Oh stop before you embarrass yourself. The guy's friends even say he's a leftist, if you can find a political motive (which I doubt you will -- I think he was just crazy, and she was the closest government type figure he could find) it will likely be that he was upset Congresswoman Gifford was so moderate.
So educate yourself. Go take a class, learn the basics. Many firearm ranges offer free or nearly free introductory courses, where they offer a basic familiarization with firearms, and allow you to use one for a little bit.
Hobby shooting is actually a pretty fun sport, IMHO -- I don't get much time to do it these days, but when I do, I enjoy it.
The use of a firearm is determined entirely by the user -- not the firearm. Any firearm can be used either offensively or defensively, depending on the desire of the user.
Ballistic armor is unwieldy and not as effective as you may have been led to believe.
Well, the UK has a pretty decent hobbyist shooting community, I talk to some of those guys on a pretty regular basis.
Slavery was something most of the founding fathers wanted to get rid of, but they didn't believe they could at the time. It's an absolute blot on this country's history, and fortunately we got rid of it.
There are absolutely places in this country that are not safe to go. In general, I attempt to avoid those places. In a perfect world, I could avoid where criminals are, with 100% certainty, all the time, and I suppose I wouldn't need to worry about protecting my family and myself. We don't live in a perfect world, and I prefer the ability to defend myself, should that need arise.
Well. First of all, the term "assault weapon" is being used incorrectly by you. The term "assault weapon" refers to a select-fire weapon, whose manufacture for civilian use has been prohibited by the Hughes Act since 1986. The legally transferrable ones that survive command prices that range from five thousand up to several hundred thousand dollars, and require approval from local law enforcement and the BATFE to purchase.
Second, there are many semi-automatic hunting rifles, some that are even functionally identical to their civilian legal semi-auto "assault-weapon" clones. See the Remington R25, for an example.
Third, there is no weapon that fires "a gazillion rounds in 3 seconds", and that ridiculous statement simply shows your complete ignorance of the topic. One can fire exactly the same number of rounds, in the exact same amount of time, from a Remington R25, that they can from an AR-10.
You're being imprecise in your language, and by doing so you are attempting to draw distinctions that do not exist. If you actually had some concept of what you were discussing, you might argue that semi-automatic rifles, no matter what their marketing, make you nervous and afraid, but bolt action rifles are okay -- in which case I would have to point out that the Remington 700 is used by military snipers all over the world, as well as by hunters all over the world.
There is no distinction between a military and a hunting weapon -- except for the fact that most military weapons use intermediate calibers that are somewhat less effective than most hunting weapons. Kind of turns your argument on your head, doesn't it?
Oh, and "spray firing" is not a correct term. It's not used anywhere. If you want to talk about "spray and pray", that's a term we use for idiots who can't hit anything with their weapons. They're completely ineffective. And they don't require automatic weapons to do it.
Argue from facts, not emotion. You're allowing your irrational fear of pieces of metal to drive your emotions, and omitting fact from the discussion.
I hope you're not a native english speaker, because your last paragraph is completely incomprehensible. I have no idea what you mean.
No, I'm using absolute numbers, not per capita. That should have been obvious.
And your comparison is statistically moronic. Take a basic stats class, as you continue to argue correlation equals causation. That's a typical fallacy perpetrated by someone who doesn't understand basic statistics.
I can make a simple, functional, modern firearm with a mill and a lathe in a few hours. Anyone can be taught the basic skills to do that in a couple of days at most.
Your friend is crafting a work of art -- that's not what I'm talking about.
Look up what happened during prohibition for an example of what happens when you ban things.
You should research the 21 foot rule. It's very easy to kill someone with a knife.
And you misrepresent how easy it would be to illegally manufacture firearms if they were banned. With a lathe and a drillpress or mill, for probably a cost of less than $2000USD, one could set up shop, and make that back in a few days.
If you make the laws "lax enough", your black market will thrive, not go away. See Prohibition in the US for the example of how well that works.
If by "do better", you mean restrict my Constitutionally guaranteed access to firearms as a law-abiding citizen in order to obtain some imagined gain, I don't think that's a very good description of "do better".
Guns are an equalizer. The 5' 90lb 75 year old lady can protect herself with one, or she can become a victim without. I want her to have that ability, don't you?
Hunting rifles? When did we discuss hunting rifles?
