In some ways, the assault rifle is now a symbol on both sides. In Connecticut, which has some of the most restrictive gun laws in the country, Murphy says tons of his constituents hunt and he never hears complaints about their inability to mow down deer without a rapid-fire rifle. (OK, we might permit an exemption for the folks down South who need to cut back on the herds of very speedy 300-pound wild pigs.) Guns like the infamous semiautomatic AR-15 aren’t really needed for sport. Joe Biden would love to take action, but he hasn’t come up with anything more dramatic than nominating a permanent director for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.Ī permanent director would be a post-Trump triumph. Nobody believes anything as controversial as banning semiautomatic rifles is going to get through the current Senate. And Congress responded by … pretty much ignoring the matter completely. After the ban expired, the number of mass shootings increased. “There’s a lot of safer and more effective ways to get to the stores.”Ĭongress did indeed ban semiautomatic rifles in 1994, in a law with a 10-year expiration date. (A memoir of his transformation, “ Gunfight,” was published last year.)Ĭlaiming that you need a semiautomatic rifle for hunting, Busse said, is like arguing that you need a Formula One racecar to go shopping. I think they doth protest too much,” said Ryan Busse, a former executive in the gun industry who’s now become a critic. “The industry has gone to an extreme effort to argue it’s a needed hunting gun. It turns out that in many states, semiautomatic rifles are basically regarded as weapons of sport - the kind of thing you’d use to go hunting deer or target shooting. Yeah, C does simplify things, doesn’t it? After we learned that Payton Gendron, the 18-year-old suspect in the Buffalo shooting, had been able to buy an AR-15-style assault rifle with just a little more effort than it’d take to buy a burrito, inquiring minds wanted to know why. See a pattern here, anybody? And what do you think we should do about it?ī) Limit the sale of semiautomatics to people with hunting licenses The gunman at the Pulse nightclub used a semiautomatic rifle. Murphy later moved on to the Senate, where in 2016 he staged an old-school filibuster, speaking for over 14 hours to protest the fact that his colleagues weren’t planning to do anything after the Pulse nightclub shooting that killed 49 in Florida. Murphy was formerly the congressman from the district where 20-year-old Adam Lanza killed 26 people, including 20 children, with a semiautomatic rifle at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012. “Despite gun violence rates going through the roof, the country only pays attention when there’s a mass shooting, and then the country only pays attention for 24 to 48 hours.” “That’s the pattern,” said Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut. But when it comes to the rest of the country, one man who ought to know says the public has already started to move on. Well, for the families and friends of victims of the Buffalo supermarket disaster, where 10 people were killed by a gunman with a semiautomatic rifle, obviously forever. How long does it take to get over a mass shooting?
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