Well, who wouldn't like to see gangbangers unable to get weapons of any sort, because they're not the ones who will use them responsibly. That's not the issue.
Look at the homicides in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, where the gangbangers have automatic weapons. Better have lots of life insurance if you're the chief of police there, because the odds are good you'll die in a fusilade of bullets from an automatic weapon while driving to work.
MS-13 is active in our cities. Would you feel safer if they had easy access to machine guns? There's really no pressing valid reason for any law-abiding citizen to have the capability to mow down 30 people in a minute, is there?
It is possible to "mow down" 30 people in a minute with any number of hi-cap,semi- auto weapons. whats the diff?
Do you really think that criminals or gangs don't have automatic weapons because it's difficult to get them through legal channels? You've got to be kidding me here... While I can't say for certain that this is the reason, I have a suspician that the reason they don't use them here (as opposed to other countries, like in Latin America), is because they're afraid that the US government, specifically the military, would come down upon them like a ton of bricks. If you can by a "real" AK-47 on the world market for less than $100, and given the sheer number of tons of drugs that are smuggled into the US every year, you don't think that they could smuggle automatic weapons in too?
There's got to be a reason that they're not using these sorts of weapons here.
Mark
"There's really no pressing valid reason for any law-abiding citizen to have the capability to mow down 30 people in a minute, is there?"
That can be done with a semi-auto. Should we treat them like machine guns?