A huge percentage of hunting rifles are semi-automatic, and only marginally different (missing one or two fire control group components) from their fully automatic cousins used in the military.
Did you know that it's entirely possible to fire a single round with a machine gun, and an "assault rifle" generally has a single-shot semi-automatic selector setting? Or that a 30 round magazine in an AR-15 pattern semi-automatic hunting rifle can be emptied in about 3 seconds by a trained shooter?
The line between "hunting rifle" and "assault weapon" is so blurry that neither are accepted by anyone familiar with firearms. They're simply not precise, nor do they accurately describe anything.
If you want to describe the difference between bolt action and semi automatic, or fixed magazine and detachable magazine, then we could have a discussion, but if you don't even understand the terms it's going to be pretty much absurd to try.
You should look up the 21 foot rule sometime. You can be murdered just as quickly and effectively by a complete amateur with knife, as by someone with a gun.
And what if your escape route to run away is blocked by your executioner -- you know, because you did what he said and went where he wanted you to -- perhaps into the walk-in freezer as has happened in cases in the past.
You obviously know nothing about the defensive use of a handgun. I do.
Japan, Singapore, and Taiwan are very regimented feudal societies whose subjects do not have the rights we do. We didn't found this country on that model, and we'll never go there. SCOTUS has made that abundantly clear in Heller and McDonald.
Well, I think you've covered in that post, the entirety of every debate technique *not* to use, if one wishes to retain any credibility.
You're obviously projecting your own inability to function in the presence of an inanimate object -- I believe Freud had something to say about that.
No, I actually don't fear anything -- whether I carry a gun or not, I'm pretty secure in who I am and what I can do, and, unlike Lisa's rocks, guns are actually capable of being used for protection. A gun is not a talisman, it's a tool.
Apartheid?? hahahaha. That's a good one. The completely irrelevant ravings of a lunatic mind.
Why would you pick Memphis, Seattle, and Galveston?
When I see things being cherry-picked, I assume that's done for a reason. Then I see that Arthur Kellerman is the one who did the study, and I already know that he did the study in order to prove that guns are dangerous to keep in the home, and that he didn't properly evaluate the information he gathered.
His biggest problem is that he only evaluates a "use of a gun in self defense" where a criminal is actually shot or killed. This *vastly* understates the facts, as *most* defensive uses of a firearm do *not* end in anyone being shot.
"Assault Weapons" are generally out of reach, financially, of the general populace, due to the fact that select-fire weapons made after 1986 are not legally ownable by civilians. An M16 costs about twelve thousand dollars, and MP5 can cost over 30k. They're also heavily regulated by the BATFE. I disagree with that, select-fire weapons are no more dangerous than anything else, and can be manufactured relatively easily if one wished to do so. In the history of this country, I believe only one has ever been used in the commission of a crime, and it was by a police officer.
Your points about handgun usage are spot on. God made men, Sam Colt made them equal...
All guns are capable of killing people. "Specifically made to kill people" isn't a characteristic you can "ban" or regulate based on. In fact, for a handgun you use to defend yourself, do you want it to *not* be good at its job?
I can't carry a shotgun around with me. It's simply not feasible. So I'll carry a handgun, tyvm. While it may make no difference to the outcome in your world, it makes *all* the difference to the outcome in mine -- as a handgun on my person will do a whole hell of a lot better job than a shotgun stored in the safe at home.
No... The amount of criminals arrested with handguns may have declined, they've just switched to other weapons. They're now claiming that knives are the problem, and have banned them. What's next? baseball bats? Wrenches? Hammers?
I far prefer to be able to defend myself against the criminals rather than unilaterally disarming and and hoping the criminals someday do the same -- that's an absolutely ridiculous plan.
And yes, crime rates did drop in states that didn't allow CCW, but not nearly as much as they did in Florida and the other states that pioneered the CCW movement. The highest crime rates in the country now reside in cities like Chicago, NYC, DC, and LA. There's one thing they all have in common -- and it's not how gun friendly they are.
Okay, now explain how that links to guns, exactly...
I see a murder problem, perhaps, but how are you going to link higher crime rates to guns? Do the guns cause the murders? Or perhaps the fact that Chicago does not permit its citizens to own firearms, and has a significant organized crime problem might have something to do with it. In fact, this completely invalidates your hypothesis -- since guns are banned in Chicago, the murder rate should be in line with Toronto, right? Or maybe the problem is not, in fact, guns. Maybe it's something else.
