I will not buy the "whatabout all the mass shootings by gang members" argument. That is a social problem that cannot be influenced by laws, or mental health care, so let's completely set aside that phenomenon for a minute. We now live in a culture where disaffected young men who legally buy semi auto weapons and large capacity mags, and then go on suicide murder rampages like they're in some fictional first person shooter game. This is ridiculous. I am well aware that dramatically cutting off access to this type of equipment will not dramatically reduce gun deaths overall in America, but it has the potential to seriously cut into this type of domestic terrorism. I'm fully aware 99.9% of legally owned semiautomatic guns are not misused, but our freedom to own such things is not worth the cost of even one more of these types of mass shootings in my opinion. This will leave these cowards to use pump shotguns or rent trucks and drive them into crowds. So be it. You can't cause as much damage doing that than the Vegas shooter.
furthermore, semiautomatic guns serve no practical civilian purpose. You dont need them to defend your home. Get a pump shotgun and buckshot. You also can't practically use them to guard against the tyranny of the government in this day and age.
I was a slippery slope advocate for a long time. I've dropped this. At this point I don't even care if it is a slippery slope or not. I'm sick of living with all this needless gun violence in our country and if that means I have to do a background check for private gun sale, register my guns, get a FOID card, use a smart handgun, whatever - sign me up if it will help solve our gun violence problem. I know this will cost me more and be a hassle too. I'm fine with all that.
to those of you who think such ideas betray 2nd amendment, solidarity with all gun owners, etc know that I respect your opinions too and I am open to being persuade differently. I just will not accept the line "people kill people, not guns." It really is both. It's far to easy for bad people to do the bad things they are going to anyways by how cheap, easily accessible, and quick it is to amass a personal mass murder kit.
I understand that you feel this way, but I'd like to address some things.
First, if you're not going to buy the mass shootings by gang members, then you are going to have to take those numbers out of the statistics, so if we are going to set it aside, then we need to mitigate the mass shooting statistics accordingly.
We have lived in a society where disaffected young men have been able to legally buy semi auto weapons and mags for a long time, this isn't a now thing...heck, when I was a kid, you could buy a surplus M1 carbine out of a wooden barrel by the counter at Western Auto. Access is much more controlled and difficult now than it was then, yet the prevalence of these tragedies is higher now.
I hate to have to say this, because it sounds cold and callous when I even think it, but you just as well get ready for the next one of these tragedies, because it's coming. There isn't a thing we can do to stop it. You could make a law tomorrow that every semi-auto rifle in America has to be turned in by Monday, and it wouldn't stop it. It's a sad terrible truth, but the answer to stopping some of these doesn't lie in adjusting firearms policy, but in finding ways to identify people who pose a threat, and getting them the help they need. We don't have a gun violence problem, we have a violence problem.
I'm not going to try and change your mind, everyone needs to reach their own conclusions on things such as this, nor would I advocate for anyone to ostracize you from "the club", but I would encourage you to reexamine the facts from a place with less emotion, and really weigh whether or not any of these things would make a real difference, because if you look back at many of these tragedies, most of the things you mentioned would not have...and if it's just a measure mollify the raw emotions of the masses without accomplishing any real results, then what's the point? All you've done is waste a lot of time, energy and probably political capital that could have been spent finding results that would accomplish something.