Yep, agreed with all that except I wouldn’t say machine guns “are not” banned. I would say new sales to civilians are banned ... that’s a type of ban. It’s just a ban that “grandfathers in” the existing automatic weapons already owned by civilians at the time the law was enacted, among other exceptions. But, there’s no need for us to quibble over semantics.
Is there a deeper point you are trying to make, that I am missing? I.e., are you disagreeing with something I said, or are you just commenting on the subject?
The point I was trying to make is that automatic weapons are “highly restricted” (to use your terminology) because they have very high killing power in the hands of a single person, and not much other use. And those higher restrictions have been effective in preventing mass shootings using such weapons.
“High caliber, high magazine capacity gas-operated semi-automatics” (I won’t say “assault weapon” if you prefer - the exact terminology doesn’t matter) should be “highly restricted” like fully automatic weapons, for the same reasons. That was my point.
Incidentally, for context, a majority of Americans agree with this view. Source:
Analyzing Surveys on Banning Assault Weapons
Why some people ardently oppose this, after the horrific incidents of Newtown, Sandy Hook, Aurora, Las Vegas, El Paso, Dayton .... the list goes on .... is beyond me. There are now people in the US who have been victims / near victims of multiple mass shootings. In one weekend, there was a mass shooting in my hometown of Dayton and my current state of Texas. The US has a mass shooting problem. We do not have a lack-of-deadly-enough-guns problem.