Maybe Phoenix' crime rates are caused by the fact that it's on the I-10/I-19 corridor, and has a massive drug and human trafficking problem. I would advance that as a far more likely hypothesis than that the problem is inanimate objects.
And gun ownership rates in the US are not "3x" the gun ownership rates in CA -- they're closer to 200x the gun ownership rate in Canda (1.6 million in Canada, 250 Million+ in the US, by best estimates). So if your hypothesis holds true, instead of 70 - 241 (montreal to phoenix), we should expect nearly *nine thousand* murders in Phoenix. Of course, that ignores the fact that gun ownership in Phoenix is probably about 3-5 times the US national average, as the north-eastern states with their draconian gun laws skew those numbers, and thus the murder rate in Phoenix, again, by your hypothesis, should be much higher.
So, does the US have a crime problem? Sure -- nobody's ever argued that. Guns don't cause that problem -- guns do give us the ability to defend ourselves against it.
Again, you're making a correlation == causation argument -- and ignoring clear evidence that is not the case.
In fact, I go many places where there may not be a police officer within a hundred miles. There might be a criminal though -- or a bear, or a wolf, or a mountain lion. Calling the police from the middle of the high desert and asking them to come get the bear off of me is highly unlikely to be a successful course of action. The same goes for calling them and asking them to come get the guy who is shooting me or chopping me up with an axe. When seconds count, the police are generally several minutes away, and sometimes many hours away.
My guns will never be involved in any "tragic accident involving two members of my family". I know that for a fact. Your contention that my family needs protection from me, indicates to me that you have a problem you are attempting to project onto me.
Fear of inanimate objects -- you should look up what Freud had to say about it.
Well, as I posted in response to someone else, if you ban handguns you'll simply have a black market spring up overnight. For a couple thousand dollars one could purchase a lathe and drill press, and crank out plenty of handguns for next to nothing.
So the argument is that if the populace is disarmed, they will simply be scared and submit to the criminal? What if they do? And then are killed for their trouble? At least here in the US, criminals have finally figured out that if they're going to commit a violent crime, they might as well eliminate the witnesses, as they stand a better chance of getting acquitted if they're caught. And they don't need a gun to kill a bunch of unarmed witnesses, your axe or whatever will do quite effectively -- the end result is the same, dead civilians. That's unacceptable to me.
You can look up the statistics that show clearly that when concealed carry began to be legalized throughout the US, violent crime statistics dropped. I'm not one to claim correlation == causation -- it doesn't, but we know for a fact that handguns are used defensively on a continual basis. I *want* a criminal to be "on edge" when he contemplates breaking into a home. I *want* him to know that he stands an excellent chance of being shot if he does. It's a deterrent. And in the event he decides to cross that line, and gets himself shot by the homeowner, I have no sympathy for him. He forfeited his life.
When a person makes that choice to cross over into violent crime, I *want* them to fear the armed citizen, and what he will do in response.
A 9mm Glock isn't the weapon I would *choose* to hunt with, but it's adequate for the job if I needed to. I've taken *plenty* of small game and varmints with a.22lr handgun, and in fact, a.22lr handgun is probably the most effective survival weapon in existence.
A handgun is primarily a defensive weapon, not an offensive weapon. Someone who really wants to kill someone uses a rifle -- we see even in the case under discussion that the shooter appears to have failed. Handguns save many lives each year in the US, and have for the entirety of our history. Criminals will do what they will -- handguns or no. Hell, ban handguns, and you'll simply have an explosion of people purchasing metal lathes and building their own. For the cost of a lathe and drill-press, one could build plenty of simple handguns.
Improvised explosive devices are relatively easy to build, and *far* more effective than handguns -- witness their use in the middle east, even though Kalashnikov assault rifles are relatively easy to get one's hand on there. An AK-47, for the record, is significantly more effective than a handgun for offensive purposes.
Regardless -- it doesn't matter. Debating something already settled by SCOTUS is absurd.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh stop before you embarrass yourself. The guy's friends even say he's a leftist, if you can find a political motive (which I doubt you will -- I think he was just crazy, and she was the closest government type figure he could find) it will likely be that he was upset Congresswoman Gifford was so moderate.
So educate yourself. Go take a class, learn the basics. Many firearm ranges offer free or nearly free introductory courses, where they offer a basic familiarization with firearms, and allow you to use one for a little bit.
