoffman
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