I had some concern that my rhetoric, in my comment preceding yours, was a bit overheated. I stand by it, but I am nonetheless nigh unto delighted that you look

I had some concern that my rhetoric, in my comment preceding yours, was a bit overheated. I stand by it, but I am nonetheless nigh unto delighted that you look past the form to find the substance -- to say nothing of the fact that you seem willing to give that substance honest consideration, something I've found regrettably rare in discussions of this nature. For all of this I thank you very kindly; many, many others, who in general share your opinion of the matter, would do very well indeed, in discussions such as these, to model their behavior upon your sterling example. Now, then: For a private citizen to possess grenades, bombs, or other such weapons, is already felonious under the "destructive devices" provision of the National Firearms Act. Explosives in general have industrial use, but are not much less tightly regulated all the same; however, taking a lawfully obtained explosive and fashioning it into a weapon, such as a grenade or bomb, brings it under the auspices of the NFA. The NFA also very strictly regulates fully automatic weapons to the extent where legally coming into possession of one is, for most purposes, effectively impossible. Manufacture of such weapons is similarly restricted, and the law on this point is quite uncompromising; should a weapon in your possession, even through malfunction, fire more than one round on a single squeeze of the trigger, it is considered to be an automatic weapon, and your possession of it therefore necessarily in violation of law. I'd argue that these provisions do a great deal to demonstrate the effectiveness of the gun laws we have. The use of improvised explosive weapons is rare, albeit often striking when it does occur (e.g. the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma federal building); the use of automatic weapons in mass shootings is practically unheard of. Handguns, believe it or not, actually do have some application in hunting. I mind me of a man I once knew who used one to hunt wild boar, which is sort of a porcine equivalent of the wolverine, only larger, nastier, and a lot harder to kill. To hunt boar, you find one, attract its attention, and induce it to charge -- something which I gather boars' general disposition makes fairly trivial. Then, ideally before the creature approaches closely enough to disembowel you, you shoot it in the head. As you may imagine, this requires an easily maneuvered weapon which throws a heavy round: "What happens if you miss?" I once asked him. "Well," he said, "then you're fucked." Amusing anecdotes aside, from the perspective of the current discussion, handguns do admittedly pose a somewhat stickier problem. For one thing, I'm not sure anyone really has need for items such as the 33-round magazine Jared Loughner used in the Tucson shooting two years ago; such high capacities strike me mostly as a sop to relatively incompetent shooters. (A competent shooter should be able, having spent some effort developing the skill, to reload a semiautomatic handgun and resume fire in something like two or three seconds. That capability doesn't render magazine capacity irrelevant, but it certainly renders it less so.) In fact, I'd almost be willing to consider practicable a general ban on semi-automatic handguns (i.e., not revolvers). The trouble is that such a ban would of necessity be uneven in application; lawful handgun owners desirous of continued compliance with the law -- which is to say, more or less all lawful handgun owners -- would turn in their handguns, while those not so concerned would retain them. This problem generalizes well, I think, across any sort of law prohibiting firearms of a certain type, class, &c.; specifically, there is a strong correlation between someone being likely to use a firearm in the commission of a crime, and someone who will not comply with a legal requirement that he turn in the firearm he would otherwise use in the commission of a crime. There are, for better or for worse, a lot of handguns in this country. To not only ban them, but have any assurance of collecting most of them from legal and illegal owners alike, would require the sort of police action which would set civil liberties hardliners howling from now until the Last Trump, and not incidentally would itself require either an enormous expansion of police forces, or a nationwide deployment of National Guard and regular Army forces of the sort more ordinarily employed, in much more strictly limited scope, for suppression of civil disorder on the scale of the 1992 Los Angeles riots. And I'd be entirely unsurprised to see such action provoke riots, and nasty ones at that, among those who, we might euphemistically say, see their firearms as a way to enforce the redress of social inequality. Speaking as one who lives near to, and works nearer to, an area in which such riots would occur if anywhere, I'd just as soon avoid them, thanks. Practicalities aside, though, even many hardline gun-rights advocates agree that a revolver is in many ways more serviceable for personal defense than a semi, for several good and sensible reasons. But that's just the trouble: I see no sensible way in which to set practicalities aside, in this case. If I thought it were possible to implement something like a semiautomatic handgun ban, without unreasonably curtailing lawful self-defense and without doing our nation's already threadbare social fabric far more harm than the status quo, then it's not something to which I'd feel any need to object. But, as with any social engineering project, the essential trouble is that you don't get to start from a clean slate -- and, that being inescapably the case, I find it impossible to imagine how any such program could be implemented without doing far more harm than good. (All of which assumes the political will to implement such an even-handed program, which I cannot imagine existing in the modern United States; I think it a much more likely result that those lobbying for the ban would be satisfied to disarm legal owners and leave well enough alone in the case of all others.)