There’s basically two kinds of GOPer involved in the whole guns thing. Most are the dumb kind, but let’s look at the smart kind first. These guys are the ones on the top of the heap. They are well enough educated and intelligent enough to know that the crap they spew is BS. They won’t touch any kind of gun control with a 20 foot pole because they are too busy sucking at the teat of NRA-aligned PACs and because “That’s what those evil commie democrats who want to take your guns are about.” Yes, they know that talking point is unadulterated crap but it gets the dumb ones in line to vote for ‘em so hey, lets say it anyway. They are genuinely evil, or at least amoral. Bubba wants to believe it so they say it, and Bubba’s too dumb to know he’s being lied to by somebody who knows that it’s a lie but says it anyway because it gets the rubes to do what they want, to give them the power they crave, These smart but evil ones are a minority. There aint room for too many on the top of that pile and they want to be sure it continues to be them. When thinking about gun control we can basically write these folks out of the equation. They are gun-pushers because it’s politically convenient to be. If it ceases to be so, they’ll use a different lever like being “pro life” or “promoting Christian Values.” They’ll never support ANY kind of gun control, “on principle” although they wouldn’t know a principle if it crawled up their trouser leg and bit them on the dried-up and shrivelled scrotum. The best we can hope for from these guys is that they sit down and shut up if we make the political cost of opening their yaps on the subject too high.
So then we come to the dumb ones. The “Gun Nuts” — most of these believe themselves to actually be “responsible firearm owners” when they are anything but. Let’s set aside any generalisation on why they are “Gun Nuts” because there are too many reasons. One bunch might fear the government coming in and “taking their stuff.” Another might be white supremacists. Yet another might believe the end-times are coming and they need to be able to defend their good God-fearing families. Some might even be scared of the zombie apocalypse or fit into all of the above groups. You get the picture.
These guys are DUMB. But they are quite capable of ingenuity and sneakiness.
They can’t get full-auto guns so they come up with bump stocks. Ban those they’ll come up with something else to increase their rate of fire, because they LOVE “spray and pray”, particularly the rather sizeable chunk of this crowd that honestly, ain’t that good marksmen. Ban detachable box magazines and watch a Garand-style clip-loading system (almost as fast to reload, but we’ll be able to identify the idiots from the massive crop of blood blisters on their thumbs) become the mainstream in this crew. Ban semi-auto rifles and watch some “clever” idiot come up with a revolver chambered for a full-up rifle round onto which they graft a long barrel and a shoulder stock — and speedloaders to match.
If your end goal is to reduce the number and severity of gun-related atrocities committed in America by dumb people with guns, you will not achieve this just by banning or restricting the “crazies current favorite weapon.” They’ll find a new favorite weapon and optimise and customise the F out of it to the point it becomes as much of a problem as the one you just banned. It will only be a matter of time.
Truly effective gun control must be both universal and general. Universal as in it applies to everyone and to all firearms. General in that it must be written such that it CANNOT be worked around, that it can’t carve out specific categories of gun to regulate while leaving others untouched — that’s only inviting the ones you leave untouched to become your next problem. Once you have THAT you can carve out narrowly written exceptions if you want. Exempt air weapons under a given muzzle energy. Heck, if you want you can exempt anything that’s single action and cannot fire (or be converted to fire) a heavier or more powerful round than the .22LR “plinking round” that we’ve all fired at fairground shooting galleries (out of guns with deliberately messed up sights to make sure the operator doesn’t pay out too much in prizes) or at cans on the fence.
Everybody that’s worked any kind of cybersecurity knows how much more effective it is to “restrict everything, then whitelist what’s allowed” rather than trying to build a “blacklist of everything bad.” Making gun control work is no different. It’s similar in another way too. If you want folks to stop trying to work around the policy you make it simple, and you make compliance with it a LOT easier than trying to wiggle through any cracks it’s got.
I do not believe restricting a “class” of firearm specifically will work in America. But properly designed “gun control” can.