Hobby shooting is actually a pretty fun sport, IMHO -- I don't get much time to do it these days, but when I do, I enjoy it.
The use of a firearm is determined entirely by the user -- not the firearm. Any firearm can be used either offensively or defensively, depending on the desire of the user.
Ballistic armor is unwieldy and not as effective as you may have been led to believe.
He said "useless for any legitimate use". Self defense is a perfectly legitimate use -- see Heller v. DC and McDonald v. Chicago.
Well, the UK has a pretty decent hobbyist shooting community, I talk to some of those guys on a pretty regular basis.
Slavery was something most of the founding fathers wanted to get rid of, but they didn't believe they could at the time. It's an absolute blot on this country's history, and fortunately we got rid of it.
There are absolutely places in this country that are not safe to go. In general, I attempt to avoid those places. In a perfect world, I could avoid where criminals are, with 100% certainty, all the time, and I suppose I wouldn't need to worry about protecting my family and myself. We don't live in a perfect world, and I prefer the ability to defend myself, should that need arise.
Well. First of all, the term "assault weapon" is being used incorrectly by you. The term "assault weapon" refers to a select-fire weapon, whose manufacture for civilian use has been prohibited by the Hughes Act since 1986. The legally transferrable ones that survive command prices that range from five thousand up to several hundred thousand dollars, and require approval from local law enforcement and the BATFE to purchase.
Second, there are many semi-automatic hunting rifles, some that are even functionally identical to their civilian legal semi-auto "assault-weapon" clones. See the Remington R25, for an example.
Third, there is no weapon that fires "a gazillion rounds in 3 seconds", and that ridiculous statement simply shows your complete ignorance of the topic. One can fire exactly the same number of rounds, in the exact same amount of time, from a Remington R25, that they can from an AR-10.
You're being imprecise in your language, and by doing so you are attempting to draw distinctions that do not exist. If you actually had some concept of what you were discussing, you might argue that semi-automatic rifles, no matter what their marketing, make you nervous and afraid, but bolt action rifles are okay -- in which case I would have to point out that the Remington 700 is used by military snipers all over the world, as well as by hunters all over the world.
There is no distinction between a military and a hunting weapon -- except for the fact that most military weapons use intermediate calibers that are somewhat less effective than most hunting weapons. Kind of turns your argument on your head, doesn't it?
Oh, and "spray firing" is not a correct term. It's not used anywhere. If you want to talk about "spray and pray", that's a term we use for idiots who can't hit anything with their weapons. They're completely ineffective. And they don't require automatic weapons to do it.
Argue from facts, not emotion. You're allowing your irrational fear of pieces of metal to drive your emotions, and omitting fact from the discussion.
I hope you're not a native english speaker, because your last paragraph is completely incomprehensible. I have no idea what you mean.
No, I'm using absolute numbers, not per capita. That should have been obvious.
And your comparison is statistically moronic. Take a basic stats class, as you continue to argue correlation equals causation. That's a typical fallacy perpetrated by someone who doesn't understand basic statistics.
I can make a simple, functional, modern firearm with a mill and a lathe in a few hours. Anyone can be taught the basic skills to do that in a couple of days at most.
Your friend is crafting a work of art -- that's not what I'm talking about.
Look up what happened during prohibition for an example of what happens when you ban things.
We revolted, remember?
Yes, the latest number for firearms in the US is 250 Million+. Most people own firearms -- many own quite a few.
You can look up statistics if you want to see how many CCW holders there are in the US, but the number has been rapidly growing since the early 90's.
You should research the 21 foot rule. It's very easy to kill someone with a knife.
And you misrepresent how easy it would be to illegally manufacture firearms if they were banned. With a lathe and a drillpress or mill, for probably a cost of less than $2000USD, one could set up shop, and make that back in a few days.
If you make the laws "lax enough", your black market will thrive, not go away. See Prohibition in the US for the example of how well that works.
If by "do better", you mean restrict my Constitutionally guaranteed access to firearms as a law-abiding citizen in order to obtain some imagined gain, I don't think that's a very good description of "do better".
Guns are an equalizer. The 5' 90lb 75 year old lady can protect herself with one, or she can become a victim without. I want her to have that ability, don't you?
Hunting rifles? When did we discuss hunting rifles?
A huge percentage of hunting rifles are semi-automatic, and only marginally different (missing one or two fire control group components) from their fully automatic cousins used in the military.
