Well, there are a lot of reasons people buy guns. Men like to play with powerful, dangerous things, c.f. chainsaws, sports cars, etc. All well and good, count

Well, there are a lot of reasons people buy guns. Men like to play with powerful, dangerous things, c.f. chainsaws, sports cars, etc. All well and good, count me among them. One indicator of a powerful dangerous thing is it being used by the military. Some of the very richest people in the world own things like decommissioned fighter jets. All of this is good fun as long as we're just blasting flowerpots at the range. We live in a confusing world, where killing, especially mass murder is prohibited, and we will give you our harshest punishment for it, unless it's in the context of a war, in which case we will give you a medal and call you a hero for it. All of this is to say that people want to own the closest thing to a military assault rifle that they can. You saw in the 1994 assault weapons ban, and in the various California assault weapons laws, that entrepreneurs will come up with ingenious ways to obey the letter of the law while circumventing the spirit of it. I do support an assault weapons ban. I don't like the idea of a bureaucrat deciding whether something falls under the intent of a law, but I don't see a great alternative given all the water under the bridge on workarounds for gun laws. The intent should be this: discourage/restrict guns that are not relatively better for sporting or defensive purposes, but are relatively better for offensive, murderous purposes. Magazine capacity limits for sure, and maybe restrictions on detachable box magazines should be considered. In a mass shooting scenario, where one person is armed, and everyone else is unarmed, we want to give the unarmed as many chances as possible, and for as long a duration as possible, to disarm the shooter. Any sort of mod that enables the weapon to shoot more than about 1-2 rounds per second is obviously unnecessary for sporting purposes and dangerous for a mass shooter with a high capacity mag. Pistol grips I'm neutral on, although I don't see a sporting purpose, and they do certainly help with control of a weapon in combat. Intermediate caliber cartridges don't seem to have a sporting purpose, and they are good for mass shootings. I'd be inclined to restrict them, perhaps allowing a pistol grip or intermediate caliber but not both in one weapon.