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It turns out that I have been a little naive about gun control.A hostile comment on Comedy Central points out that fully automatic assault weapons have been outlawed since 1934, and Wikipedia corroborates this. It appears that to follow the progress and the failures of gun control one has to be an expert on guns.
In 1994, a ban on a certain category of assault weapon was enacted and passed under the presidency of Bill Clinton, but the law had a 10-year sunset provision, and thus expired (presumably in 2004). Evidently weapon manufacturers were able to circumvent the law by making very minor alterations in the features of their weapons, this making them fall technically under the category of allowed weapons. It was argued that weapons manufacturers could not reasonably be held to a standard higher than the law itself.
So, to be effective, a law has to anticipate all measures that gun manufacturers might take to circumvent its application. This is like having to spell out what it means to kill somebody. Reading the gun laws in Wikipedia (look under Federal Assault Weapons Ban, Gun Laws, and Gun Politics) was a painfully difficult undertaking, since the amount of technical detail was oppressive, especially to one who is uninterested in guns except to get rid of the bloody things.
As is typical with Wikipedia articles on contentious subjects, the articles mentioned above have been written by multiple authors with evidently conflicting viewpoints, and, in many cases, limited language skills, resulting in convoluted grammar that is often difficult to follow, and occasionally positively misleading. One thing is clear: writing skill and interest in firearms do not go together. A clear, uncluttered article on the present state of gun control from the National perspective, with a clear definition of gun categories, would be very useful. It is useless to include the interested parties, since pro-gun groups have proliferated over the years (the NRA, the GOA, the Pink Pistols), and some have supported some measures, and opposed others, and become merely an additional layer of confusion on top of everything else. The delight that gun fanciers have in talking about stocks and spent cartridges and tumbling projectiles would be amusing, if the issues were not so horrific. It is a dirty business, jealously protected by many dangerous people, but sane people must get into it, or gun violence will continue to escalate.
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