clo,
Somehow, I doubt armed guards would have made much difference. This guy had murderous intent, and he was going to find some way to do it.
Please understand I'm truly interested in your responses here - I'm not trying to pick a fight.
Can you cite your source, indicating that 40% of gun sales are online and without a background check? While I can believe that 40% of gun sales are online, 99% of those DO indeed require a background check, and are handled through a dealer in the buyer's state, as per Federal law. The ones that don't are face-to-face transactions between residents of the same state. In truth, most common carriers (UPS, Fedex, etc) will not ship a firearm to anyone except a Federal Firearms License holder, and an FFL cannot legally release the firearm to an individual without a background check.
As for magazines, how should we define what is "too large for civilian use"? At what point does that magazine make the gun more dangerous and/or more deadly? If we limit the capacity of the magazines, shouldn't we also limit the number of magazines someone can have for each gun? Changing magazines takes about 1-2 seconds for someone who has practiced it - barely a pause.
In your eyes, what makes a gun an "assault gun" (aside from magazine capacity, which I addressed above). "Assault guns", unfortunately, is a mis-used term. It is used to refer to any firearm (usually a rifle) that is black and has any number of accessories added to it. In reality, these accessories do nothing to make the gun more dangerous.
The military's "assault guns" are fully-automatic machine guns - something that is very strictly regulated and financially out of reach for most folks. And as for handguns - those currently issued to some branches of the military are exactly the same as the ones available for civilian purchase. In fact, civilians had them first.
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