That’s 100% the problem, right there. You seem to think that putting FRTs and Glock switches in as many hands as possible will win us more friends. You’re horribly wrong and that viewpoint will destroy the 2A when one of those is inevitably misused.
I agree with you, conceptually. Gun control sucks. But it ain’t our two opinions that matter. Like it or not, we live in a society with hundreds of millions of other people, who all get opinions and votes too, and as much as we might wish it otherwise, no freedom is absolute or unlimited. Society has rules, and those rules are primarily generated as responses to negative events and trauma. Society made rules saying we can’t look at or possess certain things, made rules saying that we can’t say or do certain things in certain contexts, etc. I can’t go fly an airplane next to a major airport without licensure. I can’t drive wherever I want. I can’t take your stuff or your money. I can’t randomly fire bullets into buildings to see if they’re occupied, etc. That’s the social contract, and like it or not, it’s real.
I don’t want a gun ban, but we as a 2A community need to be respectful and realistic and rational when dealing with our fellow citizens. Things that turn common, safe and legal handguns and rifles into hair-trigger de facto machine guns aren’t making our weapons safer to use, more accurate or more reliable. These devices are designed to defeat internal safeties and facilitate firing as many rounds as possible in as short a time as possible. How is that responsible use of a firearm? What happens when some idiot uses an FRT in a “defensive” shooting, putting out 15-30 rounds in a burst, and hits unintentional targets? Would you want your neighbor in an apartment or next door home-defending against a bump in the night with something dumping dozens of rounds at the press of a trigger?
I think a lot of you 2A absolutists need to look at how we got to gun control and how we dug ourselves out of it. Y’all are nostalgic for the days when boys took rifles to school and hunted…well, do you know why that ended? Because the collected exceptional events of misuse (brandishing, fights, drinking, the occasional school and/or school-adjacent shooting, threats, etc) piled up to the point it couldn’t be ignored, and eventually, heinous acts compelled people to change the law to remove local discretion and “loopholes” and the like. And yeah, it was bad for all involved. But it happened because irresponsible gun owners and users pushed the limits of public tolerance past the breaking point. And they overreacted, and we as a 2A community suffered for it and it took more tragedies to push us back towards a sane center. We have made a lot of gains in the past 20 years in terms of securing our right to carry firearms in public, to carry without unconstitutional permits, and even to compel anti-gun states to cease persecuting people who want to carry firearms (imperfect, but a work in progress). We’ve actually got society agreeing mostly with our message. Let’s not blow that momentum and goodwill to mag-dump obnoxiously.
Six years ago, a psychopath used semiautomatic rifles fitted with bump stocks to kill 59 people and injure hundreds more at a concert. Similar devices to accelerate functional firing rates have been used in other mass shootings. Those were pale imitations of machine guns to our little community in retrospect, but could anyone really tell the difference at the time? And some of yall want to make those more accessible? What is wrong with you? How do I convince my high-school girl next door neighbor/crush, who was at that concert and saw her friend get shot, with a vote identical to my own, to support the RTKBA to an unlimited degree that puts FRTs and machine gun analogues out right next to her 9mm CCW? My brothers in Christ, she already fervently believes ARs should be banned- “i don’t think there’s a good reason to have that many bullets” was what she said about the issue. What makes our opinions and votes more important or valid than hers? For that matter, do we really want to be in a firearms community where people normalize firing **bursts**? What happened to basic firearms awareness and safety?
It is really hard to find a defensible shooting situation for a functional FA firearm that is not hard-linked to a range or other very, very limited and controlled context. These are not conducive to those circumstances and should be banned on a federal level.
