The Virginia House of Delegates approved an assault weapons ban on a party line vote Friday.
Fairfax County Democratic Del. Dan Helmer’s bill would end the sale and transfer of assault firearms manufactured after July 1, 2024. It also prohibits the sale of certain large capacity magazines.
“This bill would stop the sale of weapons similar to those I and many of the other veterans carried in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Helmer said.
Gonna need at least 15 rounds for a self-defense oriented pistol, and 30 for a home defense rifle.
This is the classic problem with democracy “I don’t know anything about this topic but I definitely have opinions anyway.” And look, I get it, and I don’t have a solution to this democratic problem. There’s no good test for reasonable expertise so we can’t be excluding people from having opinions in areas based on knowledge. Furthermore, if you feel strongly that an issue affects you, how well educated do you really need to be before your opinion becomes valid?
Yea, I don’t buy it. I’m saying I don’t know much about guns because I don’t want any in my house, but given what people “claim” they need guns for (hunting / defense) 5 bullets should be plenty.
WTF do you need 30 rounds for? Are you fighting an army? My guess is that any burglar is running away after the first shot, you’re not going to be in an action movie 30 minute shoot out.
This is the problem with 2a people, they have these fantasies of what is “needed” that’s completely detached from reality and just serves to provide guns to maniacs that can go on shooting rampages.
There are multiple reasons you need a small handful of bullets for self defense:
You don’t want to have to count rounds during the most stressful situation in your life. You should be focused on other tasks besides worrying about round count and reloading.
Bullets are the fastest and most reliable way to disable someone, yes, but they’re not instant like in the movies. Unless you get a head shot (usually not advised) or hit their spine (a bit of luck) they don’t have to stop fighting for a decent amount of time. You need multiple hits until they give up or are forced to.
You use up bullets way faster than you think. Your scenario where a 30 round magazine is appropriate (to you) would average one shot per minute. A typical self defense shooting is averaging multiple shots per second.
Smart home invaders bring buddies.
If they knew you only had five shots, couldn’t they just count your shots and then come after you?
Do you really want to have to deal with a potentially deadly encounter with “enough” preparation, or would you like to have way more than enough?
Self-defense pistols require higher mag capacity for 2 reasons.
One reason is because the goal of shooting an attacker isn’t to kill him from blood loss in 40 minutes. It’s to stop him from killing you in 5 seconds, meaning it generally requires multiple hits to physically stop them.
And the bigger reason is because precise shooting under stress is really, really difficult. In a 2-way shooting scenario with 5 rounds the most likely outcome is you miss all 5 shots. You carry 12-15 rounds in the mag not so you can shoot someone 12 times - you do it so you have 12 chances to hit.
It’s also one of the reasons you don’t hear about people with concealed firearms taking out mass shooters very often. Anyone with a lick of training knows they’re going to miss most of their shots and that they’re more likely to shoot an innocent bystander than the shooter.