Did you know that it's entirely possible to fire a single round with a machine gun, and an "assault rifle" generally has a single-shot semi-automatic selector setting? Or that a 30 round magazine in an AR-15 pattern semi-automatic hunting rifle can be emptied in about 3 seconds by a trained shooter?
The line between "hunting rifle" and "assault weapon" is so blurry that neither are accepted by anyone familiar with firearms. They're simply not precise, nor do they accurately describe anything.
If you want to describe the difference between bolt action and semi automatic, or fixed magazine and detachable magazine, then we could have a discussion, but if you don't even understand the terms it's going to be pretty much absurd to try.
Good points.
You should look up the 21 foot rule sometime. You can be murdered just as quickly and effectively by a complete amateur with knife, as by someone with a gun. And what if your escape route to run away is blocked by your executioner -- you know, because you did what he said and went where he wanted you to -- perhaps into the walk-in freezer as has happened in cases in the past. You obviously know nothing about the defensive use of a handgun. I do. Japan, Singapore, and Taiwan are very regimented feudal societies whose subjects do not have the rights we do. We didn't found this country on that model, and we'll never go there. SCOTUS has made that abundantly clear in Heller and McDonald.
Well, I think you've covered in that post, the entirety of every debate technique *not* to use, if one wishes to retain any credibility. You're obviously projecting your own inability to function in the presence of an inanimate object -- I believe Freud had something to say about that.
LOL
No, I actually don't fear anything -- whether I carry a gun or not, I'm pretty secure in who I am and what I can do, and, unlike Lisa's rocks, guns are actually capable of being used for protection. A gun is not a talisman, it's a tool.
Apartheid?? hahahaha. That's a good one. The completely irrelevant ravings of a lunatic mind.
Why would you pick Memphis, Seattle, and Galveston?
When I see things being cherry-picked, I assume that's done for a reason. Then I see that Arthur Kellerman is the one who did the study, and I already know that he did the study in order to prove that guns are dangerous to keep in the home, and that he didn't properly evaluate the information he gathered.
His biggest problem is that he only evaluates a "use of a gun in self defense" where a criminal is actually shot or killed. This *vastly* understates the facts, as *most* defensive uses of a firearm do *not* end in anyone being shot.
http://www.nraila.org/Issues/FactSheets/Read.aspx?ID=119
That's what I said elsewhere -- he's an anarchist, not right-wing Palinbot.
The video isn't talking about gold & silver standards for money -- watch it all the way through if you can tolerate the ravings.
"Assault Weapons" are generally out of reach, financially, of the general populace, due to the fact that select-fire weapons made after 1986 are not legally ownable by civilians. An M16 costs about twelve thousand dollars, and MP5 can cost over 30k. They're also heavily regulated by the BATFE. I disagree with that, select-fire weapons are no more dangerous than anything else, and can be manufactured relatively easily if one wished to do so. In the history of this country, I believe only one has ever been used in the commission of a crime, and it was by a police officer.
Your points about handgun usage are spot on. God made men, Sam Colt made them equal...
All guns are capable of killing people. "Specifically made to kill people" isn't a characteristic you can "ban" or regulate based on. In fact, for a handgun you use to defend yourself, do you want it to *not* be good at its job?
I can't carry a shotgun around with me. It's simply not feasible. So I'll carry a handgun, tyvm. While it may make no difference to the outcome in your world, it makes *all* the difference to the outcome in mine -- as a handgun on my person will do a whole hell of a lot better job than a shotgun stored in the safe at home.
No... The amount of criminals arrested with handguns may have declined, they've just switched to other weapons. They're now claiming that knives are the problem, and have banned them. What's next? baseball bats? Wrenches? Hammers?
I far prefer to be able to defend myself against the criminals rather than unilaterally disarming and and hoping the criminals someday do the same -- that's an absolutely ridiculous plan.
And yes, crime rates did drop in states that didn't allow CCW, but not nearly as much as they did in Florida and the other states that pioneered the CCW movement. The highest crime rates in the country now reside in cities like Chicago, NYC, DC, and LA. There's one thing they all have in common -- and it's not how gun friendly they are.
Okay, now explain how that links to guns, exactly...
