These recommended first steps on legal purchasing age and background checks are minimal and woefully insufficient gun control measures.  The ownership of all semi-automatic or fully automatic assault weapons and high-capacity magazines for pistols and long guns must be totally banned or no one is safe from future massacres of this horribly frequent type.  There are many millions of such military weapons out there among civilians and that by their very nature and design are unacceptably dangerous in a civilized society.  Would you fly anywhere if tens of thousands of people owned transportable surface-to-air missiles mounted on pick-up truck beds capable of bringing down airliners from concealed locations?  What if the NRA supported the sale of nerve gas to anyone 18 or 21 or whatever?  Would they claim that is also covered under their fanatically twisted interpretation of “the right to bear arms?”  Well, any one owner of a military-style death weapon such as the AR-15 could kill an entire church or classroom or picnic or grandstand or wedding or club full of people by firing rapidly with a satchel full of high capacity magazines before any help could possibly be on the way. 

“For an average shooter, you’re talking about a top speed of about two shots per second, which means you’re emptying a mag in 15 seconds. Reloading takes maybe four seconds, so it’s 19 seconds to empty a mag and recharge. So the effective rate is about 90 rounds per minute, not counting the time it takes to aim.”   

Ninety people could be dead or dying within a minute.  That’s 450 within five minutes. These are not hunting rifles.  They are human life destroyers. 

Like many of the world’s leading nations, the US should ban the production, sale, ownership, trading, use, and transportation of these battlefield weapons that are designed solely to inflict the most severe harm imaginable to our mortal flesh.  Be ashamed of America until we ban every single one of them, or else prepare yourself for more grisly headlines like the ones from the theater in Aurora CO, the elementary school in Newtown CT, the concert venue in Las Vegas, the church in Texas, and MSD High School in Parkland.   And even if you have convinced yourself that background checks can weed out every psychopath from the sportsmen or those seeking only self defense from their paranoid fears of government invasion of their homes, that does nothing about the millions of current owners who already own an arsenal geared for mass murder or who have no record of mental health issues. And if even only one in a million of these owners of military-style guns snaps and becomes a hate-filled deranged killer and goes on a bloody rampage,  that means carnage beyond imagination from fifty or so murder-suicide massacres per year.   How many foresaw Las Vegas? 

Thanks to the NRA, their Republican puppets in Congress and the White House and state houses, and the widespread ownership of weapons of mass death, we ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.  America:  Ban the hyper-lethal weapons now!  Do it for the courageous children of Parkland…and for all the children and everyone else in the USA.

Roy Van Til, Vienna ME