Semi-auto handguns are also an efficient way to kill people. Virginia Tech ring a bell? No rifles, higher body count than Sandy Hook, and that was perpetrated against adults. The way I see it, there are two possible reasons for wanting to ban the rifles.
1. Banning them for the sake of "doing something."
2. Banning them with the intention of coming back for more later.
Neither one of those strikes me as a particularly good reason, though given the rhetoric from the anti-gun side, I'm inclined to think it's a combination of the two.
Don't call the cops on people squatting on your property either.
There is no shortage of people in America who do not value human life.
I agree. Sort of, I guess. It's definitely important to know how to use it. It's even more important to know when not to use it. I have the benefit of having had a healthy respect for them taught to me when I was still a child, and over 20 years handling them safely. Honestly, any training course you throw at me would pretty much be a joke, because it's nature to me by now. But that same course, to somebody without any experience, is going to be insufficient at best. What I consider to be common sense is, to a lot of people, completely alien. And before you can handle a gun safely, it needs to be common sense. Just like handling a car safely. For a truly viable "training course," you're talking years' worth of instruction for some people, months, weeks, days or hours for others, depending on both how well they learn and how seriously they take the responsibility.
I'm reminded of a recent story about a father who "accidentally" shot his 7 or 9 year old son outside a gun shop. He may have passed some training course or whatever the hell he did. But when it was all said and done, he pointed a loaded firearm at a child and pulled the trigger. And that's not an accident. That's negligence. And it keeps happening. Most car accidents involve negligence on the part of at least one party, and how many of those are there every day? Be it guns or cars, people fail to realize the gravity of the situation when they're in control of machines capable of causing death and mayhem. And that's not going to be fixed with a quick course, or often times, even with an extended course. My "training course" for firearms lasted 12 years and started when I was 6. A lot of the lessons I learned, especially the situational awareness involved in safe firearm handling, translated well to driving, and has kept my ass out of a few accidents.
Simply put, be it with guns or cars, a lot of people just don't give them the necessary respect until it's too late. I don't know if it's an "it could never happen to me" attitude, whether they're just so focused on the shiny new iShit that they can't be bothered to consider the seriousness of being in control of such things, or if they're just generally stupid. But I'd expect a firearms training course to be more or less as effective as driver's ed.
Someone building an accounting program won't think about encrypting their data, because they're trained in accounting, not security.
Joke's on you; I'm trained in both.
If you are so scared of other people attacking you in a manner that would require a firearm as defense, you need to either a) move away from the hell-hole you are living in, or b) see a psychiatrist about your paranoid tenancies.
Dumbest shit I've read in a long time.
"The four building blocks of the universe are fire, water, gravel and vinyl." -- Dave Barry