The Aurora Massacre
People are going to talk for days about why the massacre happened, and how it happened, but today I’m going to talk about guns.
The AR-15 is one scary-ass gun. It has the penetrating power to kill two people with one bullet, is semi-automatic, and the gun laws in Colorado allow civilians to purchase extended magazines that carry 100 bullets.
If you would have said to me a week ago, people could buy 100 bullet cartridges for assault rifles, I wouldn’t have believed it. Those types of cartridges don’t even appear in Call of Duty.
Why does this matter? If you’ve ever played a FPS, you know that if you need to reload in the middle of a fire fight, you’re dead. So, if you have 100 bullets in your magazine, you get 100 shots, which could mean 100 people shot before you need to reload. Comparing this with a 20-round magazine, the shooter would need to reload four times to shoot the same number of people.
The pro-gun crowd will say that if more people were carrying firearms, this would have never happened. This ignores the fact that an AR-15 is so much more powerful than a handgun. It’s not as if the average mother is going to carry an assault rifle to match-up with the murderer. Also, if these movie-goers are carrying hand guns, they might need to reload two or three times to stay in the fire-fight. In that time, the murderer could have killed all the people that are shooting back.
The wrong conclusion is that we need to loosen gun laws so that people can purchase really fucking scary guns with 1,000 bullet magazines. That will cause hundreds of people injured instead of seventy.
Is it too ridiculous to ask that we make it illegal to purchase 100-round magazines on assault rifles? Furthermore, why should it be legal to purchase an AR-15? There is no purpose for these two things, except for mass murder.
The fact is that we couldn’t have predicted this, but we could have saved a few more lives by having sensible gun control.
