Summary of Feinstein's Gun Bill coming in January

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Not passing the House and not getting 60 (maybe not even 50) votes in the Senate. But the gun nuts will run around screaming like the paranoid freaks they are anyway.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

The old AWB was stupid, and the new one, if based on it would also be stupid, and an utterly meaningless piece of legislation. An actually effective AWB would have a tough time getting through a Democratic House, much less the current one.

But the argument that the AWB at least prevented murders committed with the covered weapons is silly (assuming it's even true, murders with them were rare before, during and after the ban.) Let's imagine a parallel universe where for whatever reason the government has banned red cars. Go outside and see how many red cars you can find. Now in this case, does that mean the owners of the red cars wouldn't drive cars at all? No, they would just drive different colored cars. That's the case with the AWB. If someone couldn't get ahold of the banned weapon, they'd just use one that looks differently but is just as powerful.

Now as said above, I'll admit that an actual far reaching ban (say ban everything except for small handguns and basic hunting rifles) might be effective in stopping things like the Connecticut shooting (I've always held that gun control is useless as far as organized crime is concerned, and still do, though lately I've come to hold that there's a lot more in play here than just organized crime and thus gun control could be effective in some respects.) but we all know how easy passing and enforcing that would be. Passing some half-assed ineffective bill in its lieu to make ourselves feel good is not a good strategy.