Too many stereotypes, not enough thinking

I read some crap the other day about how Bush screwed up by allowing the assault rifle ban to expire and I thought I’d comment on it.

The problem with people today is that they all want easy answers. I think it started with the scourge of mankind, the baby boomers, with their smug, condescending, shallow thinking and selfishness in regards to just about everything. Since the 1960’s, this country has become obsessed with information. Unfortunately, we don’t do anything with it, just throw it out there, randomly blaming everyone for everything, regardless of whether it makes sense or not. It sounds like I’m rambling but here’s where I’m going with it (back to the gun ban). The people for the gun ban have absolutely no idea what was banned, why, and most importantly, whether it did anything. To qualify, I’m not a republican and I’m not in the NRA, but I’m also not stupid. When the ban was lifted, all the big news stations covered it as if it were the end of the world, always showing video of gun store racks filled with “assault rifles” that were banned. The only problem is that none of the guns they showed were actually banned. AR-15’s, Mini-14’s, Bushmasters, and AK-47s were never banned. You just couldn’t buy them with magazines bigger than 10 rounds. Magazines for semi-auto pistols were also restricted to 10 rounds. How about full-automatic machine guns? Surely, they were banned. No. No, they weren’t. You could always buy a fully automatic machine gun, as long as you didn’t have a felony record and you bought a permit. There were a few guns banned, I’m not even sure exactly which models, but only thing the gun ban really did was drive up the price of various guns and magazines. It had no effect on crime and I’m not sure why anyone thought it would. Why all the complaints, then? Simple – people are stupid and they want easy answers. Anything that restricts guns in some way must be good, so go with it and if anyone complains, call them a right-wing, republican, peace-hating, bad guy. Remember, you don’t need facts if you have morality on your side.