I see a murder problem, perhaps, but how are you going to link higher crime rates to guns? Do the guns cause the murders? Or perhaps the fact that Chicago does not permit its citizens to own firearms, and has a significant organized crime problem might have something to do with it. In fact, this completely invalidates your hypothesis -- since guns are banned in Chicago, the murder rate should be in line with Toronto, right? Or maybe the problem is not, in fact, guns. Maybe it's something else.
Maybe Phoenix' crime rates are caused by the fact that it's on the I-10/I-19 corridor, and has a massive drug and human trafficking problem. I would advance that as a far more likely hypothesis than that the problem is inanimate objects.
And gun ownership rates in the US are not "3x" the gun ownership rates in CA -- they're closer to 200x the gun ownership rate in Canda (1.6 million in Canada, 250 Million+ in the US, by best estimates). So if your hypothesis holds true, instead of 70 - 241 (montreal to phoenix), we should expect nearly *nine thousand* murders in Phoenix. Of course, that ignores the fact that gun ownership in Phoenix is probably about 3-5 times the US national average, as the north-eastern states with their draconian gun laws skew those numbers, and thus the murder rate in Phoenix, again, by your hypothesis, should be much higher.
So, does the US have a crime problem? Sure -- nobody's ever argued that. Guns don't cause that problem -- guns do give us the ability to defend ourselves against it.
Again, you're making a correlation == causation argument -- and ignoring clear evidence that is not the case.
I actually meant occurrences. Accidental shootings are relatively rare.
John Lott Jr. and Gary Kleck have done a great deal of statistical analysis in the field of analyzing firearm use in the US.
I can't carry a policeman around in my pocket.
In fact, I go many places where there may not be a police officer within a hundred miles. There might be a criminal though -- or a bear, or a wolf, or a mountain lion. Calling the police from the middle of the high desert and asking them to come get the bear off of me is highly unlikely to be a successful course of action. The same goes for calling them and asking them to come get the guy who is shooting me or chopping me up with an axe. When seconds count, the police are generally several minutes away, and sometimes many hours away.
My guns will never be involved in any "tragic accident involving two members of my family". I know that for a fact. Your contention that my family needs protection from me, indicates to me that you have a problem you are attempting to project onto me.
Fear of inanimate objects -- you should look up what Freud had to say about it.
Well, as I posted in response to someone else, if you ban handguns you'll simply have a black market spring up overnight. For a couple thousand dollars one could purchase a lathe and drill press, and crank out plenty of handguns for next to nothing.
So the argument is that if the populace is disarmed, they will simply be scared and submit to the criminal? What if they do? And then are killed for their trouble? At least here in the US, criminals have finally figured out that if they're going to commit a violent crime, they might as well eliminate the witnesses, as they stand a better chance of getting acquitted if they're caught. And they don't need a gun to kill a bunch of unarmed witnesses, your axe or whatever will do quite effectively -- the end result is the same, dead civilians. That's unacceptable to me.
You can look up the statistics that show clearly that when concealed carry began to be legalized throughout the US, violent crime statistics dropped. I'm not one to claim correlation == causation -- it doesn't, but we know for a fact that handguns are used defensively on a continual basis. I *want* a criminal to be "on edge" when he contemplates breaking into a home. I *want* him to know that he stands an excellent chance of being shot if he does. It's a deterrent. And in the event he decides to cross that line, and gets himself shot by the homeowner, I have no sympathy for him. He forfeited his life.
When a person makes that choice to cross over into violent crime, I *want* them to fear the armed citizen, and what he will do in response.
A 9mm Glock isn't the weapon I would *choose* to hunt with, but it's adequate for the job if I needed to. I've taken *plenty* of small game and varmints with a .22lr handgun, and in fact, a .22lr handgun is probably the most effective survival weapon in existence.
A handgun is primarily a defensive weapon, not an offensive weapon. Someone who really wants to kill someone uses a rifle -- we see even in the case under discussion that the shooter appears to have failed. Handguns save many lives each year in the US, and have for the entirety of our history. Criminals will do what they will -- handguns or no. Hell, ban handguns, and you'll simply have an explosion of people purchasing metal lathes and building their own. For the cost of a lathe and drill-press, one could build plenty of simple handguns.
Improvised explosive devices are relatively easy to build, and *far* more effective than handguns -- witness their use in the middle east, even though Kalashnikov assault rifles are relatively easy to get one's hand on there. An AK-47, for the record, is significantly more effective than a handgun for offensive purposes.
Regardless -- it doesn't matter. Debating something already settled by SCOTUS is absurd.